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Corin paused at the door to look back at Prudence. All throughout the tour of Bloodstone Antiquities, Angela’s words from the car kept needling their way into his thoughts. “You’re allowed to fall in love.”

“Corin?” Ezekiel whispered when Corin stopped following.

“Hmm?” Corin’s head jerked to his large companion. “Right, sorry. Please proceed.”

Ezekiel glanced between Corin and Prudence and grinned. “This shouldn’t take too long.” He took out his keys and unlocked the storage room, stepped in for a moment, then came out carrying a protective brown case with a luggage handle. Locking the storage room behind him, he gestured for Corin to follow him upstairs.

On the third floor, they passed a meeting room. The tea and pastries Ezekiel had promised were set out for the others on a large oval-shaped mahogany conference table surrounded by eight black swivel chairs. Ezekiel led Corin further down the hall and ushered him into his office, closing the door behind them.

Corin stood off to the side as Ezekiel set the case on his desk and unlatched it. “Have you had any other peculiar … memories that aren’t your own, as you described it, around this item since you told us about it?”

“No. I have examined the object a couple of times since then, but nothing seems to happen.” Ezekiel lifted the lid and presented the rust-covered sword to Corin, stepping aside and crossing his hands behind him. “So what do you think? Is there something supernatural here, or am I just imagining things?”

Corin stepped up to the case and peered at the object. “When you touched it, were you wearing your gloves?”

“Yes, but I have tried touching it again without gloves to see if anything would happen. I don’t think direct contact is needed.”

Corin leaned his cane against the desk and held his hands out toward the sword. “May I pick it up?”

“I suppose, but just be careful. It’s still an antique, and I don’t know how fragile it is.”

Corin gently lifted the sword out of the case and waited to see if anything would happen. “Hmm. Well, I’m not receiving any vision like you described.” He tilted the handle up to get a better look at the guard of the sword’s hilt, the metal shaved and worked into the visage of a horned serpent. “It’s difficult to see anything noteworthy through all this rust, but I think the hilt may be gold.”

“It was definitely gold in my vision. And this here”—he pointed to the large, rounded inlay on the pommel—“appeared to be some sort of large red opal, though you can’t tell with all the lime covering it.”

Corin peered closer at the pommel. “A red opal?” He envisioned the golden hilt with the rust removed—imagined the red jewel hidden beneath the oxidized residue. Corin recalled seeing a sword similar to this weapon once.

No, not similar. He saw a sword that looked exactly like this one.

No, he saw this exact sword, brandished by a man around the age of twenty. He had auburn hair and wore medieval clothing with scale armor. He glared at Corin, his jade-green eyes filled with rage. It was daytime, sunlight filtering through the forest canopy above them. Corin was on the ground flat on his back, looking up at this auburn-haired youth as he held the sword to Corin’s throat. The young man shouted at him in a language Corin didn’t speak, but he still knew the meaning of the words. “This is your last chance, Beli! Submit!”

Corin looked up at Ezekiel in bewilderment, coming out of the memory. “I … I think I just experienced what you did. I remembered something that’s never happened to me.” He nodded to the sword in his hands. “There was a young man, and he was holding this sword. He … Ezekiel, read my thoughts.”

Ezekiel raised an eyebrow. “What?”

“I want you to know exactly what I saw in my vision, so just read my surface thoughts.”

Ezekiel touched Corin’s shoulder and focused for a moment. He frowned. “Who the bloody hell is Beli? Wait, is that your name?”

Corin blinked. “Quoi?”

“You told me Corin Lacroix is an alias. Is Beli your real name?”

Corin rolled his eyes. “No, I do not know who Beli is.” He set the sword back in its protective case and folded his arms. “You were right. This sword isn’t normal.”

“To be fair, neither are we.” Ezekiel stroked his beard. “All right, we both experienced someone else’s memories after handling the sword. The green-eyed fellow in your memory referred to that person as Beli, so we at least now know the name of the sword’s original owner.”

“Do we? You’re assuming all these memories came from Beli, but he wasn’t the one holding the sword in my vision. The green-eyed young man was.” Corin took up his cane and paced the room. “It’s possible the sword is showing us memories from multiple people. If the sword belonged to Green Eyes—I don’t know what else to call him—maybe you received his memory while I received Beli’s. Or perhaps your vision didn’t come from either Beli or Green Eyes, but from a third individual altogether. Or if these are all Beli’s memories, maybe Green Eyes held the sword in my vision because he’d taken it from Beli.”

Ezekiel sighed. “I see your point. We don’t have enough contextual information to make any assumptions.”

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