“We did?” Ro asked, beating Sophie to the question.
“Uh, yeah.” Keefe stood so fast that Mrs. Stinkbottom made a nosedive to the floor. “I keep failing my mom’s creepy tests, so it was only a matter of time before she realized I was never going to ‘fulfill my legacy’ or whatever. And once she figured that out, she’d have to get rid of me.”
“Why?” Sophie wondered.
That was the part that kept tripping her up.
Why was Keefe’s mom being so extreme—and why now, all of a sudden?
It wasn’t like Lady Gisela hadn’t had chances to take Keefe out during their last few confrontations. She’d had weapons aimed right at his head and never came close to pulling the trigger.
So what changed?
And why make Tam do it when she could give the job to someone reliably evil, like Vespera or Gethen?
Keefe tapped one of his temples. “Because if I’m not on her side—and never will be—then I’m a liability. I could piece together the memories she took from me, find what she’s hiding, and use that to beat her.”
“I guess,” Sophie mumbled, trying to figure out how to word the next part gently, since it had proven to be a sensitive subject. “But… she had those memories shattered instead of washed, so nothing can trigger them.”
And no matter what telepathy tricks Sophie and Fitz had tried, they hadn’t been able to recover enough shards to learn anything useful—and neither had Tiergan.
“That just proves the memories are important,” Keefe insisted, turning to pace and sending clothes and papers flying as he kicked them out of the way. “I think something happened in London—something big, otherwise she wouldn’t have gone to so much trouble to erase it. And I bet she told Bangs Boy to off me because I’m finally getting close to figuring out what it was.”
“You are?” Sophie asked, frowning when Keefe nodded. “Since when?”
He chewed his lip for a second, then stalked over to a dresser that was shoved haphazardly into a corner and yanked the bottom drawer open, pulling out wrinkled tunics and tossing them onto the floor.
“You already know my mom gave me a letter to deliver to a house in London with a green door,” he reminded Sophie as she made her way over. “And you said Fintan told you she sent me there to recruit somebody.”
“He did,” she agreed, peering over his shoulder as he removed the last of the shirts. “He also said that it was one of her side projects, so she didn’t tell him much about it. And that the recruiting didn’t work out—and you were never supposed to recover that memory.”
“Guess it’s a good thing I found another piece, then,” he said, pushing on one of the corners of the drawer and making what must’ve been a false bottom lift ever so slightly on the opposite side—enough for him to get a grip on the edge. Slowly he raised the thin wooden panel, stopping after a few inches to slide a finger underneath and feel around for…
“Is that a trip wire?” Sophie asked as he unhooked a thin strand of silver from the underside of the panel.
“Can’t be too careful with Lord Nosypants around,” he confirmed, pulling the panel free and revealing four notebooks—one brown, one gold, one silver, and one green—with a cloudy vial sitting on top of them, attached to the other end of the wire.
“That tube is filled with one of my favorite airborne microbes,” Ro explained, flashing all of her pointed teeth when Sophie backed up a step. “Those little guys know how to have a party in your sinuses.”
Sophie’s nose burned just imagining it, and she held her breath as Keefe finished unhooking the vial and set it aside—not nearly as carefully as she would’ve liked—before carrying the journals over to the bed. He left the brown, green, and gold notebooks resting on the quilt and flipped open the silver one, turning the pages so fast that Sophie couldn’t recognize anything. But she could tell the book was filled with Keefe’s amazing sketches.
“I’ve switched from making lists of memories to drawing them, since it helps me see it all a lot better, and I can’t do the fancy projecting thing like some people,” he explained, his cheeks flushing the way they often did when he talked about his art. “And it’s a lot to keep track of, so I started sorting it into different categories.”
“Does that mean all of these are filled with memories?” Sophie asked, wondering when he’d found the time to do so many drawings—and why he hadn’t told her what he was up to or asked her to help.
“Yeah, but they’re not full or anything—at least not yet. And it’s not all stuff I’ve recovered. I’ve been logging everything, trying to arrange it in order, hoping it’ll help me find the gaps, so I can see where to focus. But it’s a lot to work through. You know how it is with a photographic memory.…”
She did.
She also knew how it felt to have someone mess with her head. In fact, she still hadn’t found all the snippets of information that the Black Swan had hidden in her brain to prepare her to be the moonlark—nor had she filled in one of the blank spots that Mr. Forkle created when he erased the memory of her first allergy attack.
“Do the colors of the journals mean something?” she asked.
His cheeks flushed even brighter. “Kinda. I use the silver one for anything that feels important, since that’s the same color as the last elite level. Green is hard stuff, since we wear it at plantings. Brown is happy stuff, since… I don’t know. It was the one I had left.”
He noticeably didn’t explain the gold. And Sophie was pretty sure she could guess the reason.
Before she and Fitz had tried to help Keefe recover more shattered memories, Tiergan had taught Keefe a trick to mark the things he didn’t want them to look at while they were inside his mind. And Keefe had gilded all of his secret memories—which made Sophie very tempted to grab the gold journal and teleport away before he could catch her.
Somehow she found the willpower to resist.
