Suspicious again that she’d even heard of the man whose bloodied card he carried, he stood, testing his balance, and asked, “And how do you know this Henry Elvanfoot?”
“He’s quite famous. Sir Henry Elvanfoot is a master wizard who has done more for the cause of bringing the talents of magical folk out of the dark ages than just about anyone in the last two hundred and fifty years.”
“What’s that you’re on about?” His brow twitched, and he wondered if he hadn’t fallen into a hallucination from the stuff she’d dabbed against his head. “Wizards and magical folk?”
“We have more to offer the world than merely curing warts and cursing blaggards.”
Responding to his basest fear, he grabbed her wrist before she could back away. “You’re mad as a hare.”
“I assure you I’m not.” Her gaze traveled deliberately from his eyes to his grip on her arm to the calling card he held in his other hand. “I have every reason to believe you have witch blood or I wouldn’t even be having this conversation with you.”
“Oh, I’m a witch, am I? Not a wizard or maybe a unicorn?”
“Don’t be absurd. You’ve got magic in you,” she said with a nod. “Though what kind I cannot say. I suspect any recollection of your innate talent was drawn out alongside your other memories. Unfortunate, but I think we can work around it.”
He hadn’t let go, but her hand and wrist somehow shrank beneath his grip so that he held only air, while she finished spouting some nonsense rhyme with a pitying look on her face.
“Now, I don’t know if it will help,” she said as if nothing had happened, “but perhaps if you concentrate on using your intuition, you might recall your true name. It would make things so much easier. Is it Ivan? Idris? Or Innis perhaps?”
“Ian,” he answered absentmindedly, the name coming to him out of the ether while he still stood distracted by the unnatural phenomenon of his now empty grasp. Then realizing what he’d said, he lifted his head at the sharp certainty of remembering. “Ian. My name is Ian. How did you do that?”
“Oh, thank goodness. I was afraid Mary had taken it all.”
Gibberish again from this infernal woman!
“Mark me, Miss Blackwood: I am sorely tempted to drag you down to the nearest police station to explain yourself. You speak in riddles. Nae, of witchcraft. Of falsehoods. But I want the truth. Answer me plain! Or I’ll make good on my threat.”
“I understand you’re upset. The details must all feel rather confusing in your current state.” The woman took a calming breath before continuing. “Plainly speaking, Ian, I’m referring to your current state of amnesia. That is the difficult concept I wish to convey. What my sister stole from you—what we stole from you—was your memory.” He gaped fish-mouthed, so she explained. “When a person dies and the mind has no more use for it, the vapors holding on to all those memories escape the body. My sister is able to capture those thoughts as they rise and solidify them as keepsakes. But I believe I can restore yours back to you, if you’ll only give me the benefit of the doubt for a few moments.”
The woman produced from her pocket a shiny blue-and-gold marble that shimmered when she opened her palm. She claimed again it was his, siphoned off his body while he’d floated in the veil that separated the living from the dead. It was impossible. Nonsense. Hysteria from a woman not in control of her faculties. And yet his blood and nerves, if they were to be believed, found truth in her words, rushing with a sort of excitement under the skin. The tension he’d been holding on to in his shoulders fell away. The crease between his brows relaxed. Curiosity took over his mind as questions he couldn’t possibly know to ask positioned themselves in his mouth. Questions about charms and spells and veins of untapped energy, of which he could avow he knew nothing yet craved their comfort.
He pressed his fingers to the back of his head. No new blood came away and there was no tenderness. Whatever she’d done with her oil and words had mended him. But he was not well. No sane person put stock in the body’s reaction, relying on nerves, muscle, and bone to decipher truth from fiction. The woman wasn’t mad; he was.
She watched him thinking, making a plea with her eyes for him to listen and understand. Maybe he had been bewitched. Or possessed. Panicked by his reaction, he could not remain a moment longer and have either confirmed.
“I must be gone from this place. From you.” He strode out of the back room until confronted by the shop’s locked front door. A turn of the latch and he’d be on the street. Swallowed whole by a world in which he knew not a single soul. His fingers trembled on the doorknob, but something held him back. In the short time he’d been in her shop, she’d given him back his name. What more could she restore?