Then I looked to one side and saw Shireen standing there, and suddenly I didn’t feel safe anymore. I threw up my hands. “No! Not again!”
“It’s okay,” Shireen said.
“I’m through with this! You hear me? Variam told me, right at the start. He asked what someone as crazy as Rachel would do if she found me sneaking around in her head. I shouldn’t have tried to spy on Rachel in the first place. It was fucking insane and I nearly died for it. I’m not doing it again, Shireen, you hear me? I’m done!”
Shireen didn’t look upset. She stepped over the rope to the magic items section and picked up a wand, turning it over in her hands. “I was shielding you while you were in her memories,” she said without looking. “I’ve had a lot of time to practice with Elsewhere. I was trying to hide your presence so she wouldn’t see you. Rachel must have become suspicious. I’m sorry.”
“You don’t think you could have warned me about that BEFORE?”
“I know.”
“Jesus.” I looked away. The customers were still in the shop, their conversation a gentle background murmur. Outside was the strange white glow of Elsewhere; at some point we’d left my dreams. I knew that I could go back if I wanted—Shireen couldn’t actually keep me in Elsewhere against my will—but I didn’t. There were things I wanted to know, and this time I knew the right questions to ask. “I know what you are now,” I said. “You told me when we first met, didn’t you? You told me you were a shadow. I didn’t know what you meant, but I should have figured it out from the start. Harvesting steals someone’s magic, but your magic’s part of you, isn’t it? You can’t take one without the other. When Rachel Harvested you, she wasn’t just taking your magic, she was taking you. And you’ve been living inside her head.”
Shireen was silent for a while. “At first I didn’t know what had happened,” she said at last. “I thought I’d died and gone to . . . I don’t know. The next life, maybe. I felt wrong, like there were bits of me missing. And there were new memories. I could remember things I’d done with Rachel, except when I remembered them I was looking at me, from the outside. And then I started to see other things. The present as well as the past. I could see what Rachel saw.” Shireen looked up at me. “And finally I found I could talk to her.”
I stared at Shireen. “She can see you, can’t she?”
Shireen nodded.
I covered my eyes. “Jesus.” I remembered my reunion with Rachel last year. She’d been talking to thin air, speaking to someone who didn’t answer. Now I knew who she’d been talking to. “So all these years she’s had you looking over her shoulder?” I shook my head. “She murdered her best friend and now she’s got her ghost following her around. No wonder she’s crazy . . .”
“It’s . . . worse than that,” Shireen said.
I stared at her. “How?”
“You saw something in Rachel’s memories, didn’t you?” Shireen said. “Something they couldn’t see.”
“That thing . . .” I remembered the spindly, inhuman form and had to hold back a shiver. “It’s real?”
“It’s real.”
“What is it?”
“Do you know what it feels like, being Harvested?” Shireen asked.
I shook my head.
“It feels like your soul’s being ripped away.” Shireen’s eyes were distant. “You can’t move and you can’t scream, but you can feel every bit of it. It takes minutes but it feels like years. I knew what was happening to me, and I knew it was Rachel who was doing it. And I hated her for it. She was my oldest friend and she was killing me, and I wanted her to suffer, hurt her as much as she was hurting me . . .” Shireen fell silent for a moment, staring past me. “There’s a vulnerability to Harvesting. When you open yourself to take in the person whose magic you’re absorbing, you open yourself to . . . other things. I called out, and something came. It passed into Rachel. I don’t know what it is and I don’t think it has a name. I know it doesn’t talk. I don’t think it can do anything to me. But it can do things to her.”
We stood in silence for a little while. “Are you really Shireen?” I said at last. “Or are you some sort of copy?”
“I don’t know,” Shireen said simply, and somehow she sounded very sad. “I can remember my life, but it’s patchy. Like old plaster flaking off a wall. Sometimes Rachel’s memories feel more real than mine. Maybe the real Shireen died and she’s gone away and I’m just an echo. Or maybe I am still Shireen, and I won’t die until Rachel does . . .” She looked up at me. “How would I know?”
I sighed, my anger draining away. “I guess you wouldn’t, would you?” I thought for a minute. “What happened after Rachel killed you?”
“At first Rachel was preparing for Tobruk to come back,” Shireen said. “She wanted to be Richard’s Chosen and she was going to fight him for it, kill him if she had to.”
“But Tobruk never came.”
“And in the end she figured out why. She didn’t believe it at first, but after they found the body even she couldn’t pretend. In a way the two of you were on the same side back then, though she didn’t see it like that . . . And then it was time for Richard to leave. And they brought out Catherine.”
I felt a sick sensation in the pit of my stomach. “Did Richard kill her?”
Shireen shook her head.
“Then is she—?”
“Rachel did,” Shireen said, looking at me steadily. “You remember the room that was being built at the end of the catacombs? That was what it was designed for. Catherine begged and pleaded but Rachel didn’t listen. She did the ritual and it worked just like Richard said. It drained the life from Catherine’s body and opened a gate, just for a few seconds. Richard went through it. The last thing he told her was to watch for his return.”
I stared down at the floor, feeling numb and hollow. So this was how it all ended. A part of me wanted to argue, tell Shireen that she must have made a mistake—but hadn’t I always known deep down that this was what must have happened? How likely was it that Catherine could have gotten away and survived for all these years without me or her brother or anyone else ever knowing? Will had been right after all. I had killed Catherine by capturing her—it had just taken a while for her to die. “Why did Rachel do it?” I said.
“Because she didn’t have any choice,” Shireen said with a sigh. “That was how she saw it. She’d wanted to be Richard’s Chosen, and she wanted it so badly she killed me for it. Once she’d done that . . . If she stopped being his apprentice and walked away, it would all have been for nothing. She would have killed me for nothing. It was like . . . as long as he was giving the orders, she could pretend it wasn’t really her fault. He gave her an excuse.”
“That’s bullshit! She always had a choice; she could have stopped!”
Shireen looked past me. When she spoke, her voice sounded different, as though she were reciting.
For mine own good,
All causes shall give way: I am in blood
Stepp’d in so far that, should I wade no more,
Returning were as tedious as go o’er . . .
I stared at her. “Where’s that from?”
“A play I once saw,” Shireen said. She looked at me. “Do you know why Rachel hates you so much?”
I shook my head.
“Because you did go back. You stopped being Richard’s apprentice and started a new life. Every time Rachel looks at you she knows that she could have done it all differently, that she did have a choice. And she hates you for it because deep down there’s a bit of her that wishes she’d done the same thing. You’re a living reminder of the one thing in her past that she’s most ashamed of and that no one could ever forgive, and the worst part is that she knows she didn’t have to do it and that it was all her own fault.”
“And then there’s you,” I said quietly. “She thought once she killed you it’d all be over, but she has to see you every day and be reminded of what she’s done. And on top of that she’s got this horror from God-knows-where in her head as well.” I shook my head. “Jesus.”