Chapter 3: Days Past
The weeks dissolved into a fog of jet lag and quiet routines. She drank too much coffee, wandered her cliffside garden pruning things that didn’t need it, and reorganised her bookshelves by smell instead of alphabet. The residual energies in the cottage—the faint, staticky hum of a thousand broken ciphers—felt like white noise. It was a comfort, a familiar buzz against her skin.
Mount Saint Vincent University’s Special Collections department was a quiet, carpeted haven of controlled humidity and whispered conversations. Her new contract was simple: three months, a nine-to-five deciphering a stack of musty 18th-century French ledgers recovered from a collapsed storeroom in St. John’s. They were mundane, mostly. Lists of salt cod barrels, payments for rigging, inventories of rum. The magic in them was faint and practical—simple wardings against mildew and vermin, which she dispelled with a brush of her fingertips and a focused thought. It was methodical, quiet work. The kind that let her mind wander.
And it wandered, relentlessly, to a place of tatami and cold mountain air.
By the third week, the wandering had become a siege. She’d be tracing the florid script of a long-dead ship’s purser, the smell of old paper and leather in her nose, and suddenly her memory would superimpose the scent of sandalwood and plum. The sharp, clean line of a number ‘7’ would curve, in her mind’s eye, into the line of his shoulder as he reached for a lantern. It was infuriating.
“You’re sighing again,” murmured Simon, the gangly archival assistant whose desk was across from her carrel.
“Am not.”
“You are. It’s the fourth time this hour. Trouble with the fish counts?” He peered over, his glasses slipping down his nose.
“The fish counts are fine,” Eliza said, shaking her head to clear it. “Just… a personal ghost.”
“Ah,” Simon said, wisely. He was twenty-two and thought he knew everything. “Boy trouble.”
“Man trouble,” she corrected without thinking, then instantly regretted it.
Simon’s eyebrows shot up. “Ooh. Exotic?”
“Ancient history,” she lied, turning back to her ledger. The words blurred. She focused on the feel of the page, the rough fiber under her thumb, the almost imperceptible tingle of the dissolved preservation spell. This is real, she told herself. This is here. This is your life.
It didn’t stick.
The commute home was a blur of grey sea and leafless trees. Her cottage, when she pushed open the door, felt both like a sanctuary and a cage. Milo and Susie wove around her legs, their demands immediate and simple. Food.Affection. A lap. She obliged, moving through the motions of dinner, of tea, of lighting the fire in the small stone hearth.
The wind had picked up, whipping off the Atlantic and screaming through the gaps in the old window frames. She curled in her chair, a blanket over her legs, a book unopened in her lap. The fire popped and crackled. Susie purred on the blanket, a rhythmic engine of contentment.
She stared into the flames and saw his eyes reflected in lantern light. The memory was no longer just a sensation; it had a sound. His low, measured voice explaining the binding on the pillar. The sharp, startled intake of his breath when she’d first kissed him. The silence afterwards, dense and complete.
“Damn it,” she whispered to the empty room.
She got up, restless. Pacing the small living room, she passed the cluttered desk in the corner—her real work desk, not the tidy university carrel. It was a landslide of papers, peculiar artifacts, and half-disassembled enchanted objects. A music box that played a tune which made people weep, currently silent. A compass that pointed toward regret, its needle glued in place. A small, fractured clay tablet covered in cuneiform that gave anyone who read it a three-day migraine. Her life’s work, in all its strange glory.
Her gaze snagged on a single, innocuous item: a smooth, dark river stone she’d picked up from a stream in Bhutan years ago. It was just a rock. But looking at it, she had a sudden, visceral memory of the weight and warmth of the carved jade pillar under her palms. The shock of connection. The terrifying, exhilarating moment when the ancient, complex magic had not just dissolved under her touch, but had flowed, clean and pure and powerful, into him. It hadn’t been a breaking. It had been a channeling.
She had never done that before. She broke things. She unraveled. She did not conduct.
He’d known what it was. He’d felt it too. That was the unspoken heart of it, the thing that made this more than a spectacular night. It was a professional anomaly. A unknown variable. She hated unknown variables.
With a frustrated groan, she walked to the small, rain-streaked window overlooking the cliff. The garden lanterns swung wildly in the gale, their light streaking the darkness. She leaned her forehead against the cool glass.
What was his name? Kenji Léi. No affiliation, beyond the now-obvious truth that he moved in circles far more rarefied than just ‘facilitator.’ He’d handled that teleport like most people handled a car door. The sheer, controlled power of it…
A different kind of chill went through her, one that had nothing to do with the draft.
