Chapter 13

CHAPTER 13

MARNIE

I mages and feelings rampaged through my mind. This was everything and nothing like the last time Mar and Nie were reintegrated into one single person. They each felt like me, and yet nothing like me. They felt like distant versions of the person I was meant to be.

These feelings were all nonsense.

All of Nie, all of Mar, all of as many of us as there could be, would always be mine. We were all Marnie.

Last time there had been two distinct sets of memories, the ones from the living Marnie, and the one from the dead version. It was as if I’d lived them both. This time, the flashes didn’t tell a cohesive story. They didn’t feel like a set of memories. They felt like violently glowing moments plucked like stars from an otherwise pitch-black sky.

Fire and ice warred within my veins. An electric storm burst through my nerves.

My entire body felt like it was being struck with every single emotion, every sensation, all at the same time.

A moment or an eternity later, the storm dulled, just enough for my brain to kickstart.

I forced myself to breathe, forced myself to blink.

The world came back into focus.

Imogen’s face was hovering over mine.

I was lying on a bed.

“Speak to me,” Imogen pleaded. She shook my shoulders. “Mar.”

I tried my mouth, to see if it would work. My tongue felt too thick. But I managed to sound surprisingly normal as I said, “Hi.”

“Thank goodness. I thought you died.” Imogen let out a long, coffee-scented breath that tickled my cheek.

“All evidence suggests otherwise.”

She dropped down on top of me and squeezed so fiercely it felt more like an attempt at suffocation than a hug.

I pried my arm out from under both of us and patted her on the back. “There there. Now let me up.”

She popped up and grinned at me, wiping her wet cheeks. I’d made her cry. I didn’t want to make her cry.

“Sorry,” I said, even though that was not a word or sentiment I was generally accustomed to expressing.

“I’m just so glad you’re all right, Mar.”

Tears of…relief? I didn’t understand her at all.

“Marnie,” I said.

My head pounded, the color of the room undulating with every pulse.

“Okay, Marnie. What happened?” Imogen asked. “This was way scarier than when you just looked shocked the last time you absorbed your copy. This was like you had a seizure while falling off a cliff in space with nothing to hold onto and no air to breathe.”

That was about how it had felt, too. But what happened to me exactly?

“I don’t know,” I said.

“Do you have Nie’s memories? She disappeared, so you should remember what she remembered. Right?”

“I…” When I tried to focus on the flashes, my head pounded harder. “I need a shower. We’ll talk after, okay?”

“A shower in the undrinkable water?”

“It’s a risk I’m willing to take.”

“Okay,” Imogen said, a look of concern lining her features. “Yeah, sure, of course. And while you do that, I’ll check in with the crew, and of course with Brock. Maybe he found something useful in the background checks.”

I made a noncommittal noise and started toward the bathroom.

Imogen was still talking.

My legs felt like they were made of gelatin.

For most of my life, I’d known exactly who I was—a self-sufficient survivor. Now I was neither self-sufficient nor a survivor. I needed Imogen, just as Mar had needed Nie. And as Nie, I’d died.

I locked myself in the bathroom and started the water, then I undressed and stepped into the stream. I tried to let the heat wash away the self-pity that helped nothing. I tried to let it wash away the new anger I couldn’t comprehend.

I stood there, getting pelted by rust-scented water, until I went numb. I lost myself to the flow. Maybe I’d lost myself a long time ago. And maybe I should have realized that when I found myself turning to others for answers, for companionship, for anything at all instead of trusting myself to carry me through.

My hair plastered to my skin in black sheets. My fingers pruned. I leaned my palms against the cracked avocado tiles, closed my eyes, and tried to focus on conjuring Nie’s memories.

A gnarled stick.

The color yellow.

The color red.

Swirling black shadows.

I focused on the final image, the only one that made any sense to me.

I replayed the image over and over in my mind until the shadows turned into something else entirely, and the image elongated into choppy scenes recorded on brittle film.

Black tendrils transformed into wispy hair.

A black arm clutched my disembodied head. I, Nie’s head, was tucked against his side as he dove from the balcony, landed on his feet, and ran, carrying me like a linebacker with a football.

His? He? Why did I know this glorified gorilla was male?

Mar was scared.

Nie was angry.

“No.” I—Nie—had repeated the word, unable to articulate anything more complicated. That didn’t mean I couldn’t think more complicated thoughts.

My mind whirred with thought, and recognition.

I knew the shadowy gorilla…or at least I’d encountered him before.

He set me down on the ground and paced.

“No other choice,” he said, his voice broken with regret and resignation.

The memory crackled, like the film was damaged.

As it faded back into my mind and I shivered in the no-longer-warm shower, I realized that even if Bernadette was an untrustworthy shapeshifting creature of shadows, she wasn’t the one who’d killed Nie.

Imogen had been right all along.

I dried my hair and got dressed before returning to find Imogen lounging in bed watching TV. When she spotted me, she clicked the show off with the remote and popped up.

“Hey,” she said. “You were in there a really long time. I was starting to worry.”

It hadn’t felt long.

“But here you are,” Imogen said.

“Here I am.”

“I ordered food. I didn’t know what you’d want, and I didn’t want to leave, so I ordered a bunch of takeout. I hope that’s all right.”

“Thank you, Imogen. That was thoughtful.”

