“I asked you a question, Trent,” Isaac said, interrupting my thoughts. He stood in front of me, crossing his arms over his chest. Philip and Bethany flanked him, waiting, their faces like stone. Bethany was finally looking at me, but there was a coldness in her blue eyes that felt like ice. I liked it better before, when she wasn’t looking at me at all. “What were you planning to do with the Van Lente Box?” Isaac pressed. “Give it to Underwood? Sell it?”
I smirked up at him from where I sat tied to the chair. “You know, you didn’t need magic to put me to sleep. Listening to you talk would have done the trick just fine.”
“Just answer the question,” Bethany said. “The sooner you do, the sooner we can figure out what to do with you.”
Her voice was colder than I’d ever heard it. I’d blown any chance she would trust me again. She probably hated me. I deserved it, I supposed, but that didn’t make it any better.
“You told me you wanted to destroy the box because it was the only way you’d be free,” Bethany continued. “What did you mean? Free from what? Or was that just another lie?” I kept my eyes on Isaac and didn’t answer. She continued, growing more frustrated, “So what was the plan, Trent? You knew the shadowborn were coming to the safe house, so you came back to … what? To look like a hero? To get us to trust you so we’d take you to the box? It’s not like you were in any real danger from the shadowborn, right? You knew they couldn’t kill you. Not permanently, anyway.”
Damn, she really knew how to push my buttons. I wanted to tell her she was wrong about me, but I couldn’t risk giving Isaac any information. Instead, I turned away from her. It was just as well. I couldn’t stand the way she was looking at me.
“Bethany said you claim to have amnesia,” Isaac pressed. “You’ll forgive me if I don’t believe it. Pretending not to have any memories is a long con to play, Trent. Sooner or later, you’re going to slip up. It’s inevitable. You might as well come clean now.”
I looked up at him sharply, trying to bite back my anger, but the floodgates broke. “It’s not a lie.”
Standing next to Isaac, Philip said, “Sure it’s not. You know who lies about who they are? Criminals. Thieves. Spies.”
I glared at him, forcing myself to keep my mouth shut. Why couldn’t the others see it? Why couldn’t they piece it together the way I had? Maybe Isaac had cast some kind of spell on them.
Philip let out a frustrated groan. “This is bullshit. Give me five minutes alone with him and I’ll get him talking.”
“That’s not how we do things,” Isaac said. “You know that.”
Philip shook his head. “Humans. I’ll never understand you. Trust me, the best way to loosen his tongue is to tear part of it out. But if you’re not going to do that, and he’s not going to talk anyway, you might as well just get Gabrielle to do her Vulcan mindmeld thing and get it over with.”
Isaac nodded, taking a deep breath. “I was hoping it wouldn’t come to that, but I don’t think he’s left us much choice.” He turned to Gabrielle, who was still kneeling on the carpet beside the clawfoot tub where Thornton lay submerged, still holding his hand in the water. “Gabrielle? I’m sorry, I wouldn’t ask if it weren’t important, but we need you.”
She turned to Isaac, the golden hue of the water reflecting on her face. She looked angry. “Not now. Find some other way.”
“I would if I could,” he said. “None of us have your special talent. You’re the only one who can get inside his mind and tell us what you see.”
“Wait—what?” I stiffened in the chair. Were they serious? Could Gabrielle really do that? Of course she could, I realized. At this point it was foolish to be skeptical about anything these people were capable of. Still, withholding information from Isaac was the only leverage I had, and if she told him everything, I’d lose that.
Gabrielle let go of Thornton’s hand and stood up with a sigh. “Fine, but let’s keep it quick.” She walked over to me, inhaled a deep, steadying breath, and held my face in her hands. One was still wet from the tub, the spell in the water tingling against my skin like the brush of a feather. I tried to pull away from her, but with my wrists bound behind the chair there was nowhere to go.
“Don’t do this,” I said.
But it was too late. She was already in my head. I could feel her there, leafing through the pages of my mind as effortlessly as she might a magazine on the beach. She closed her eyes and bent closer, close enough that I saw the wet trails her worried tears had left in the corners of her eyes and along the sides of her nose.
She pulled my memories to the surface, dredging them from the swamp of my mind. In my head, unbidden, I saw the abandoned Shell gas station on Empire Boulevard. She saw it, too. Then she peeled the image away like the outer layer of an onion, and beneath it was my room in the fallout shelter, sparse and dreary, the overhead light flickering dimly. She peeled that one away, too, and beneath it she found what she was looking for.
“It’s Underwood,” she said. “I see him.”
The memory of Underwood’s face hung like a ghost in my mind, remaining frozen there no matter how hard I fought to keep my mind blank. Gabrielle was too strong. Now that she was inside my head, she could look wherever she wanted and I couldn’t stop her.
“Do you recognize him?” Isaac asked. “Is he someone you’ve seen before? Maybe under a different name?”
She shook her head, her eyes still closed. “No, I don’t know him.”
“But Trent does,” Isaac pointed out. “Tell us what he knows.”
She burrowed deeper into my mind, sorting through random images as if they were photographs: Underwood slapping my cheek and calling me a good dog. Underwood handing me a gun. Underwood sliding the address of the warehouse across the table to me. I was surprised at how vivid it all was, the colors, the sounds, even the smell of Underwood’s plentiful cologne. With Gabrielle along for the ride, the memories felt as fresh as if I were living them for the first time.
She laid open my mind, picking over my most private memories like Thanksgiving leftovers. She effortlessly pried them free and told the others what she saw—a thief who couldn’t remember his past, the low-level Brooklyn crime boss who took him in, and the mission to steal the box for an anonymous buyer in return for the information Underwood claimed to have found. I felt exposed, helpless, but most of all, hearing it spelled out so matter-of-factly, I felt foolish for having believed Underwood for as long as I did. He was a criminal, a master of lying to get what he wanted. I’d been an idiot to think he wouldn’t lie to me, too.
“So Underwood gave him the address of the warehouse,” Bethany said, talking about me as though I weren’t there. “That explains how he got past the ward. I thought there was something off about his story. But how did Underwood know we were there?”
Gabrielle found another memory: Underwood disappearing behind the black door. “He heard it from a mobster named Bennett, who belonged to a syndicate that owns the warehouse,” she said. “Underwood tortured him for the information. He killed him.”
“So Trent was telling the truth about that, at least,” Bethany said. “Bennett was the name of the dead man he saw at the safe house. He told me he knew Bennett, he just didn’t say how.”
“Now we know,” Isaac said. “Bennett is connected to Underwood, too. They all are. So who is he, and why haven’t we heard of him before?”
My breathing fell into sync with Gabrielle’s, to the point where I couldn’t tell which breaths were hers and which were mine. The longer she spent inside my head, the more our minds became entwined, knotting together like tree roots. Other memories began to bleed through into my own, memories I didn’t recognize until I realized they weren’t mine. They were hers. Most of them were of Thornton; her thoughts of him were still the rawest, closest to the surface. The fallout shelter faded from my mind, and I saw Gabrielle and Thornton kissing on a hilltop beneath a bright full moon and a sky full of stars. Their hands were clasped, their wrists bound by shiny white ribbons that reflected the moonlight. Figures moved around them, squat and low to the ground, dressed in ceremonial robes and intoning in high-pitched voices. Her memory filled in the blanks for me: They were goblins, and with that knowledge came a sudden understanding of what it was I was seeing.