Hunting Memories

Prologue SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA: Spring 2008

Rose de Spenser sat at an antique desk with her pen poised above a sheet of pristine stationery. Night lights from Chinatown glinted through her bedroom window as she stared outside. town glinted through her bedroom window as she stared

She knew what she had to do, but fear and uncertainty kept her pen in midair.

"Don't do it." A voice came from behind her. "You'll give us away."

"I have to," she whispered. "We cannot go on like this." Then she turned partway in her chair, facing inside the room.

Her nephew stood in the doorway. His form was transparent as always, so she could see out into the living room behind him. Though long dead, he looked eternally seventeen years old, his brown hair hanging to his shoulders. He wore the same blue-and-yellow Scottish plaid draped across his shoulder and held by a belt over the black breeches he had died in. The knife sheath at his hip was empty. After all these years with her in America, he'd never lost his accent.

"The world has shifted, Seamus," she said, "and if we do not act now, we'll lose our chance."

He looked at the wall and did not respond. But he must have known she was right.

What choice did they have? To continue rotting away in this apartment for another hundred years? To leave all the others, the lost ones in hiding, to rot away for another hundred years?

No.

Her attempt to convince him somehow strengthened her own resolution, and she turned back to the desk, this time lowering her pen to the sheet of paper. She wrote:

She folded the sheet and placed it inside an ivory envelope, addressing it carefully:

She stood up and walked to the door. Seamus didn't move, but she had never once walked through him.

"Where are you going?" he asked.

"Downstairs. To mail it."

She could see the pain on his face, the worry for her, but she just stood there quietly, waiting. After a long moment, he stepped aside.