“You’re too much like Father.” Mary shook her head, disappointed. “Thinking you can make it all go away by plastering over the ugly parts with a few apologies.” She tossed the orb in the air, catching it again like a child’s plaything. “What would you have me do? Move somewhere far away again where nobody knows us or our pathetic mutant tale?”
“Yes, we can go somewhere else, if you like,” Edwina said with the inflection of someone trying to talk a cat out of a tree.
“You know this was the last best place for us to go. A city of millions where no one looks each other in the eye. Everyone hip to shoulder in the street, all covered in the same muck. Don’t you see?” Mary stepped down from the base of the streetlamp. “I can finally breathe here. I can stretch and be myself among the filth.”
Suddenly, she charged, closing by half the distance between her and Edwina, her eyes fierce and wild. “Death thrives in this city’s back lanes. And with it, so do I. More than anyplace we’ve ever lived.”
Ian stepped protectively nearer to Edwina, wondering now whether Mary had lost a part of her mind to madness. “What is death’s attraction?” he asked.
Mary turned her smoky eyes on him. “You should have died,” she said frankly. “Fortunately, I harvested your memories before you woke, or I’d have made sure you ended up just another body for the papers to shout about.” She held his orb up again, skipping backward and twirling around as she held it out teasingly in her palm. “Oh, the tales you could have told if you’d been allowed to remember.”
Edwina pressed her fingers over her mouth. “Mary, what have you done?”
Her sister dipped her head and smiled. With a slow, even breath, she blew on the orb until its shell expanded in her hand, glowing slightly as it grew to the size of a globe on a gas lamp. Inside, shadows of people and places Ian recognized swirled beneath the iridescence—his mother and father standing on a lakeshore on holiday, Hob smoking his pipe by the fireplace, the shepherd dog he’d had as a lad, and the faces and bodies of women he’d loved and lost. Mary lifted her hand, turning the orb slightly to give a different view. “Concentrate,” she teased.
Peering closer, he saw an image of George on the street, mumbling to himself about a woman as he sat in the gutter. His neck was covered in dried blood, and he complained about the woman stealing something from him, but he couldn’t remember what. The pin on his lapel was missing. The memory swirled out of view and a new one animated. Ian saw himself checking pawnshops and trinket carts until he spotted the thistle pin under the glass at the sisters’ shop. And there, the mermaid match safe, not yet squirreled away in a cloth sack, on display too! Missing items from the murder victims. The woman behind the counter—he’d spoken to Mary—explaining she’d found them while scavenging on the foreshore. Evidence. Proof. Lies. The orb’s interior clouded over. The images inside shifted.
Now his memories showed him hidden in an alcove across the lane from the shop in the middle of the night, watching and waiting. Drizzle coated his clothes and skin until his nose and mouth were nearly numb from the cold. He cursed the need for surveillance when he could be sleeping in a warm bed, but he was so close to the truth! The image changed. The clouds had vanished and the stars shone above. He was on the embankment now, shivering as he followed Mary and Edwina in their flowing black shawls toward the river. Suspicion. Murder. Blood magic. Ian could almost feel the images inside the orb as true memories again, so closely they cleaved to his mind and nature. The sisters walked down the stairs to the river’s foreshore, then meandered up shore as they scoured the ground. Getting ahead of them, he took the ladder by the bridge several hundred yards away, dropped to the riverside, and hid by a stranded boat as the sisters made their way toward him. A noise at his back, but he paid it no mind. Only a gull or rat scurrying after prey at that hour. And then a piercing, shattering pain at the base of his skull. Sand in his mouth. Blood on his neck. The glint of metal in the starlight. A knife flicking open. A struggle. A last breathless defensive spell to throw off his attacker before consciousness faded.
Mary dimmed the orb so that it shrank in her palm again, and with it the last glimpse at his lost memories. “Did you see it? The knife?”
“It was never mine,” he answered, still half-drunk on the effect of watching his displaced memories. “The knife was his. He dropped it because of my spell. After he’d followed me following you.”