“You thought it was meant to be romantic, didn’t you? I’m afraid not…I was being quite literal.”
He pressed his lips to hers. She felt them. She felt his warmth against the fading of hers.
She felt nothing at all.
Pain seared through her.
She screamed.
She lived.
Maggie joltedas someone touched her, her heart racing and her breaths coming short and fast. She swatted at the hand, slapping it away, and fought the urge to scream like she had in her hallucination. It was Father Rinaldo. He was standing beside her, one hand on the table in front of her, the other had been on her shoulder, gently shaking her.
His expression was one of pity and concern.
She hated that look. She loathed it more than anything else in the world.
Shame surged forward in her. Shame about her disorder, embarrassment about having basically shit herself in public, and disgust at herself. Anger quickly rose to combat it. Anger at Rinaldo for pitying her. Anger at the world for having made her like this. Anger at herself for being too weak to rise above it.
“Marguerite?”
“I’m fine. Don’t. Just don’t.” She stood from the chair and paced away from him. She was glad she had found somewhere to sit that was out of the way of the main packs of people in the library. Leaning against the jamb of a window, she lowered her head and shut her eyes, trying desperately to calm her pounding heart.
It had felt so real. It always felt so real.
“This isn’t your fault. These visions of yours. It’s Gideon’s.”
“He’s not a fucking necromancer. He’s not. That’s nonsense. Magic isn’t real. You’re just a lunatic preying on a lunatic.” She put her hand over her eyes and forced herself to take slower, deeper breaths. “I don’t know what you’re hoping to get out of this. Maybe you just want someone to be on your crazy train on this stupid conspiracy theory of yours, I don’t know. But I want off this locomotive.”
“Come here. Let me show you something.”
She glanced over to him. He was pulling something out of a leather briefcase beside him. It was a manilla folder. Written on the tab, in neat and tidy script, it simply read Marguerite. There was a symbol embossed on the face of the manilla folder. It was a cross, stuck in the center of a shape that resembled an old magic circle. She wasn’t sure why she recognized the style, but she did. Around the edge, in Latin, it read “Ordo ut Solis.”
“More proof you’re a stalker?” But she was curious. What did he know? Was this a file on her? It had to be. Maybe there was something in there that could tell her who she was…why she was messed up. Maybe it could help her piece together her past and find a cure.
Or it was a pair of her underwear, and he really was just a giant pervert.
“Everything we know about you. And…who you were.”
“Who I was?” She sat down again at the table, looking at the folder. She wanted to open it, but she was also terrified. “Before I lost my memory?”
“More or less.” He sighed. “Look. It’s…complicated. You’re complicated, like I said. We don’t have much. Just snippets. You’re a bit of a mystery even to us.”
Terrified, but too curious to stop, she slowly opened the file. There was only one thing in it. And it was a photo of herself.
A photo that was a hundred years old. Maybe from the thirties, she wasn’t sure.
But it was her. There was no denying it. She was wearing a long dark dress, sitting by a window, the light through the curtains over-exposing the image. It looked like a casual photograph. She wasn’t smiling, just gazing out the window.
“All our years of digging, and that is all we have.”
She was trembling like a leaf. She couldn’t help it.
“What are you doing?” She smiled quizzically at the man as he set up the camera on the wooden tripod.
“A photo for posterity. Now, look back out the window as you just were. My colleagues would like to see the progress I’m making.”
With a bemused shake of her head, she did just that. “A waste of film, if you ask me.”