I watched her fade, as if into the landscape itself, as Grieve came up behind me. He wrapped his arms around my waist, and I leaned back against him.
“I know what I have to do, but I don’t know how to do it.”
“And what is that?”
“I have to return to the past—I’ve done it via flashbacks, unwittingly, but I have to go back to when I was Cherish and look for anything that makes Myst vulnerable. The Snow Hag is convinced I know something—or knew something—that can give us an advantage against the Vampiric Queen. But I can’t remember it as I am now.” I rested the back of my head against his shoulder.
He kissed my hair, his arms gentle around my waist. “Hypnotic regression? Would that work?”
“I don’t know, but it might be worth a try. I wonder if Ysandra can help me. It’s worth asking. Or . . . Kaylin. I wonder if his demon might know of a way.”
Grieve didn’t like that idea. “Kaylin’s demon is chaotic and dangerous. Trusting him might be stretching our luck, Cicely.”
“We live in dangerous times.” I closed my eyes and reached out into the slipstream. There, on the currents, was a cacophony of whispers. The rush of recent dead slipped past—they were loud tonight, and I could hear the murmurs of confusion coming from them. And the voices of people hurrying home, trying to get off the streets, terrified that they might be targeted for attack like so many others had been. A rush swept by—a Wind Elemental I didn’t recognize, but it paid no attention to me, just soared past in a frenzy of movement.
As I lowered myself deeper into the ever-changing river of energy, I could hear the sounds of forest animals scurrying through the snow and the footsteps of the guards patrolling the land and the Golden Wood. From the house, I could hear the pacing of Ysandra’s thoughts—she was worried about Luna, about me, about the world. And in another room, I could hear Luna crying. Fear seeped into her voice as she settled into the realization of what she had promised Dorthea.
And then, from farther out, I began to sense a disturbance. It wasn’t an energy I recognized, at least not well—I thought I might have felt it before but couldn’t be fully certain. But it was covert and covetous, and . . . jealous. Envy? Or jealousy? The two emotions were very much akin to one another, but there were subtle differences. . . . Jealousy was more dangerous.
A moment later, the focus zeroed in on me. Someone was horribly jealous of me and . . . just as I was about to home in on the source, she pulled back, like a snake coiling, rearing to strike. But instead of lashing out, she turned tail and slithered off, faster than I could follow. Whoever it was had picked up on my energy. She knew I was out riding the currents.
I shook myself out of the slipstream. Ulean! Ulean, are you here? I need to follow an energy signature. Someone I think might be the spy in my Court.
I’m here, and I heard it. I’ll see what I can find.
I turned to Grieve. “Someone is out there who hates me. She’s jealous. I think I felt the energy of whoever is our spy. Ulean is following her signature to see if she can track her down.”
“Then we let her do her job. Come inside. We will discuss how best to send you back to discover Myst’s secrets.” He led me toward the door. As we neared the homey Veil House, I realized that I was lonely. Lonely for our realm, for the stark lands and the austere luster of the Barrow. For the heat of the fireplaces that kept the chill at bay. And yet, even with the roaring fires, there was always a chill there. It had seeped into my bones, into my soul. It was who I was.
“I want to go home,” I whispered.
“So do I, but we have things to do. We’ll go soon enough. We aren’t far from there. Just a skip through the woods, my love.”
And yet, it seemed like we were half a world away from our home. With a start, I realized that the town—New Forest, and the beloved Veil House—were beginning to feel alien to me. They no longer belonged to my life, and while I was still adapting to life in the Court of Snow and Ice, a part of me had already adopted it for my own.
As we entered the house, I realized I was a guest here now. I wondered if Rhiannon was feeling the same way, and that made me sad. It was her childhood home, after all. She’d spent all her life here. Her memories of her mother were locked within these walls. That it might no longer be a welcome haven for her hit me in the gut.
I found her in the kitchen. She was staring out the window.
“I was watching you out there. You look so at home under the night.” She turned. “What are you thinking?”
“About my home. I finally have a home, and it’s not the one I expected it to be. I always thought I’d return here, to this house, and that we’d be a family again.” I shook my head. “We’re so far from where we started; there’s no way to calculate the distance, is there?”
She bit her lip, but it wasn’t indecision. A drop of blood welled up, and she licked it off, deliberately, holding my gaze. “The initiation changed me. It changed you. How can we ever think to be the same? Even when Leo was holding me in that cage, I was not the woman I was when he walked out on me. Cicely, you worry too much about me.”
Rhia looked around, motioning to the kitchen. “I lived my life here, but when it burned, it burned away my connection to it. When you and I killed my mother, we severed my connection to the past. I’ve had to let it go to stay sane, to forget what we had to do to Heather. To let her go, I’ve had to let the Veil House go. You never had a foundation like I did. I think sometimes you place too much value on it. I think, like I’ve had to let go of my past, you need to let go your idolization of actually having one.”
I leaned against the counter. What she said made a lot of sense, but it was hard to see through the layers of hope I’d built up around coming home. “Maybe I’m so caught up in losing what I never had, that I’m struggling with what I have now. I feel guilty for loving my new home. I feel guilty for moving into that dark, icy realm, and leaving everything behind.”
“But you’re not leaving anything behind. I’m still here—and we’re closer than we’ve been since we were little. You have Grieve. All you left behind was a life on the streets. You didn’t have Heather, Cicely. You didn’t have the Veil House. You didn’t even have Krystal. She wasn’t your mother; you couldn’t rely on her. If anything, she treated you like the adult. All you had was your car and your memories of being dragged from city to city. The only thing you’re leaving behind is your old life.” She laughed gently and reached out to stroke my cheek. “You’ve got more now than you ever had in your life.”
I knew she was right, but there was something I couldn’t seem to verbalize. And then I knew. “Kaylin, Luna, Peyton. They were . . . I thought they’d be my family.”
“And you feel you’ve lost Luna. And you aren’t sure about the others.” Rhia pulled me close, resting her forehead against mine. “Kaylin will follow whatever path he needs to. Peyton will return to her father’s pride to learn what she needs to know about that side of her heritage. Luna . . . Luna might hate you forever. They each have their own journeys. It’s hard to accept, but people leave us along the way. People don’t always stay with us until the end of the story.”
I let out a long sigh. “I know. I just thought maybe I was done with losing people. I lost you for so long, Rhia.”
“And you found me again. But Cicely . . .” She stood back and a pained, sad smile crossed her face. “We will outlive them all. Unless we’re murdered, we’re going to outlive all of them. Did you think about that?”
And there it was. The crux of our transformation. Except for our new families—Grieve and Chatter—we would outlive everyone we ever knew. We were headed down a one-way path to virtual immortality, and other than the vampires, anybody we’d ever known would be dust before we could even blink an eye.