Page 216 of A Winding Wave of Magic
“Don’t fight it,” he said as he tilted his head. “This will only hurt a little.”
My father tookme to Disneyland for my seventh birthday. Sibyl didn’t go for reasons obvious to me now. She preferred to stay at the beach or cocooned in the little house on the base. So it was just my dad and me.
It was one of the best days of my life. At a time when other people’s thoughts came to me so sporadically, I didn’t See themfor what they were. I felt my father’s love when he held my hand and basked in that attention, the occasional nudge of someone else’s joy in the Happiest Place on Earth, and that was about it.
At one point, he insisted on taking me on Space Mountain, a fairly tame coaster compared to some of the behemoths at California amusement parks. But to seven-year-old me, it was terrifying. The first time the coaster caught enough speed to jerk me back in my seat, the force plastering my body in place, I felt more than peril. I felt trapped.
By the time we got off, I was in tears and wouldn’t touch another ride for the rest of the day.
That was how I felt as Senni tunneled through my mind, searching for every bit of relevant history concerning my grandmother. He didn’t seem to care about my childhood. We raced through it, skipping visions of my mother, slowing only when we reached the moment I had learned of Gran’s death through a strange telegram and the appearance of Jonathan—of my mate.
There, the rollercoaster slowed as he walked through my memories of the house, of Gran’s body, and the memories of hers I’d absorbed from the house. And then the moments before the fire came clear. The appearance of the raven, then the shadow of Caleb Lynch attacking me. The fire, the shadows, the mysterious lynx.
But there was something else happening too. While Senni’s public search felt like a tidal wave of information that he posted to his broadcast as quickly as possible, a different sliver of power wound its way through with the quiet, undetectable precision of a surgeon’s scalpel.
Give me the Secret,it ordered.
No!My indignation, that fight in me, seemed even stronger in recollection than it had in the moment.
The scalpel cut, and something latched on.
What is it?The question wasn’t articulated completely, but the meaning was there, searching, digging through the rest of my past, looking for connective threads to recent events to provide an answer.
Not a scalpel, then, I realized. A needle. Senni could See the threads he sought because that was the shape that his power, his mind, provided. His power was a grid, a great tapestry that wove itself into others’ pasts. He found threads to join with his and tied them together or broke them as he liked.
This was what other fae meant when they said I had no shape. My power was fluid. It borrowed the shape of otherelements. Water, most often.
But this, I could See too.
The needle looped around another thread in my mind, tugging it to the surface.
It was the memory of the box in my bedroom, opening into that dark oblivion, guarding the Secret Gran had told meneverto show.
No!my mind cried.
Senni tugged harder, and soon the vision was threaded into his mind too—not for others to See, but only for himself.
The needle went to work, looping around other threads leading from that moment. Conversations about the Secret. The mention in Gran’s will. The discussions I’d had with Jonathan.
But now I could See where he was going. And there was the next thread—the one that would take him to only a few days earlier when we’d discovered the parchment for the first time.
He looked around it.
I cut it back.
Senni reared, and his black eyes found mine with a clear message.Don’t.
I shook my head back as visions of my childhood continued to play on the ceiling like a silent film.
Something bound my mind even more tightly, and that invisible needle tugged on the end of the thread leading back to the Connollys’ attic. He pulled and looped his thread around it.
Stop!I shouted.
He smiled. There was no point.
I started shaking in the chair.
“Release her!” Jonathan’s voice was hidden by the chaos.