She beamed at me.

I took a seat across from her on my own mattress and searched for what exactly I should tell her about my broken memories. I decided to start with the most important piece of information I’d gleaned.

But before I could utter a word, she said, “I called Brock and told him to focus on the background check for Guy Jones first. I talked to Rose and Wendy, too. And Rose said that you thought a cloaked dude was stalking Nie, and he followed her onto the train, and that he was both the bad guy and Birdie since Birdie had a ticket, but since she can change shapes, there’s no good reason for her to hide who she is with a cloak. It had to be Guy Jones creeping on Nie.”

I just blinked at her.

“Sorry, that was a lot.” Imogen smiled. “You looked like there was something you wanted to say at the start there. Go ahead. I’m all ears.”

I said, “You were right all along.”

“Oh, that’s so nice. People almost never say that to me. Right about what?”

“It wasn’t Bernadette who broke into my last room. It was someone else.”

“So you have Nie’s memories.” She clapped her hands together. “That's the best news. And I’m so glad it’s not Birdie. I mean I really didn’t want it to be her.”

We didn’t need to get into Imogen’s weird adoration for the reaper again.

“I have broken memories,” I said.

“Because…of Wendy’s magic? Like Nie didn’t have all of her own memories?”

It was possible. It was also possible that the issue was the fact that Mar and Nie had lived separate lives much longer before reuniting this time, and it was difficult to access all of those memories. I hoped time would help.

I said simply, “I don’t know.”

“Well, we should have some takeout, and while we eat and think things over, we should call Andrew back. He’s been calling you. I didn’t want to be rude and answer your phone, but I did happen to see who was calling, even though I wasn’t trying to see.”

“Okay.”

Was Andrew calling to follow up on his lab work from our initial meeting? Whatever he wanted, better to know about it as soon as possible.

I called him back and set the phone down on the mattress on speaker.

Imogen smiled at me, enthusiastic about being included.

“Mar,” Andrew answered. “I’m glad you called.”

“Imogen is here. You’re on speaker.”

“All right,” he said.

“Hi. Mar’s actually Marnie now,” Imogen said.

It only occurred to me then that the reason Andrew was calling could be because he wanted me to physically check something on Nie’s head. Too late for that.

“I hope the memories prove useful,” Andrew said.

I hoped so, too.

“I’m calling to report on your lab work,” Andrew said. “I didn’t detect anything magical or pharmaceutical in her system. Her cholesterol is a bit high.”

“I like french fries,” I said.

“Me, too,” Imogen whispered.

A knock came from the door. Imogen popped up to answer it.

“I did find something interesting in the earwax,” Andrew said.

“Besides the fact that it was vibrating?” I asked.

Imogen opened the door and exchanged words with whoever was on the other side. I leaned slightly to see a young woman handing over a plastic takeout bag.

“Yes,” Andrew said. “I’ve pinpointed the date the curse was whispered.”

“When?” I asked.

“October twenty-fourth,” he said.

The day after I—Nie—arrived in Nevermore.

“That means she wasn’t cursed in Piccadilly. She was cursed here,” Imogen said, as she returned to the bed. She laid out foam packages along the comforter and gestured for me to help myself.

“One more thing,” Andrew said. “Time of death occurred somewhere between seven and eleven p.m. on the twenty-sixth.”

Two days after Nie was cursed. The curse hadn’t killed me, which meant there was another cause.

I closed my eyes and tried to focus on my memories of what had happened during the three days I’d spent in Nevermore before someone had murdered me.

I came up blank.

I let out a breath and surveyed the food Imogen had purchased. I grabbed a french fry. The salty grease did little to soothe the disappointment I felt in my failure to access my own memories.

“Did you already know some of this stuff?” Imogen asked me.

I shook my head. “No.”

“Andrew, do you think Nie didn’t know everything she should know because she was undead?” Imogen asked.

“It’s possible. This particular situation is as new to me as it is to you,” Andrew said.

“Broken memories. It could be the fact that she was in pieces,” Imogen snorted. “Was that not funny? That’s definitely not funny. Ohmygoodnessgracious, I’m so sorry.”

Except what if she was right?

“Sure,” Andrew said. “The entirety of Nie’s experience may not be contained in every part of her.”

“What would her shoulder remember?” Imogen asked. “Lifting her arm?”

“It’s unlikely for parts to have self-awareness,” Andrew said. “The rest of the body could have disappeared at the same time as the head when the memories were absorbed.”

So it was possible we had to find the rest of Nie to find the rest of the answers. I wasn’t sure if that was better or worse than the rest of her disappearing and leaving no further evidence to find at all.

The entire conversation was making my stomach churn.

I pushed the food away.

After a few niceties and an invitation to call if we needed anything else, Andrew hung up.

“I need a nap,” Imogen said with another yawn. “I didn’t sleep last night.”

I hadn’t slept much either.

Imogen said, “You’re tired, too, right?”

“Exhausted.”

“Let’s nap,” Imogen said.

I lay down and watched her instantly fall asleep. I closed my eyes and tried to sleep, too. There was no way that was going to happen.

I needed to stretch my legs, move around so I could think.

This room was suffocating.

I picked up my messenger bag and gently patted the pocket that held Rose’s potions. There. It should be safe enough to go for a walk, so long as I stayed inside the hotel…right?