Legacy (Keeper of the Lost Cities #8) - Shannon Messenger Page 0,110

did to reset your brain clearly went awry.”

“Clearly,” Sophie muttered, “considering I almost died.”

“Yes, you did. I still have nightmares about it sometimes.” He stared at his hands, wringing his fingers back and forth. “It was me with you that day, in case you were wondering. Not my twin brother. It’s why I was chosen to be the one to reset your abilities the second time—everyone felt I had ‘experience’ with the situation—though truthfully, both times I’ve never felt so out of my depth or terrified in all of my life.” He cleared his throat again. “That first time, when I heard the screaming and saw what was happening, I hailed Livvy for help immediately. Then I carried you and your sister into my house, hoping no one else in the neighborhood had noticed anything. By the time Livvy got there, I’d already erased both of your memories—but of course, I had to erase another from your sister when her sedative wore off not long after Livvy’s arrival. I hadn’t wanted to overdo how much I gave her, considering she was so small and had just been through such an exhausting trauma. But I clearly underestimated—the first of many mistakes I made that day.”

“I’m assuming the second mistake was when you gave me limbium?” Sophie guessed.

“Actually, that was the third. The second was before Livvy came up with the idea of limbium. I grew impatient and gave you a half dozen other medicines I thought might help, and ended up making you vomit all over yourself.”

Sophie cringed. “This just keeps getting better and better.”

“That was my thought too. And then we gave you the limbium, and I got to discover exactly how dire things could truly get. You started making a horrible sound as your airway closed off, unlike anything I’d ever heard before, and then your whole body was convulsing and I just… froze. If Livvy hadn’t been there, I don’t know what would’ve happened. I might’ve lost you. She was the one who kept you breathing and suggested we rush you to the nearest human hospital. Her reasoning was flawed—though we didn’t know it at the time. She suspected our treatments were negatively reacting with some human toxin or virus that you’d been exposed to, which sounded logical enough. And it got you to the place that saved your life, which was all that mattered. Then Livvy had to go, so no one could wonder who she was or how she knew you, and your human parents arrived, and I just sat there, watching you hooked up to those horrible machines, hoping nothing irreparable had happened. And when you woke up…”

His voice choked off, and he dragged a hand down his face, lingering on his eyes.

She couldn’t tell if that meant he was crying.

Part of her was glad she couldn’t tell—her world made so much more sense when Mr. Forkle was a strong, reliable presence, even if his stubbornness drove her crazy at times.

“When you woke up,” Mr. Forkle continued, his voice steadier this time, “it felt like one of those ‘miracles’ that humans are always going on about. You were you. Your inflicting had been switched back off, and everything else seemed fine. And you and your sister both had no idea what had happened between you.”

“Wait,” Sophie had to interrupt. “Aren’t you always saying that abilities can’t be switched off once they’ve been triggered?”

“For ordinary elves, yes,” Mr. Forkle agreed.

Sophie groaned, knowing this was going to lead to another “let me explain how very weird you are” speech.

And sure enough, he told her, “In your case, I made your genes slightly more flexible in certain ways. That way, if something we’d planned needed adjusting, we’d have the option of doing so—which has been both an advantage and a disadvantage. I often wonder if that flexibility is the reason we’ve had to reset things in your mind.”

He tilted his head and sighed in a way that seemed to say, It’s so challenging experimenting on someone. Which definitely helped Sophie choke back any fuzzy feelings she might’ve been fighting when she’d thought he was crying.

“Anyway,” Mr. Forkle said, moving the conversation back to what they’d been discussing. “I swore I would be a thousand times more vigilant from that moment on to ensure that nothing like that ever happened to you again, and yet, somehow I still managed to misunderstand the role that the limbium had played in your allergy until it happened again. And I didn’t anticipate