The Forgotten Locket Read Online Free

compulsion—the place where the music didn’t quite line up—and pushed. I felt it bend, weakening to the shattering point. I could feel my freedom returning, like a limb slowly waking up from numbness. I shook my head, my body prickling with pins and needles. I pushed harder, shoving with everything in me, until it snapped under the pressure and I fell to my knees.
     
    “My memories are my own,” I ground out through gritted teeth. “I don’t have to tell you anything.”
     
    Zo smiled, but not kindly, and paced closer to me. The music cut off as he crouched down by my side. “Why are you fighting so hard? You’re only making it worse for yourself.” He smoothed back a curl of my hair, his fingers lingering on my cheek. They were slick with sweat and warm from the heat of the guitar strings. “Don’t push me, Abby. You won’t like what comes next.”
     
    I jerked away from his touch, my eyes narrowed. “Nothing I say or do is going to stop you from doing whatever it is you have planned. We both know that. So why do you keep pretending you care what happens to me? It just makes you look stupid.”
     
    Zo’s body stilled. The expression on his face turned as flat as the landscape around us, but I could see the anger moving behind his eyes. The air surrounding him turned cold, thin and pointed as fractured ice.
     
    “I wanted to do this gently, effortlessly. But now . . .” He stood up, towering over me, his eyes dark and hard as obsidian. His tone was as sharp. “I can’t promise that you won’t feel pain. And I can’t say that it won’t make me happy if you do.”
     
    He stepped back, his hand curling around the neck of the guitar like it was my throat.
     
    The music he unleashed hit me all at once. A wall of noise and sound overwhelmed my senses, feathering my vision with black, coating my skin with a slick film.
     
    Memories stretched in my mind, elongating into tight, spiraling threads woven with each other into a vast, colorful, living tapestry of my life. The pictures thrummed with power, each one passing through my mind in a blur.
     
    First there were the memories Zo had summoned: V, dying in front of the black hourglass door I had asked him to build. Dante, the darkness from between the doors still clinging to his lean body and his eyes weeping blood. Leo, turning to protect his brother, his sad eyes watching me walk away.
     
    The music intensified. Zo hunched over the strings, his fingers striking as fast as lightning.
     
    Other memories: Natalie, smiling while I took a picture to save her. Valerie, handing me an invisible key, telling me stories with a heart of truth.
     
    Sweat lined Zo’s brow, a drop sliding down past his closed eyes.
     
    Painful memories: Jason, leaning close for a kiss. Mom and Dad, dancing in the kitchen when they didn’t think I was watching. Hannah, painting her toenails and singing along to a song playing in her headphones.
     
    Conflicting memories: Jason, still in love with me when he should have been with Natalie. Jason’s house occupied by a different family. My parents, divorced and bitter. Hannah, unborn and unremembered. They had been part of my life—they were still part of my life—and yet, Zo had managed to redirect the river and change them, erase them. Saving them was one of the reasons I had chosen to pass through the time machine door. I tried to hold on to my memories, tried to make them stay.
     
    The river rushed by; I could almost hear the sound of time passing, could almost feel time slipping through my fingers like water.
     
    The memories started to fray along the edges, unraveling into individual threads instead of the taut tapestry they had once formed. And as each thread snapped off, torn out of me by Zo’s music, a thin tendril of darkness took its place, an emptiness that felt like a scream and sounded like a fading echo.
     
    I knew Zo was a liar. I knew it. And yet, in this he had told me the truth.
     
    It hurt.
     
    A