The Memory Painter

“Because it wasn’t.”

All of a sudden Conrad grabbed his sword and lunged at her with lightning speed. Linz flinched, but she wasn’t the target—his blade blocked the sword that was slicing through the air behind her.

Linz whirled around to find Finn at her back. If her father hadn’t stopped him, she’d be dead. In one deft move, Conrad knocked the sword from Finn’s hand and it flew across the room.

He held his sword to Finn’s neck and said, “I always wondered if it was you who turned them against me. Now I know. Thank you for the journals. They were very enlightening.”

Conrad stepped back and drove the tip of his blade into the floorboards, so that it stood upright. He would no longer fight. He spoke to Finn in ancient Egyptian. “Seth. I see you finally crawled out from your rat hole to face me.”

With a twisted smile, Finn gave a mocking bow. “Father.”

Linz stood frozen in shock. Seth? Conrad was Ramses? She peered into the depths of his eyes and saw it was true. “Father?” she asked in their ancient tongue.

Conrad’s eyes grew wide. He whispered, “Thoth? You’ve remembered?”

She nodded and turned to face Finn and all the remaining pieces of the puzzle fell into place. Linz needed to see his eyes, but he was still wearing his tinted eyeglasses—she needed to know for sure.

“Take off your glasses,” she ordered. “Look at me.”

Finn gave her a self-depreciating grin, and Linz caught a glimpse of the Finn that Diana had loved like a brother. “It’s not pretty,” he warned.

She gasped when he removed them.

Finn had begun wearing sunglasses after he had started to remember, but it was now clear the migraines were a lie. The dark lenses had veiled the truth. The eyes were windows to the soul, and Finn had not wanted anyone to see his. They were hideous—livid, bulging, marred with broken veins. His once beautiful green irises were now a muddy violet. Linz could see the hatred of Septimus, d’Anthès, Kira, Seth—so many enemies from her past—but she could also see Finn, in pain, suffocating under the weight of his own soul. “Finn?”

“Finn’s gone,” he said. “I almost kidnapped you both that first night you came to visit me. It’s so easy to hide a sedative in tea. But then I found out who you were—Daddy’s little girl. I knew Conrad would come after me if you disappeared. It’s a shame I hesitated. It would have saved me so much trouble.”

Linz pointed the tip of her sword at Finn’s neck, forcing him up against the wall. “You convinced us that Conrad was Kira and Septimus so we would fear him. But he wasn’t. You turned us against him … you knew Conrad was Ramses and that he wanted to help Michael remember.” She thought back to the moments before the lab explosion. “You caused the gas leak … you were willing to kill yourself in the process. You wanted to stop us that much.”

Finn scoffed and let out a maniacal laugh. “I only wanted to kill him—the gas exploded before it was meant to. I remembered Seth at the same time as Conrad, and I couldn’t have them reunited. I would have loved to have extracted the Guardian’s knowledge from Michael’s mind, but I didn’t know how to, yet. That has taken me many years to perfect. So you see, I couldn’t let him remember. He had to die. Conrad unknowingly made it quite easy.”

It drove Linz mad to realize that, even now, Finn had tried to turn them against her father—and had almost succeeded. If her father hadn’t tried to protect Bryan and she hadn’t remembered the past, their present lives would have ended no differently.

Conrad tried to calm her. “Lindsey, put the sword down. You cannot have his death on your hands.”

But her psyche was battling with too many alien emotions. She spoke in ancient Egyptian. “He destroyed our world, Father. You died before you could see … we’ve lived in darkness ever since.” She pressed the blade into Finn’s skin, accusing him. “You put an arrow into my back. But Ammon healed me. I did not die. I lived a long life wandering the world, finding a place to hide the book that bore my name.”

Finn gasped in astonishment. “The Book of Thoth exists?”