He was always better at swimming than I was. Quick and confident, even when we were little. Whenever he joined my family at our cabin or I went on lake trips with the Belmontes, he would be gone in an instant, swimming fast and far, all the way to the buoys, while I was still standing near the shore. I would linger there, watching the flash of the minnows darting around me. And then he would come back. He would go out, touch the buoy, and come back.

“Okay, are you going to say it, or am I?” Tink asked, leaning back on her hands.

Cautiously, keeping my eyes on the lake, I said, “Say what?”

She sighed, gesturing toward the lake. “Something is seriously going on with him.”

I inched forward on my towel, digging my toes into the sand. I hadn’t told Tink the truth about Gideon. And never planned to. “I think he still misses Brooke,” I said.

Gideon had had a crush on Brooke Oliver for years, as long as I’d even known him. And though I wasn’t certain how much of that was Verrick’s fevered obsession with the Remnant, and how much of it was genuine, Gideon hadn’t taken her absence well. She had occupied so much of his mind for so long, her loss left a gap. A sudden blank space to be tiptoed around.

Tink wasn’t convinced. She was frowning toward the water. “But you’d think he’d get past that eventually. It’s been months, and he’s getting worse.”

“Just because he doesn’t get over someone in a week like you do doesn’t mean he’s broken.”

She turned toward me, squinting against the bright sun. “I’m going to take this moment to point out how bitchy that statement was. Luckily for you, I am unoffended.”

“Sorry,” I said, meaning it. “That was uncalled for.”

“Accepted. So now we can turn our attention to the problem at hand. Pining solves nothing. Maybe we should find him a girlfriend.”

“Because that’s worked so well in the past.”

Tink had tried to fling girls at him before, with varying degrees of success. Gideon was too friendly and polite to outright rebuff anyone, but sooner or later they’d all been gently rejected. Brooke had remained the sole source of his hope.

“He was still fixating on Brooke.” She paused, running her finger along the circles Gideon had drawn in the sand. “You know, I’m not even sure it’s about her, though. It started before then. You really didn’t notice?”

“I noticed,” I admitted, somewhat surprised she had. As far as I knew, Gideon hadn’t discussed his nightmares with her—and Tink had had her own problems to deal with at the time. Like being called as a Guardian.

But apparently Tink was more observant than I realized, because she chewed her lip and said, “I think it began when your cousin took him to Harlow Tower.”

It had, but not for the reason she assumed. “It was a pretty traumatic experience,” I hedged. I saw him lying at Iris’s feet, snow in his hair. “If that’s what’s upsetting him, there’s not a lot we can do about it.”

“You don’t think it has something to do with her—with Iris coming back?”

I hunched my shoulders. “How would he know? I didn’t tell him. Did you?”

“No…I don’t know. But he has gotten worse. It’s not just him quitting baseball. It’s like—he’s afraid of something.”

I thought of that surge of panic I’d felt from him the day of the baseball game. The sweat beading his brow. He wasn’t afraid of something. He was afraid of himself. And there wasn’t any cure for that.

“So are you,” I told Tink. “So am I. Demons, remember?” I gave an exaggerated shudder.

She sighed again. “I suppose therapy is out, since he can’t really discuss demons. Maybe we could…I don’t know, hire a hypnotist. Get him to forget it.”

“Right. Repression is definitely the answer here.”

“Hey, I am just trying to help.”

“I don’t think a hypnotist is going to do the trick.”

“Fine. Then we’re back to finding him a girlfriend.”

While Tink went through a list of candidates, counting them out on her fingers, my mind strayed.

He’s getting worse.

Tink wasn’t wrong, as much as I wanted to deny it.

But maybe she wasn’t wrong about the solution, either.

Not hypnotism. Not getting him to forget what had happened, exactly. But maybe there was a way to reverse the damage.

I glanced down at my wrist, the tiny notch of a scar just under my palm.

It went back to Iris. It went back to the knife in my hand, five small cuts. We hadn’t unsealed Verrick, but the process had been started. I had felt him stirring there, poised at the very edge of consciousness, fighting to awaken. I had felt his eyes begin to open. He was sleeping still, but it wasn’t a heavy slumber. He was worming his way through the cracks, clawing them wider. But if my blood could be used to unseal him, maybe the opposite was true as well. Maybe he could be locked away again. Permanently.

I just needed to figure out how.

If I wanted information on sealing, there was only one place to go: the Kin elders.

That was something of an unsettling prospect. I didn’t know the elders well, and I would have preferred to keep it that way. Tink was terrified of them, and I didn’t blame her. You could feel their eyes whenever their gazes landed on you, and the looks they gave were so sharp, it felt as though they could see right under your skin and dissect you. I’d never felt at ease in their presence.

Not that I’d seen much of them. They mostly chose to keep to themselves. Esther was in charge of the day-to-day management of the Kin, and the elders were only consulted on matters deemed of high importance—or, as Tink had discovered, used to frighten reluctant Guardians into obedience. What they did with the rest of their time, I had no idea. I only hoped it didn’t involve ritual sacrifices.

But if I wanted to help Gideon, I would need to brave a meeting. And they were marginally less intimidating when encountered separately¸ so on Friday morning I called Sonja Reimes, the least alarming of the trio, and asked if I could stop by her house.

I’d spent the night coming up with a plan of what to say. A sequence of lies, really. I was curious, I would tell her—because of my father, and because of Iris. I simply wanted to know details of the sealing. What was involved, how it was done. For my own peace of mind, I would say. And hope her shrewd perception didn’t cut through to the truth.

I took Mom’s car and drove across town, parking a short distance down the road and making my slow way up toward her house as I tried to calm my shaky nerves.

But as I neared her door, I hesitated.

I thought of my father.

Seventeen years ago, he had become linked to Verrick, their lives—and their blood—bound inextricably. Sealing one had meant sealing the other. And so my father had given up everything in order to stop Verrick. He’d gone to the sealing willingly.

I thought of how he had looked when I’d met him. His image was fixed in my memory: a tall man, near forty, with dark hair that curled like mine and a dotting of freckles on the crooked bridge of his nose. I recalled how I had stood there before him, unable to speak. How the seconds had ticked past, and no flicker of awareness had entered his eyes, no trace of the boy he’d once been had shown in his expression. His voice had been kind but flat, empty of emotion. And though I’d reached out with my Knowing, the only sense I’d gotten from him had been a faint confusion, distant and ambiguous.

I wasn’t certain I’d be able to reverse whatever aspect of Verrick’s unsealing Iris had begun six months ago, but now another voice whispered into my thoughts. They were tied to each other still.