Page 62 of The Robin on the Oak Throne

That word alone made her want to sit down on the small mattress in the corner and not get up for a hundred years. Her mother was standing before her. They were roughly the same height. Kierse might have been an inch taller. Their eyes were the same depthless dark brown, but her mom’shair matched Kierse’s younger self—an ash blond that had never seen hair dye. Beautiful, stoic, and proud.

Kierse reached out to touch her face, but her hand passed straight through. A memory. Nothing more than a memory. And already it had gotten away from her.

No matter that for her entire life she had believed that her mother had died in childbirth. Here she was—alive and well, locked away in Kierse’s memory.

“You need to stop teaching her these things, Adair,” her mother said. “It’s going to get her in trouble.”

“Stop worrying, Shannon,” her father said, setting the girl down on her feet. “I’m teaching her life skills. No one is going to find her all the way over here. For now, we are safe.”

“For now,” Shannon said. A deep resignation settled on her shoulders at the words.

Adair disappeared back into the bathroom and came out in trousers and a fitted shirt. He padded barefoot to his wife and kissed her.

“It will be all right. We’re going to fix all of this.”

Shannon nodded. “Of course.”

Kierse wondered what exactly they were trying to fix. What they were running from—because it was clear in the packed bags and empty apartment and scared hunch of her mother’s shoulders that they were running. Was it what had killed the rest of the wisps? Had it caught up to them, too?

The smaller version of Kierse was running around their heels, telling them all about school and the eraser she’d stolen but hadn’t gotten caught for. Apparently, her father was the one who had given her that skill. The one that had helped her stay alive when she’d been left to the streets.

“I heard from my contact,” Shannon said a time later, when the little girl was pretending to do her homework and was instead listening in on her parents’ conversation.

“And?” Adair asked.

“He has an address and a meet time. We can go tonight.”

“Tonight?” Adair asked, steel entering his voice. He’d gone from loving father and husband to a hardened soldier in the span of a second. As if the carefree man was the mask he wore over his true identity.

Shannon glanced at her little girl. “We have to do it. She’s not safe.”

“Are you sure?”

“I am. We can’t trust anyone else.”

“Can we trust him?”

Shannon met his gaze with a hardened one of her own. “At least we know where his allegiances lie.”

“Then tonight it is.”

Kierse could have sat in that tiny apartment for all of eternity and watched her family go about their lives. Banal, ordinary, almost boring, and yet it was a spark of a star in her stomach. The life she’d never known. The life she’d kill to have back.

But the memory jumped too quickly and suddenly she was in a town car. Her younger self was tired and yawning, resting her head against her father. But she was still alert in a way that could only be learned from vigilant parents. She knew that she hadn’t been woken in the middle of the night and ushered into a car worth more than they made in a year for no reason.

They were in some kind of tunnel, so Kierse still had no context for where they were. As headlights glowed in thedistance, they came to stop before an underground elevator.

Her stomach plummeted.

“No,” she whispered even though no one could hear her.

The driver opened the back door and ushered them out of the car and into the elevator. Kierse didn’t want to believe that she knew where they were until the door opened, revealing a butler dressed in black—Edgar.

There was no denying it.

Her parents—and her younger self—were now inside Graves’s house.

“What a pleasure to have you in residence. I am Edgar.” He bowed slightly for them. “We shall be going to the library this evening.”

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