Keefe glanced at the gold notebook, like he suspected what she’d been thinking. But he said nothing, instead going back to flipping through the silver one. And after a few more pages, he paused, pressing the book against his chest to hide what he was looking at. “Okay. Before I show you this, I swear I was going to tell you about it. I just… wanted to make a little more progress on my own first—which you do all the time, so please don’t go all Foster Rage on me.”
Sophie crossed her arms, not feeling ready to make any promises.
“You’ve also been super busy lately,” he reminded her. “And…”
“And what?” she asked when he didn’t finish.
“Never mind. All that matters is: I haven’t done anything dangerous. I’ve just been doing the mental exercises Tiergan taught me.”
“So you haven’t been taking fathomlethes?” she pressed, sighing when Keefe looked away guiltily. “Ugh. You know those things are super unreliable.”
They’d also made him cover the walls of his room at one of the Black Swan’s hideouts in tiny scribbled-on scraps of paper like a serial killer’s lair—which explained the abundance of drawings he’d managed to get done so quickly.
The rare river pearls were known for causing frenzied dreams and flashbacks.
“I was careful,” he promised.
“And it was hilarious,” Ro added. “One night he got out of bed and started doing a wiggle dance in his sleep and singing about Prattles pins. And another time he decided he was a baby alicorn and dropped to his hands and knees and galloped all over the house, whinnying. Greatest thing I’ve ever seen.”
Sandor choked back a laugh—but Sophie only felt more worried.
“It was worth it,” Keefe assured her, his face now brighter than Ro’s hair. “It helped me remember this.”
He flipped the silver notebook over and held out a photo-realistic drawing of…
A really nerdy-looking guy.
Between the tweed blazer and the bow tie and the ruddy cheeks and the wild hair, he looked like some sort of professor stereotype. All he was missing
was a pair of thick spectacles and…
“He’s human,” Sophie realized, focusing on the man’s deep brown eyes.
She’d gotten so used to being surrounded by blue-eyed elves that it was almost jarring to see someone with the same eye color as her—and someone with deep smile lines and strands of gray peppered through his messy red hair.
The elves remained ageless after they became adults. Only their ears changed with time, growing points along the tops after a few thousand years.
“Look at what he’s holding,” Keefe told her, pointing to the man’s left hand, which held an envelope sealed with a symbol they’d only seen one other time: two crescents forming a loose circle around a glowing star.
“That’s the letter your mom gave you,” Sophie murmured.
“Yep. Looks like I didn’t follow Mommy’s delivery instructions as strictly as she wanted me to.”
“Which surprises no one,” Ro jumped in.
“Of course not,” Keefe agreed, a hint of his smirk returning. “But now we know for sure that I did deliver the letter. And I saw the guy she was contacting. And now that I know what he looks like? I can track him down again and find out what Mommy Dearest wanted from him.”
FOUR
BUT… YOU KNOW HOW MANY humans there are in London, right?” Sophie had to ask, even though she hated being the hope crusher. “It’s a huge city. Like, millions and millions of people.”
And the man that Keefe had drawn was a pretty generic-looking British guy—from his bright ginger hair down to the elbow patches on his blazer. There were probably ten men on every block who looked similar to him—not that wandering the zillions of London streets trying to find someone more unique would honestly be much easier.
“That’s where Dex comes in,” Keefe said, snapping the silver notebook shut with a smug grin. “I did some research—which, uh, don’t tell the Forklenator about, by the way. I’ll never hear the end of it if he finds out—and it turns out, London has lots of surveillance cameras. So Dex is going to hack into their system and set it up to search for anyone who looks like my drawing. He says the art is detailed enough that he should be able to find an exact match—and it’ll tell him which camera caught the image, so we’ll know right where the guy is. All Dex needs is a few minutes with one of their computers so he can do his thing, and then we just sit back and wait for the alerts to go off.”
Sophie wanted to point out that they were assuming the guy was still living in London, and he could’ve easily moved away in the years that had passed. But her brain was too busy getting stuck on something that was probably way less important.
“You’ve been working on this with Dex?”
She managed to leave off the “without me.” But the unspoken words still felt like they were staring them down, demanding to be acknowledged.
Keefe tapped his fingers against the spine of the silver notebook. “Well… I needed a Technopath. And Dex is the best.”
“He is,” Sophie agreed.
He was also her best friend.
And she knew it wasn’t fair to feel left out after all the times she’d chosen to hide what she was working on from everybody. But that didn’t stop a piece of her heart from turning very prickly.
“I was going to tell you,” Keefe assured her.
“When?”
“Soon.”
That didn’t feel like a good enough answer—and Keefe must’ve known it, because he reminded her again, “You’ve been super busy. I haven’t seen you in over a week.”
“Well, I would’ve been here if you’d told me what you were doing! And if Dex has to go to London, you’re going to need me to teleport him there.”
Sandor cleared his throat.
“We’ll figure out how to bring you along if we have to,” she promised.
“You will,” Sandor agreed. “There is no ‘if.’ ”
“And that’s what we were already planning on,” Keefe told her, which didn’t make Sophie feel any better. If anything, it kinda proved that they’d been waiting until they had to clue her in.