He could find her. If he’d wanted to. A man with those resources, who knew her name, her profession… it wouldn’t be hard. The fact that he hadn’t was its own answer. The clean break was holding.
The thought should have been a relief. It felt like a door slamming.
Her phone buzzed on the desk, a sharp vibration against the wood. Milo twitched an ear. Susie ignored it.
It was probably Marcus. Or Lily. Or a university reminder about tomorrow’s departmental meeting.
She didn’t move.
It buzzed again. Then again—two quick, successive pulses. A call, then an immediate follow-up text.
She picked up her phone, turned it around. The screen glowed in the dim room, highlighting the smear of dust on its surface. It was from her brother. She rolled her eyes, a familiar fond exasperation cutting through the heavier thoughts, and called him back.
He picked up right away. “Are you ignoring me?”
“I’m not ignoring you.”
“You didn’t pick up.”
She was trying to think of why and said, “My phone was upside down. I didn’t know who was calling, so I wasn’t ignoring you.” She paused, the truth of it clicking. “I was ignoring everything.”
He chuckled, the sound warm and familiar through the speaker. “That’s so you. But the reason I’m calling is because me and Lily are having a Winter Blues party.”
She paused for a second, thinking about it. “A Winter Blues party?”
Marcus gave a little puff, a sound she knew meant he was shrugging. “Yeah. You know, it’s almost February. We’re in that weird in-between where it’s dark, it’s cold, miserable. We’re kind of out of money because of the holidays. The next sort-of holiday is Valentine’s Day, even though it’s not a holiday, so there’s not a long weekend till March. So yeah, I’m having a party because I need to. I need to feel something.” She heard him pause, his voice softening. “The seasonal depression is hitting hard.”
She paused, took in what he said. The raw admission was unlike his usual stoicism. It was an invitation, a lifeline thrown into her solitary cave. “Okay,” she said. “I will be there at nine.”
She heard him mutter something under his breath, a half-curse. “The party starts at eight.”
“Yes,” she said, a smile touching her lips for the first time in days. “And I will be there at nine.”
“Why? It’s not like you’re doing anything else on Saturday.”
“I could be doing a lot of things on Saturday. You don’t know that.”
Then she heard her sister-in-law in the background say, “Marcus, just let her come at nine.”
“Okay,” he said, defeated. “Nine. Don’t be late. And wear something tropical. We’re trying to make it, you know, not wintry.”
The call ended, leaving the crackle of the fire and the wind’s howl. The empty silence felt different now, less like a weight and more like a space awaiting an arrival. Saturday. Three days away. She looked around her cottage, at the spines of her whispering books, at the garden lanterns flailing in the gale.
Tropical, she thought. Her wardrobe consisted of practical sweaters, durable trousers, and one little black dress she kept for client dinners. Nothing screamed palm trees. A challenge, then. A small, absurd task to focus on. She rose, the blanket falling from her legs, and walked to her bedroom.
She opened the closet door and stared at the contents. Grey, black, navy, brown. A splash of burgundy. The memory of the silk robe in the mountain fortress, emerald green and impossibly soft, flashed behind her eyes. She pushed it away, rustling through hangers. At the very back, her fingers brushed something coarse and brightly colored.
She pulled it out. It was a garish, short-sleeved shirt she’d bought as a joke at a market in Key West five years ago. Electric pink covered in giant, smiling cartoon pineapples wearing sunglasses. It was hideous. It was perfect.
A laugh, sharp and surprising, escaped her. She held the shirt up. Milo, who had followed her, sat on the bed and blinked slowly at it with profound disdain. “Don’t judge,” she told him. “It’s thematic.”
The phone buzzed again in her hand, a text from Lily this time. He’s just stir-crazy. Please come. I’m making those rum punch cupcakes you like.
Eliza typed back, Wouldn’t miss it. Bringing the full tropical vibe. She sent it, then added, Tell him not to touch my cupcakes.
She tossed the phone on the bed next to Milo and laid the ridiculous shirt out beside it. The flamboyant fabric was a violent shock of color against the muted greys and deep blues of her room. For a moment, just looking at it, the echoing chamber inside her ribs didn’t feel so empty. It felt anticipatory.
She had a party to get to. She had pineapple cupcakes to defend. It wasn't much, but it was a direction. It was forward. She walked back to the living room window, the shirt’s image burned in her vision, superimposing itself over the dark, churning sea. The wind still screamed, but it sounded less like a lament and more like a wild, cleansing force.