After breakfast, Evan and I met Vivian in the chamber of mirrors. We gathered around a stone worktable while Vivian read over the possession spell and checked all the ingredients I’d selected.
“Excellent work locating the right spell and gathering the right ingredients.” Her words were full of praise, but her voice wasn’t. “Now, you have to decide if you are willing to pay the price for this spell.”
Evan gave me a what’s-she-talking-about look.
“You mean some of our energy?” I asked.
“Spells always have a cost. Sometimes it’s to your health,” Vivian said. “This one has a different price. You can’t pause Toria and Alistair’s punishment without consequences. The cost of this spell is that you will lose your most treasured memory.”
“I don’t even know what my most treasured memory is.” But it sounded like something I should hold onto.
“Neither do I,” he said.
“Will we know we’ve lost it?” I asked.
“You’ll feel an emptiness where it used to reside,” Vivian said.
My throat was unbearably dry, itching in places that I couldn’t scratch. I coughed a few times, trying to make it stop. I had so many memories of my friends and family. Could I give up the most important one for Toria?
Evan’s face was a mix of curious and aghast. “What will losing the memory do to us?”
“Our experiences make us who we are,” Vivian said. “To lose a memory is to lose a tiny piece of ourselves. And our treasured memories usually have a huge impact on who we become.”
“It sounds like the beginning of a slippery slope,” he said.
“It can be,” Vivian said.
Her tone worried me. “So, we shouldn’t do it?”
“That’s your decision to make. But you should know the consequences before you do,” Vivian said.
“Give us a moment.” I pulled Evan aside and spoke in a low voice, barely above a whisper. “Are you still willing to do this?”
He rubbed his forehead. “I don’t know what my most treasured memory is. But what if it made me who I am? What if losing it changes me forever?”
I couldn’t help thinking of Lydia. She was willing to work the darkest spells, no matter what the cost, to get what she wanted. I didn’t want to become like her, but suddenly I saw how easily I could.
My fingertips were suddenly ice cold, like the blood had scurried away, in search of safety. “It’s a huge risk.”
“You really think we need the dead heirs in the future?” He stepped closer.
“I do.”
“And you still want to do this spell knowing what we will lose?”
“We were willing to risk losing ourselves to the possession, the only difference is now we know that we will lose a piece of ourselves to the spell.” I stared down at my ring. These were the kinds of hard choices we were going to be facing for the rest of our lives.
“I trust you.” He took my hand in his and laced his fingers through mine, warming my fingers again.
My throat clogged with emotions I didn’t dare name. “I trust you, too.”
When we went back to the table, Vivian asked, “What did you decide?”
“We’ll do the spell,” I said.
Evan squeezed my hand. “Together.”
Vivian walked me through how to cast the spell. We even did a practice run to be safe. Vivian oversaw everything we did and tweaked a few elements along the way.
Once she was certain that I was ready, she said, “You’ve done a good job finding the spell and getting the ingredients together. When you work the spell, I want you to focus on pulling the magic from the mirror and your ring. I don’t want you tiring yourself out.”
I anointed purple, magenta, royal blue, and indigo candles with frankincense oil and arranged them on the cardinal points around the mirror. Evan and I pricked our fingers and smeared drops of our blood on the bloodstone. We put it in the center of the mirror between us.
I spoke the spell in Scottish Gaelic and felt the energy of the mirror flow from my toes to my scalp. It was gentle and warm and filled me with power. Something shifted at my core. A feeling of moreness. Toria was inside me.
I looked to the Radcliffe mirror on the wall. Where I should be standing, I saw Toria. She wore a beautiful gold and red striped walking-out dress. Her skirt was gathered with red ribbon at the side to expose the pleated gold underskirt. Her hair was piled atop her head under a bonnet that was trimmed with red feathers and a gold butterfly.
What am I doing here? I heard her ask inside my mind.
I thought back at her, I’m helping you and Alistair like I promised.
She took control of my head and looked around at the spell’s ingredients and her reflection. Her face tightened. Kat, no, not a possession spell.
I know what I’m doing. So does Evan. But I need you to promise to give my body back as soon as you are done.
I don’t want to possess you.
It’s too late now. And you don’t have much time. Use it. Use me.
All right. I felt her hope coursing through my veins.
I shouldn’t still be this aware. You need to take complete control of my body.
I have.
But I’m still here, I thought at her.
Try to move.
I told my hand to touch my face, but it didn’t move.
See? I’m in control.
Which meant I got to be an awkward observer. Again.
I looked at Evan and realized he was no longer Evan. Or at least he no longer looked like Evan. He was Alistair with wavy, brown hair and a strong nose. He still had his bowler hat from yesterday.
“Is it really you?” Toria’s voice was a disbelieving whisper.
He reached for her hands. His were warm and strong. “It’s me, my love.” His voice was husky as he pulled her into his arms.
I didn’t know what to do. Part of me wished I could fade away and let them have their privacy. But I didn’t want to risk disappearing. I lingered in the background, experiencing every aching moment with Toria.
She smelled the crisp autumn scent that always clung to him. He buried his face in her neck. She felt his lips there. So did I. Warm and soft. A kiss. It had been so long since he’d kissed her. It sent tingles down her back.
She wanted more. Her lips found his. She didn’t care about anything else. Just Alistair.
When they finally paused to catch their breath, she said, “I’ve never stopped looking for you.”
“As I’ve searched for you.”
He smiled at her and she felt like her heart would explode. She didn’t know when she would see him again. This might be their only chance.
The words rushed out of her mouth. “I love you so much. I’m so sorry I left you. If only I had been stronger, I could have saved Sebastian. I could have saved us all this pain.”