“It also would’ve been way faster if you’d let me project your memories for you,” she pointed out, feeling more tempted than ever to grab the gold notebook and steal a good long look at everything he was hiding.
She snatched the brown one instead.
Keefe cringed as she flipped to the first carefully sketched memory—but didn’t try to stop her.
He also didn’t offer to let her start helping him now that she knew what he was working on, she noticed—but then she didn’t care anymore, because his art was even more amazing than she’d expected. He’d used a medium she didn’t recognize—not paint, but the colors were too vibrant for pencil, and the details seemed to shift with the way the light hit the paper. It felt like she was actually watching Keefe sneak through the grounds of Foxfire at night, carrying a wiggling green creature, and playing tackle bramble with Fitz while Biana cheered them on, and sitting with all of the Vackers, gazing at the colorful flames of an aurenflare. The drawing after that showed Lord Cassius covered in some sort of thick, sticky slime. And the rest of the pages seemed to be blank, save for a barely started pencil sketch toward the middle of the notebook, where the bodies had only been vaguely blocked out. It was impossible to tell who the figures were, but the memory looked like it might have taken place in Keefe’s favorite ditching spot at Foxfire.
“I haven’t spent as much time on my happy memories,” Keefe explained quietly, “since they never have my mom in them, so they’re not as important, you know?”
The raw truth in those words softened some of the prickles in Sophie’s chest. And she was about to hand back the notebook when a sketch hidden near the end caught her attention—a drawing she was surprised to recognize herself in.
She sat with Keefe on the staircase at Havenfield, the light from the chandelier forming a soft halo around her as she leaned toward him, clinging to his hand while he turned away, his eyes slightly watery. It didn’t look like a happy scene, and it took her a second to realize she was seeing the moment she’d told him what little she’d learned from Fintan about Keefe’s shattered London memory. But underneath the sketch, in neat, bold letters, he’d written the words she remembered telling him that day:
Lots of people care about you, Keefe.
“We do,” she said quietly. “And we can help if you let us. I can help.
Keefe cleared his throat. “I know.”
“Then why are you keeping me away?”
He took the brown notebook from her and added it back to the pile with the green and gold. “I’m not. It’s just…”
“That’s not an answer,” she pointed out when he didn’t continue. “And that’s the second time you’ve stopped yourself from telling me something.”
“Is it?”
“Yep—and don’t even try the whole answering-questions-with-questions thing on me.”
He tore a hand through his hair. “It’s not a big deal.”
“Seems like it is, if it’s making you not trust me.”
“I never said I don’t trust you.”
“You didn’t have to. It’s pretty obvious.”
Ro clicked her tongue. “Hmm. This sounds a lot like something I warned you would happen, doesn’t it, Hunkyhair?”
Keefe shot her a withering glare before turning back to Sophie. “I do trust you. I’m just…”
His voice trailed off, and the prickliness in Sophie’s heart came back with a vengeance. “Please tell me what’s wrong. Did I do something, or say something, or…?”
Keefe dragged a hand down his face, making a sound that would probably be best described as “frustrated ferret.” “It’s not you. I’m just… trying to do the right thing.”
“What does that mean?” She glanced at Ro for translation when Keefe stayed silent.
“Don’t look at me,” Ro told her. “I’ve never understood it.”
Keefe sank onto the bed, making more ferret noises. “
It means… it’s different now, you know?”
“Not really,” Sophie admitted.
Unless he meant… Fitz.
Or her and Fitz.
That was the only thing that was different.
But it also wasn’t.
He sighed. “You’re going to make me say it, aren’t you?”
“I think you have to,” she admitted. “Because I don’t really get what would be wrong.”
Ro giggled. “The adorable obliviousness strikes again!”
Keefe rolled his eyes and tugged on the hem of his tunic—which was still inside out, Sophie realized. “Fine. Now that you and Fitz are dating—”
“We’re not,” she interrupted.
“I know, I know—not officially. But come on, Foster. You guys are totally a ‘thing.’ Fitz told me the whole sappy story about his big confession. And yours.” He kicked one of his shoes across the room.
“That’s ten minutes of my life I’ll never get back,” Ro added as Sophie’s cheeks reached nuclear levels of heat. “Though I did enjoy the part where you bailed on Pretty Boy right before all the smooching.”
“I didn’t bail on him,” Sophie mumbled, refusing to look at anybody. “Silveny went into labor, and we had to go save her and the babies.”
“Don’t you just hate when that happens?” Ro teased. “And that doesn’t explain why you and Swoony Boy still haven’t…” She puckered her lips and made horrifyingly loud kissy sounds. “Or have you?”
They… hadn’t—but no way was Sophie answering that question. “I still don’t get why any of this means I can’t help with your memories.”
A rhythmic thumping sound followed.
Maybe Keefe kicking the bed?
Or banging his head against the wall?
Sophie was far too busy studying the grains of sand in the rug to check.
“It’s just… now that you guys are together,” he eventually said, making her jump a little, “I figured it might be a bad idea for you and me to work on such a time-consuming project—especially since Fitz is obsessed with finding Alvar right now, so he won’t want to help.”
Legacy (Keeper of the Lost Cities Book 8) Page 7