“Oh, they’s a price,” Amari said, laughing. And it was a nice laugh. A song, just like the ones the night creatures were singing outside. “You woke up without a memory tonight. Every night.”
I didn’t react.
Amari sighed. “That’s the price them boots demand. Nature, or them vines, give to you, Lilly. It give you health and healing, but it need to take, too, and every mornin’ them boots get spent, and they need your help to revitalize, just as you need them.”
“We’re both . . . parasites?” Living off each other?
“That’s a fair notion. When they take from you, they don’t drain you in the physical way. They take somethin’ stronger—from your soul. Some of your essence, your being.”
“My identity.”
“And your short-term memory. But like all livin’ things, they ain’t perfect. They leave specks of memory for you to cling to sometime.”
Like the instincts I had about what I was capable of doing. And they left me muscle memory, too, based on the martial arts I’d performed tonight.
I tried to bring everything together: I had no doubt been out and about last night, perhaps even the nights before, chasing my identity. When the sun had come up, my boots had needed sustenance, and I had broken in to the bed-and-breakfast to collapse. Until I woke up again, drained.
“I go through this every twenty-four hours?” I asked.
“That’s your curse. And your blessing. It’d be up to you to see what you’re eventually gonna make of it.”
“What do you mean?”
Amari smiled. “You’re about to see.”
With that, she bent her head to the crystal and my eyesight went black, plunging me into an emerging pool of visions so vivid that my adrenaline surged.
A foggy memory of a dark control room with a console . . . watching screens . . . An image of a fanged dragon, destroyed . . . heart breaking, a scream pulled from my lungs as I sank to the floor . . . An explosion, burning me as I crawled away from the destruction, still alive . . .
Then, staring up at a ceiling from a bed, bandages over my face except for my eyes. “You’re retired,” said a man, my father, as he fit a spindly device over my head and my mind went blank.
Coming awake again, this time by the hand of a woman who looked very much like me. A cousin? Doing her bidding, fighting for control of my body, winning, then losing . . . Then burning in another fire, not from an explosion, but a bonfire, punishment for failing the family, more screams as I ran and ran from the flames, rolling on the ground to put out the fire on my skin, near death . . .
Real life swirled in front of me again, and I realized that Amari had let go of the crystal ball. Her voice soothed me to calm.
“You were ramblin’ away on the night I found you, before I made them boots. How you used to be a keeper of a vampire called the dragon, how he died under your watch after some hunters blew up his underground home. You blathered about bein’ ‘retired’ by your family because you’d disappointed ’em so, and from what I guess, retirement was like death, a livin’ coffin.”
I remembered how Philippe had read me earlier, and mentioned a glass coffin.
I tried not to glance at where he lay on the floor, but I couldn’t stop myself. Philippe, who had helped me, but merely because I was a means for him to get reward money for his own family. A noble cause, to be sure, but one that conflicted with mine.
“My family did that to me?” I asked.
“And worse. From what I heard from you, they call themselves the Meratoliages, and they swore in ancient times to protect the dragon’s line of vampires. Not so long ago, they raised you from that retirement to go after the hunters who slayed him. They know the dark arts, and they were able to control you as a revenant. You didn’t take too kindly to that, and you burnt again. I believe, though, it was a sight better than that retirement of yours. Just judgin’ by what you said. I’d rather burn than be buried alive, myself.”
Now that she was telling me, it all seemed so very familiar. “Did your boots heal my mind, too? It sounds as if I didn’t have much of one when I was brought out of this retirement.”
Amari nodded, hands folded on the table again. “But there’s one thing them boots didn’t give you.”
“Powers,” I said. “I had them all along.”
“And they kept you alive tonight.”
Yes. Proof of that was on the floor, not five feet away from me.
I explained how Philippe had a vision of me. “He must have also divined that my family is looking for me. He said they were offering money.” I paused, my eyes widening. “There was a . . . thing. Earlier tonight. Dressed all in black, with red eyes. You didn’t send it after me?”