Page 108 of The Blood Queen

The world’s still hazy. My head too. Thoughts are trying to fight their way through, but it’s like my consciousness has developed a protective shell, not letting me know whatever’s gonna set me off. Not yet.

That, I’m familiar with. Can’t get too upset. Can’t feel too much. I’ll lose control, go on a tear, and hurt people—

No. That’s not right either.

Not this me, I think again, and it isn’t right still, but it echoes through my mind. Not this me, not this me.

Three times.

My vision clears with a few fluttering blinks.

Cecil sits across from me. We’re in a carriage. He’s frowning, analyzing me, and I’m hit by the instinct to hide my reactions from him. It’s better not to let him know what I’m thinking, what I’m feeling. He’ll use it against me. He’ll—

He’s dead.

I killed him.

Stabbed him, smeared his blood on my face, reveled in it.

The image is crystalline in my mind. More come with it, things I haven’t seen before but I know I have—

A castle. A world of pixies and glowing magic. Blood and knives and—

A woman.

I see…dark hair. Dark eyes. Something about her has my mind grasping. I reach.

And it’s like a lock snapping free.

A door opens, connecting one room to another, and I feel an overlay fusing two versions of me:

One who’d been sitting in this carriage, hearing Cecil talk. Living on the streets, doing his bidding, scrounging for scraps of his affection, who grew up knowing he was a Red Cap but knowing more that he had to hide his nature.

Another who lived a different yet similar life, who’d been waiting, waiting for this moment, for fate to merge and split and merge again.

Cecil cocks his head, nose curling. “Samson. Are you quite well?”

“I—” I blink at him. Look around.

We’re in a carriage. In Southwark.

I touch my chest. I’m wearing the clothes that I wore when I left London months ago. It’s what I was wearing when I freed the boys from the Clink, then got into Cecil’s carriage, and he told me about a task that’d take me to Scotland.

He hasn’t said that yet. How do I know he’ll say that?

The other me knows. It happened before, or it happened over there, not here, not to this me, not this me.

This is where it started. Where the threads began that would take me on my fated path in that other life, so this is where I came back to. This is where the lines converge, the pattern changes, and here I am.

This new me.

“You’ve…got a mission?” I ask, testing.

“Indeed,” he says, none too pleased I’ve interrupted. “It’s a matter of national security. Can I trust you with the enormity of such a task?”

Images keep pouring in, torrents of thought, sheets of memories, filling in gaps between these two realities.

The spiders. The throne room. The—