Now Con was beside her as well, the two men touching her, comforting her. Lorie squeezed her knees. “It’s okay, Sarah. We’ll figure this out. I knew your name because it is in the book where I found you. In the title itself. An Ode To Sarah Blackwood. Most of it simply reads like a day in the life of Magian women in the late sixteen hundreds. There are recipes and handwritten lists, a few strange poems about the ancient war.” He paused. “Mixed in
with all of that, there is a portal leading into—”
“Her prison,” Con interrupted tightly. “So you were cursed into that book because they thought you had something to do with the so-called slaughter none of us has ever heard about? Help us out, Sarah. Is that what you’re saying?”
Sarah sighed shakily. “That is what is true. He told them I’d let the killers into our sacred Triune Festival. That I was the reason they were dead. All of them. My family. My grandmother, who had come to gossip and commiserate with all the hopeful mothers. He said I had let them in to pay him back for rejecting me as his match.”
Lorie’s grip became a bruising one. “He?”
“Aaron Winston. He came from a well-connected family.” She tilted her head, remembering everything. “Thalia Fairbanks used to tell me that Aaron’s rude manners had to have been taught to him by his parents, if only to distract their elite crowd from his putrid stench. But I think they kept him around in spite of both, because he was clever when it came to spells.”
Harrison snorted, but a look from the tall, forbidding Jacob silenced her. Lorie drew her attention again. “Winston? The name doesn’t sound familiar. There is no history of that family in Massachusetts. Are you sure you’re remembering it correctly?”
She spoke slowly, to emphasize her words. “If you were put in that place to die each day for eternity, would you forget who it was who put you there? Would you ever forget?”
Tyghe ran a hand through his hair and sighed. “I sure as hell wouldn’t, but all of this is news to me too. I’ve never heard of any of this. Maybe we need to call in some help. The masters of the library? The archivists?”
Lorie shook his head, adamant. “We won’t find the answers there. Sarah? You said you needed an heirloom from a Fairbanks, and to find out if the other families involved are still alive. Callie is the last living Fairbanks, but she’s only recently discovered her heritage. She’s received a few boxes, but perhaps if you told her what you were looking for…?”
She stared hard at Callie, searching for traces of her old confidante. “Callie. Is your given name Calliope?” When the blonde nodded, Sarah smiled. “I knew it must be. Thalia used to hate the naming tradition her great grandfather had started. She’d say that though there were nine muses, all of them had abysmal names.”
Callie laughed softly. “I think I would have liked her. I feel the same way.”
“The heirloom was something Thalia gave to me for protection. It was something I could use to prove Aaron’s dangerous attentions and determination to control me to the authorities. It proves he threatened me.” She couldn’t meet Lorie’s gaze. “It is a brooch with a muse carved into it. She would be holding a harp.”
She wanted it to reveal the truth, that she wasn’t insane. She had been falsely accused. To play it for the Winston descendants so the knew what vile stock they’d sprung from.
“Can I ask a question, Miss Blackwood? Why is your speech so, pardon the expression, normal?”
“Ric! Seriously?” Harrison dropped her chin to her chest and covered her eyes with her palm. Her glorious black hair spilled down her shoulders and it made Sarah conscious of her own unkempt tangles. Beauty definitely ran in this family. “I apologize for him. He isn’t housebroken yet.”
Sarah wrinkled her nose, considering. “You mean my speech? I honestly don’t know. When the landscapes and people started changing, maybe it happened then? I did begin to feel differently. Think differently. I didn’t realize that my manner of speaking had changed.”
“Wait, rewind. That seems important.” When Sarah looked at her questioningly, Callie explained, “I get these feelings. Harry calls it my spidey sense. Why did the landscape change? I’m still learning about spells, but if this was a loop curse, with the same thing happening over and over again, it seems like the most complicated one I’ve seen. Loops are static. They don’t alter. But yours did?”
“All the time,” Lorie and Sarah spoke softly together. She saw it in his eyes. He’d been affected by his time there. He understood.
“It wasn’t like that in the beginning,” Sarah continued. “It was only years later that I started to see new things here and there. At first, I believed it a sign that the spell was degraded, unweaving. But I was wrong. If anything, it was growing. A living spell that was harder to predict. One of the oddest changes did lead me to the second door. I couldn’t believe I’d missed—“
“Second door?” Now Harrison looked excited. Or anxious. It was difficult to tell. “Did you say there was a second door?”
She nodded. “Two doors, but I could only open the one. Wait.” Shock fired through her still frozen limbs. “There aren’t two doorways in the book?”
That possibility hadn’t occurred to her.
Harrison nodded, confirming her worst fears. “Only one. Now the inability to destroy the spell makes more sense. I have only bound the book, Sarah. It was all I could accomplish. It won’t break, no matter what I do to it, but I’ve managed to put it on pause for the time being. I need all the components to even have a chance to break its hold on you. That means there’s another. There has to be.”
“Fuck.” Con swore beside her, and Sarah could not help but agree. Not only was there another book out there somewhere, waiting to pull her back in—but now she knew her time here was only temporary. They hadn’t broken the spell.
No matter how powerful Harrison was, it had taken a room full of witches to cast her into that curse. She couldn’t keep it at bay all by herself.
Sarah had always known her time here would be short, but she’d wanted to leave this world fighting. To avenge those lost. And since her arrival she’d added something else to her list. She’d wanted to know what it was like, just once, to be a part of her triad. Something she’d never dared imagine before.
She couldn’t go back.
As her mind raced, Tucker chimed in, “Miss Blackwood, there has to be a reason why there is no record of the history you’re describing. If you name the others involved with this Aaron Winston, perhaps their families have kept a private record? Or have some evidence hidden away that might help us locate the second book.”
She closed her eyes, focusing on breathing. “Of course. But I’d like to be released first please. I wish not to be confined.”