Page 7 of The Vanishing Throne

Don’t make me remember this, I think to Lonnrach.There’s nothing here that will help you. But my protests only encourage him to hold onto the memory more firmly. It plays on.

I know exactly what’s coming. I’ve relived this in my nightmares night after night. First it’s the low intake of breath from the other end of the garden that startles me. I nearly turn to go inside when I hear something else – a strangled scream, caught in a gasp.

No no no.I watch myself cross the garden to where the gate overlooks the street. No matter how many times I remember this I always hope for a different outcome. I hope that I’ll run for help. I hope that I’ll pull out a blade and fight. I hope that someone will come. I hope I hope I hope.

But it’s exactly the same. It always is.

I sense Lonnrach watching, too. We see his sister with her face pressed to my mother’s throat.Sorcha raises her head to reveal teeth glinting in the moonlight, dripping with my mother’s blood. We hear Sorcha’s laugh, a deep, throaty purr that makes my stomach clench. In a single, swift motion, we watch her tear out my mother’s heart.

Next to me, Lonnrach’s body goes still when he sees how the memory blurs from panic. How I can barely get enough breath into my lungs, how my thoughts are racing as Sorcha escapes into the night. How my memory of the event seems to speed up and black out until the moment I find myself next to my mother’s body, pressing my hands to her chest.

We watch as I scream her name until I lose my voice.

Without warning, I’m standing back in the hall of mirrors. Lonnrach is still holding my wrist, his mouth hovering above where his teeth left their marks in my flesh. His lips are wet with my blood; it drips down his throat. Just like in my memory ofher.

Sorcha.

I can’t stop the sound that escapes my throat. When Lonnrach’s gaze meets mine, his breathing is ragged and I’m startled by the glimpse of emotion there.

Before I can think to analyze it, he turns away sharply. He raises his arm to wipe his mouth, smudges my blood across his wrist like a brand. ‘That’s enough for now.’

Lonnrach grabs his coat from the floor and strides through the nearest mirror, disappearing into it as if it were water. It undulates, spreading ripples across all of the mirrors before they finally settle into my reflection.

I’m alone once more. The vines retract into the floor and I’m surrounded by the different versions of myself again.

Only then do I realise my cheeks are wet with tears.

Lonnrach doesn’t speak when he comes to visit me after that. He makes every effort not to meet my gaze, keeping his expression carefully composed. Guarded.

I resist at first. I become desperate enough to attack him –to loop theseilgflùraround his neck – but the vines wrap around my limbs so fast that I’m forced to give in. In the days that follow, the physical weakness from blood loss and venom takes its toll and I stop fighting entirely.

I begin to view my time with Lonnrach as a nightmare I can’t escape. When he sinks his teeth into me, I shut my eyes and almost manage to convince myself that I’m dreaming and it isn’t real. Thatheisn’t real.

After a while, I become so used to the pain of his bites that it barely affects me. Now it’s just a quick prick of teeth through flesh and the sting of venom through blood.

Lonnrach watches my memories and leaves like a thief with his bounty. Every image with Derrick and Kiaran is carefully examined, played slowly and deliberately.

Through his explorations, I relive the last year of my life. I hate the way I’ve come to view his bite as a respite from the loneliness of my mirrored selves. Violent Aileana hasn’t attacked again, but I still sense her behind all the others. Waiting, watching. I see her as a quick flash of a monster’s smile, a reminder that Sorcha still lurks in my memory – and then she’s gone.

At first I would use the reprieve from her to press my palms against the reflective rock. I tried for the longest time to pass through like Lonnrach does, but the surface is always solid, hard. I count the mirrors – one thousand four hundred and sixty-seven– and all of them are inescapable. On particularly bad days, I hit the mirrors until my hands bleed. Until I’m left with bruises on my fists.

The longer Lonnrach drains my blood, the weaker I become. I barely improve when I finally take the food he leaves: servings of bread, cheese, and fruit. Kiaran always taught me never to accept food or drink from the fae, that it allows them greater control over a human. Accepting it is my tacit compliance to stay in theSìth-bhrùthuntil Lonnrach decides to release me.

He’ll kill me first.

I’ve memorised the shape of his teeth imprinted into my skin. My fingers trace the marks they’ve left as I recall each memory he conjured and examined.

Thirty-six human teeth. Forty-six thin fangs, tapered like a snake’s. Together they form two crescents, grooves worn into each arm and each side of my neck, over and over and over.

Twenty-seven times.

Some are flecked with dried blood. Others have scarred from the rapid healing ofbaobhan sìthvenom. I used to call my scars badges, each one earned from a fae I killed. But these …these aren’t badges. They aren’t marks of victory.

They’re reminders of how I lost everything.

Today, Lonnrach sifts through the longer streams of my memory. He lingers on those before my mother’s death, those he should find unimportant. I wonder if he realises that I’ve noticed the way he slows down the hours I spent building with her, or the days I took tea with my friend Catherine. Inconsequential memories of simple pleasures before I had ever felt the mark of grief.

As if embarrassed, Lonnrach pulls forward in time. I watch a stream of images go by before he settles on the memory of Kiaran and me in the Queen’s Park. Though it was the night of the battle, it seems so long ago now. Kiaran had resolved to take his sister’s place if we managed to trap the fae once more. I thought I would never see him again.

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