Hanna begged her parents for a sleepover, so Eliana stayed behind, but that worked because I had the hotel room to myself. All of us had spent the day talking about the Jem-Kruk/Alfheim situation. Niko even stayed for all of it, although he fell asleep halfway through.

Once I got back to my hotel room, I flopped back on the bed. I didn’t know what to think about everything. The Älvolk had already messed with my mind so much, and now it turned out they might take even more? Sumi had spent a long time explaining the time differences, but I still wasn’t sure that I fully understood it.

Not that it really mattered. My hope was that I’d stop the bridge from opening—not cross it myself. I didn’t want to go somewhere I could lose entire days for an overnight trip.

And Sumi knew my parents. When they were together. I wanted to know everything she had seen. Were they in love? How did they meet? What did they think of me? Did they think of me?

But Sumi said she wanted a nap. And I doubted she knew the answers anyway. I imagined that Senka and Thor’s relationship—as much or as little as it may have been—was presumably clandestine.

Or maybe Sumi had known, but she’d forgotten it. The way Johan had.

Throughout the conversation, both he and Jem had intermittently cried. They truly seemed to love each other, and Johan had once remembered his childhood well enough to write a book about it. But all of that had been stripped from his mind.

It was a cold, horrifying thought that I could lose everything I cared about, everything I’d ever done. It could all be gone. The Älvolk could make me forget everything.

A knock at the hotel door stopped my rumination, and when I answered it, I found Jem on my doorstep.

“Sumi’s sleeping, but I’m not tired. I was hoping you might want some company,” he said with his razor-sharp smile.

“Yeah, sure.” I stepped back and let him into my room.

“How are you handling everything?”

“I don’t know,” I admitted wearily. “How about you?”

“Well, for me, I reunited with my long-lost brother, so it’s been a happy day,” he reminded me.

“Of course. Yeah. I’m so happy for you both.”

Jem sat on Eliana’s bed, leaning back with his arms behind him, and he looked up at me with his dark eyes. He’d left his hair loose, and when he shook his head to get a curl out of his face, there was something oddly sexy about the gesture. My belly warmed, and once again I wanted to blurt out that I was seeing Pan.