He caressed her cheek. “I love you, too. It wasn’t your fault. I’m sorry I wasn’t strong enough to end your torment before you did it yourself. I should have done something before your father banished me.”
“No one should have to do that.” She confessed, “I couldn’t bring myself to kill you, even if it would have saved your soul.”
He winced. “You’re not damned.”
“Maybe not the way people think, but it is hell not seeing you or touching you or talking to you.”
“I know.” His voice filled with understanding. “I’d do anything to remedy it.”
“Would you?” Tears flooded her eyes. Alistair blurred. She blinked them away. She couldn’t bear to lose sight of him. Not now. Not when their time together was so fleeting.
“We don’t have much time,” he murmured.
She glanced at Vivian and wrapped her arms around his neck. Her whisper was a fevered rush of words. “We can’t take Kat’s and Evan’s bodies. But we can take others’. We just need to find other relatives who are susceptible to ghosts.”
“We can’t steal their lives.” His voice hitched on steal like that was the only thing holding him back. “It’s a dark act.”
“We’ve been so good and we’ve been so punished.” She kissed him slowly, reminding him of all they missed out on. She pulled back to look into his hazel eyes. His thick black eyelashes couldn’t hide the desire burning there. He wanted more time with her. “Think of it Alistair, we could finally be together.”
This tiny moment that I had given them wasn’t enough.
Toria touched the curl on his forehead. How she missed touching that curl.
He cradled her face in his palms. “I will find my way to you again.”
“I will never give up on you,” Toria promised.
He kissed her like she was the most precious thing in the world.
My lips were still on Evan’s when Toria and Alistair left our bodies.
***
A few hours later, I was curled up against my headboard, playing with a throw pillow. Evan had taken the chair next to the bed and stared at my desk with an inscrutable expression on his face.
“Do you remember any of it?” I asked.
“A little.” He refused to look me in the eye. Which gave me some idea of what he remembered.
My cheeks kindled and flamed. I remembered all of it. The first and the last time he kissed me. I mean, Alistair kissed Toria. His lips were warm and strong. His hands felt so right against my back. I shook my head. It was Toria and Alistair. Not Evan and me.
“They will find a way to be together even if they have to break the rules to do it.” And I didn’t blame them. The idea that they might possess relatives should have revolted me, but instead it made sense to me. I wondered if I would have felt that way before the spell or if the precious memory I’d lost had created some darkness in me.
His expression clouded over with concern. “Wouldn’t you stop them?”
“How could I? They had been denied too much already.” I got up and wandered around the room. “If only he could have killed her.”
“Kat!”
“What? She was going to go insane and take her own life. At least that way, they could be together in death.” The coldness in my logic didn’t bother me.
“Look at Percy and Ellie—they can never see each other in death.”
“But Sarah and Percy can.”
“Because she didn’t kill him.”
“Then Alistair should have gotten someone to kill Toria.” I took the next logical leap, but something inside me whimpered like it didn’t like where my thoughts went.
“Could you really do that to someone you love? You’d be deciding to extinguish his life.” For the first time, I heard fear in his voice. Fear at what I’d become because of that spell.
“I hope I never have to make that choice. But knowing what I do about the unbelievables, I would do what I had to do to save the person I love from an eternity of torment.”
“You would, wouldn’t you?”
His tone chafed my ears. I paced more quickly as I tried to explain my thoughts. “I’d weigh the eternity of consequences against the momentary pain in this life.”
“You don’t think there are consequences for killing what you love?” he asked.
I folded my arms around me, holding onto myself. “Maybe not if you do it by proxy. And if it let you see them as a ghost, wouldn’t it be worth it?”
He leaned forward, linking his hands together and resting his chin on them. “I can’t believe we’re having this conversation.”
Neither could I, but we needed to have it. “You’re bonded to your amulet as much as I’m bonded to mine. If Joshua dies an unnatural death, we could lose our minds and kill ourselves. That’s a possibility I’ve thought about. And I want you to know I would want you to have someone kill me, if that happened.”
“Well, I wouldn’t do it.”
His words were an arrow shot through my back, aching and throbbing. “Really? You’d sentence me to eternity without what I loved most?”
“Kat, I couldn’t end your life—not by proxy or by my own hand. I’d find a way to stop the legacy.”
“Don’t you think Alistair did everything he could?” The agony of what we were talking about shredded my voice.
“He didn’t have the Kingsley dagger.”
“Fine. So, you’d do all you could to save me.” My voice tightened. “But what if you couldn’t? Would you have someone kill me before I killed myself?”
“I don’t want to talk about this.” There was something dark and smoldering in his voice. A fire he would not be able to contain.
It was morbid and awful, and I hated that we had to have this conversation. But we did. “There are bad things we’re going to face. And we need to be prepared for the worst.”
“The worst being I need to have you killed?”
His eyes asked me to stop pushing, but I couldn’t. “The worst being we fail Joshua and we lose our minds. I don’t want that for you. I’ve felt what it did to Toria. I saw what happened to her.” I remembered how broken Toria was in the courtyard. She let the shadows come for her. I never wanted that to happen to Evan.
“Would it be that easy to have me killed?” Pain beaded up in his voice like blood rising from a cut.
I stopped and faced him. “Don’t you realize it would be the hardest thing I’d ever do? I don’t want you to die, but I don’t want you to go insane and kill yourself and ruin eternity, either. That’s the worst fate.”
“But don’t you think having me killed would have consequences for you? Consequences you’d have to deal with for eternity?”
“I’d still do it, to save you from what Toria’s going through.”
“You’d risk eternity for me?”
I nodded. “Wouldn’t you do the same for me?”
A sad smile flickered across his face. “When you put it like that, I think I would.”