When we hang up, I’m shaking. My breath comes in short pants; heat climbs around my collar. I dig my elbows into my knees and press the heels of my hands into my eyes. This is why I left. I love my father, but his words puncture every single layer of my wall until it may as well not exist. His grief makes my own emotions break across my skin like an earthquake, opening me up to—

“No,” I whisper into my palms. “No, no, no.” But it’s too late; the memories swell and take me.

The sharp smell of hospital disinfectant. Raw bile in the back of my throat. Cheap, soft wood in the cranny beneath my fingernails as I dig them into the armrest.

Details from that night spin like a hurricane, blocking out the world in layers. The flashback pulls me from the now and into the past, one sense at a time, until I’m in both places, both times at once—

A blue jay jeering and whistling overhead in a tree.

The piercing beep from a life support monitor down the hall.

The campus Bell Tower chimes nine a.m.

The police officer’s deep, even voice… “Route 70 around eight… a hit-and-run.”

Familiar, horrifying, all-consuming—once it starts, this memory is a ride I can’t escape. The only thing to do is let it run its course—

The nurse leaves. The officer watches her go. He sighs. “I’m sorry for your loss…”

Almost over.

Next, we’ll stand, he’ll shake my father’s hand, and we’ll go home without her. I whimper and rock and wait for that awful night to let me go—

But it doesn’t.

I gasp as a new image dislodges itself with a violent crack, like an iceberg in an ocean.

A silver badge on a breast pocket flashing. A body, shimmering. The officer’s blue eyes holding my gaze, then my father’s. His thin, drawn mouth muttering words I can’t hear. Words flowing into the room. A cold wind sweeping through my mind…

Just as quickly, the memory ends.

“That’s not what happened—” As soon as the words leave my mouth, I know they aren’t right.

For the second time in twenty-four hours, my brain wrestles with two conflicting memories of the exact same moment.

I squeeze my eyes shut. The memory of the isel at the Quarry is still there, opaque under a silver smoke blanket of false images. The truth under Selwyn’s lie.

Now the new memories of the hospital wage war against the old ones, until finally, the lies dissolve.

Selwyn and the police officer. Both chanted a spell of some kind. Both bent my mind to their will.

My eyes snap open.

The first time I saw magic was the night my mother died.