“You already know my mom gave me a letter to deliver to a house in London with a green door,” he reminded Sophie as she made her way over. “And you said Fintan told you she sent me there to recruit somebody.”
“He did,” she agreed, peering over his shoulder as he removed the last of the shirts. “He also said that it was one of her side projects, so she didn’t tell him much about it. And that the recruiting didn’t work out—and you were never supposed to recover that memory.”
“Guess it’s a good thing I found another piece, then,” he said, pushing on one of the corners of the drawer and making what must’ve been a false bottom lift ever so slightly on the opposite side—enough for him to get a grip on the edge. Slowly he raised the thin wooden panel, stopping after a few inches to slide a finger underneath and feel around for…
“Is that a trip wire?” Sophie asked as he unhooked a thin strand of silver from the underside of the panel.
“Can’t be too careful with Lord Nosypants around,” he confirmed, pulling the panel free and revealing four notebooks—one brown, one gold, one silver, and one green—with a cloudy vial sitting on top of them, attached to the other end of the wire.
“That tube is filled with one of my favorite airborne microbes,” Ro explained, flashing all of her pointed teeth when Sophie backed up a step. “Those little guys know how to have a party in your sinuses.”
Sophie’s nose burned just imagining it, and she held her breath as Keefe finished unhooking the vial and set it aside—not nearly as carefully as she would’ve liked—before carrying the journals over to the bed. He left the brown, green, and gold notebooks resting on the quilt and flipped open the silver one, turning the pages so fast that Sophie couldn’t recognize anything. But she could tell the book was filled with Keefe’s amazing sketches.
“I’ve switched from making lists of memories to drawing them, since it helps me see it all a lot better, and I can’t do the fancy projecting thing like some people,” he explained, his cheeks flushing the way they often did when he talked about his art. “And it’s a lot to keep track of, so I started sorting it into different categories.”
“Does that mean all of these are filled with memories?” Sophie asked, wondering when he’d found the time to do so many drawings—and why he hadn’t told her what he was up to or asked her to help.
“Yeah, but they’re not full or anything—at least not yet. And it’s not all stuff I’ve recovered. I’ve been logging everything, trying to arrange it in order, hoping it’ll help me find the gaps, so I can see where to focus. But it’s a lot to work through. You know how it is with a photographic memory.…”
She did.
She also knew how it felt to have someone mess with her head. In fact, she still hadn’t found all the snippets of information that the Black Swan had hidden in her brain to prepare her to be the moonlark—nor had she filled in one of the blank spots that Mr. Forkle created when he erased the memory of her first allergy attack.
“Do the colors of the journals mean something?” she asked.
His cheeks flushed even brighter. “Kinda. I use the silver one for anything that feels important, since that’s the same color as the last elite level. Green is hard stuff, since we wear it at plantings. Brown is happy stuff, since… I don’t know. It was the one I had left.”
He noticeably didn’t explain the gold. And Sophie was pretty sure she could guess the reason.
Before she and Fitz had tried to help Keefe recover more shattered memories, Tiergan had taught Keefe a trick to mark the things he didn’t want them to look at while they were inside his mind. And Keefe had gilded all of his secret memories—which made Sophie very tempted to grab the gold journal and teleport away before he could catch her.
Somehow she found the willpower to resist.
Keefe glanced at the gold notebook, like he suspected what she’d been thinking. But he said nothing, instead going back to flipping through the silver one. And after a few more pages, he paused, pressing the book against his chest to hide what he was looking at. “Okay. Before I show you this, I swear I was going to tell you about it. I just… wanted to make a little more progress on my own first—which you do all the time, so please don’t go all Foster Rage on me.”
Sophie crossed her arms, not feeling ready to make any promises.
“You’ve also been super busy lately,” he reminded her. “And…”
“And what?” she asked when he didn’t finish.
“Never mind. All that matters is: I haven’t done anything dangerous. I’ve just been doing the mental exercises Tiergan taught me.”
“So you haven’t been taking fathomlethes?” she pressed, sighing when Keefe looked away guiltily. “Ugh. You know those things are super unreliable.”
They’d also made him cover the walls of his room at one of the Black Swan’s hideouts in tiny scribbled-on scraps of paper like a serial killer’s lair—which explained the abundance of drawings he’d managed to get done so quickly.
The rare river pearls were known for causing frenzied dreams and flashbacks.
“I was careful,” he promised.
“And it was hilarious,” Ro added. “One night he got out of bed and started doing a wiggle dance in his sleep and singing about Prattles pins. And another time he decided he was a baby alicorn and dropped to his hands and knees and galloped all over the house, whinnying. Greatest thing I’ve ever seen.”
Sandor choked back a laugh—but Sophie only felt more worried.
“It was worth it,” Keefe assured her, his face now brighter than Ro’s hair. “It helped me remember this.”
He flipped the silver notebook over and held out a photo-realistic drawing of…
A really nerdy-looking guy.
Between the tweed blazer and the bow tie and the ruddy cheeks and the wild hair, he looked like some sort of professor stereotype. All he was missing was a pair of thick spectacles and…
“He’s human,” Sophie realized, focusing on the man’s deep brown eyes.
She’d gotten so used to being surrounded by blue-eyed elves that it was almost jarring to see someone with the same eye color as her—and someone with deep smile lines and strands of gray peppered through his messy red hair.
The elves remained ageless after they became adults. Only their ears changed with time, growing points along the tops after a few thousand years.
“Look at what he’s holding,” Keefe told her, pointing to the man’s left hand, which held an envelope sealed with a symbol they’d only seen one other time: two crescents forming a loose circle around a glowing star.
“That’s the letter your mom gave you,” Sophie murmured.
“Yep. Looks like I didn’t follow Mommy’s delivery instructions as strictly as she wanted me to.”
“Which surprises no one,” Ro jumped in.
“Of course not,” Keefe agreed, a hint of his smirk returning. “But now we know for sure that I did deliver the letter. And I saw the guy she was contacting. And now that I know what he looks like? I can track him down again and find out what Mommy Dearest wanted from him.”