If Dylan wasn’t going to come to her, maybe she could go to him. The Conclave urged its newest members to perform the regression therapy to access their past lives and learn from the accumulated knowledge that was available to them from the vastness of their prior experience.
Bliss sat cross-legged on her princess bed. She closed her eyes and began the deep sorting through many lifetimes of memories. This was the knowing. The practice of finding out who you really were. She was in the void, in that space in between her conscious and subconscious self—who had she been before? What shape had her spirit taken in its prior histories?
She was dancing across a crowded ballroom. She was sixteen years old, and her mother had let her wear her hair up for the first time . . . and she was laughing because tonight she would meet the boy who would be her husband—and even before he came to stand in front of her to ask her to dance, she knew his face.
“Maggie.” He smiled. Had he always kept his hair that way?
Even in the nineteenth century, Dylan—or Lord Burlington—made her heart pound.
But then, something happened at the party—the Visitor whispering lies in her ear. Telling her to kill. Maggie could hear him. Maggie did not want this, did not believe it . . . and before Bliss could open her eyes, she could feel the cold water surrounding her.
Maggie Stanford had drowned herself in the Hudson. Bliss saw the dark murky river, felt her lungs burst and her heart collapse.
As Bliss went backward, it was all the same. Goody Bradford had set herself on fire, pouring oil over her head, and then she had lit a match and let the flames consume her. Giulia de Medici “accidentally” walked off the balcony of the family’s villa in Florence, her broken body splayed in the center of the square.
Quick as the flutter of a butterfly’s wings, every image, every “death” Bliss had ever experienced came to the forefront. But then . . . Maggie walked out of the funeral home. Goody Bradford survived the flames. Giulia got up from the fall.
None of them had been successful in ending their lives, or successful in exorcising the demon that possessed them. They had all tried and they had all failed.
Bliss understood.
I have to die.
Because if she died—truly died—if she found a way to never come back, then the Visitor would die as well. He would never have a chance to do what he was planning.
That was it. That was the only way. She knew it.
There was no getting out of it. There was no surviving it. She and the Visitor were locked in a fatal embrace. If she was able to kill her spirit, the undying blood in her arms, she would bring death to him as well.
She would have to make this sacrifice, or else those horrible visions, that terrible future, would be unavoidable. She was a vessel for evil, and as long as she lived, so did he.
“Dylan, you knew, didn’t you? You knew what I would have to do. All along,” she whispered.
From the darkness, Dylan appeared at last. He looked at her mournfully. “I didn’t want to tell you.”