A reminder of where we left things in The Haunting, last chapter:

"Felicity," Ray began, "I really am sorry if I've made you uncomfortable. It was the very last thing I wanted to do, I promise." He took another step, until we were close enough to touch. He reached out. A wave of fear ran through me; I backed away.

He didn't stop, though.

Instead, his hand closed around my arm with surprising strength.

"Let go," I said, through the rush of voices and images, smells and tastes and sensations so strong that they threatened to swamp me where I stood. He didn't let go, though. Instead, he took hold of my other arm, his eyes on mine.

"Ray!" Oliver shouted.

"I need to know what you're seeing," Ray said to me. You're mine, Rose, the old Ray said.Now and forever.A little girl screamed. I smelled the surf, felt the wind in my hair. The present disappeared, in the blink of an eye.

Chapter 10

I can't stay here, Ray, Rose pleaded. She was sixteen. I don't know how I knew that – I just did. They'll never approve of you, and Daddy will never let me go. Not when he's convinced he can't paint without me.

You're his daughter, Ray replied viciously. They were outside, on a peak overlooking the water. He can't hold you prisoner, make you carry the weight of his art on your shoulders.

I just want to go away. She was crying, despair all but choking the air from my lungs. The paintings Daddy sold – men look at me like they know me, like they've seen some piece of my soul.

Ray gathered her in his arms, and I felt his warmth and Rose's love until suddenly, in an instant, the vision was gone.

In the next second, I was back in the bar - the 1920s bar, held down with a monster looming above me and Ray fighting, desperate to get to me. I could smell the sweat and whiskey of the man above me, and thrashed harder when I felt others in the room help pry my legs apart.

I struck out blindly, trying to escape the terror living inside my head. And then, as suddenly as they visions had started, they just…stopped. I opened my eyes to find Oliver beside me and Ray on the floor, hand to his face as blood coursed from his nose.

"You're okay, Felicity," Oliver said, his voice hoarse. The room spun, and it was pretty clear at that point that he was wrong.

I was anything but okay.

As if to confirm that theory, I stumbled where I stood, the world tilting dangerously. My vision tunneled, my breath coming in gasps. I was vaguely aware of Oliver catching me before I hit the floor - and then, there was nothing.

"What the hell were you thinking?" Oliver demanded in a whispered growl. Time had passed, but I had no idea how much. I was lying down, a blanket over me and my head pounding. I kept my eyes shut tight, not ready to let him and Ray know I was among the living once more. "You could have killed her—"

"I wasn't going to kill her," Ray said. "You need to stop treating her with kid gloves, though, or she will wind up dead. She's living on borrowed time as it is. You know that."

"What about a protection spell?" Oliver asked. My mind stumbled on that, but I fought not to react. As long as they thought I was still out, maybe I would actually get some answers.

"Willa's already got every protection spell in the book working now," Ray said. "They're no match against Dahrk's magic, you know that. She's twenty-two – that's two years longer than any of them were supposed to live. Now that Dahrk knows she's here, though, her only chance at survival is Rose."

"But you can't just steamroll her into accessing those memories," Oliver protested. "She isn't Rose—"

"You think I don't know that?" Ray all but snarled, the pleasant façade gone. "I'm well aware that she isn't Rose Merlyn – but Rose is in there."

A warm, wet tongue on my face – Baron's, obviously – made feigning unconsciousness any longer impossible. I pushed the dog away and risked opening my eyes.

I was on a butter-soft leather sofa in Ray's living room, sunlight blinding me. Ray was seated in a leather armchair opposite me, his nose puffy and a trickle of blood trailing down one nostril. Oliver stood, tension radiating off him.

"Felicity—" Ray began. I stopped him with a glare.

"Don't. Whatever you were going to say, save it." I turned to Oliver, still seething. "You either. Neither of you say a word." I struggled to my feet, my stomach swooping and swirling every step of the way.

"Give yourself a minute," Oliver said.

I closed my eyes and clutched the arm of the sofa for support. "I'm going home."

"I'll walk you," Oliver said.

"Not home as in the Merlyn estate, you jerk," I said coldly. My eyes swam with tears. She's living on borrowed time as it is. That's what Ray had just said, wasn't it? "I'm going back to Portland. Tonight."

I managed to make my way out the door without falling and cracking my head open - though at the moment, my head already kind of felt like it was well and truly cracked. Outside, I blinked in the glare of the late-morning sun, and took a deep breath. Ray's front door opened and closed behind me, and I closed my eyes and focused on breathing.

"Were you ever going to tell me?" I asked Oliver. And it was Oliver - I knew it without looking, knew it in that bone-deep way that I know which plants will grow where, or what direction to turn for true north. Right now, I knew instinctively that Oliver was already there; he was true north.

And he had lied.

"I'm sorry," he said quietly.

"That's not an answer."

"No," he agreed. "I don't know what to say. How much did you here, between Ray and me?"

"Borrowed time, protection spells, accessing Rose's memories..."

"So all of it," he concluded, sounding miserable. I turned on him, too weak and tired to muster much fire.

"What does it all mean, though?" I asked. "How can I have the memories of an ancestor who was born over a century ago? Or the other girls?"

"That's what you see, then?" he asked cautiously, like the question might trip a landmine.

"I see all of them," I said. "Every Merlyn girl born with the butterfly birthmark - all of whom died some horrible, tragic, early death." I looked at him, searching his face. "And you brought me back for that. Does Quentin know? And Willa?"

The look on Oliver's face - pure, unadulterated guilt and self-loathing - told me that they did. I fought more useless tears, the world spinning beneath my feet.

"So, what... You all brought me here to watch me die?"

"No," Oliver said. He shook his head vigorously. "We brought you here to save you. This curse-"

I held up my hand. Forced myself to some kind of even state of mind, if there was such a thing considering what Oliver was telling me. "Hang on, okay? Start at the beginning. What curse?"

"Do you think you can walk and talk?" he asked. When I looked doubtful, he said, "I'll be right with you. I won't let you fall again, Felicity."

His eyes were soft, dark, depthless blue. Maybe I'm a fool, but I believed him.

We started out slow, but soon the cool, fresh air worked its magic and I started to feel like myself again. Or as much like myself as possible considering that I'd just learned I was doomed to die because of some mysterious ancient curse and apparently the only thing that could save me were visions that may or may not make my brain implode. Oliver was even quieter than usual, waiting to take his cue from me. We were halfway down the mountain before I could figure out which questions to ask to get things rolling.

"Who is Damian Dahrk?"

Oliver was walking beside me, on a narrow trail crusted with the last remnants of winter snow. He paused, but only for a second.

"He's a billionaire in Scotland. Inverness."

"Where Willa is from?"

"And me," Oliver said. I looked at him in surprise. "I left a long time ago, though."

"How long?" I challenged. He didn't answer, and when I glanced at him, I could tell he was trying to figure out how to frame the answer. "Okay, fine - we'll come back to that question. How does Dahrk figure into any of this? Did he curse the whole family because of something Rose did? When? And why? And how does he know I'm here now?"

Oliver stopped walking and looked at me. His expression was enough to tell me I needed to slow down.

"Right," I said. "Sorry, too many questions. I'm just having a hard time figuring out where to start."

"Understandably," he agreed. "But maybe if you just let me tell the story..."

I nodded. "Go ahead. Tell me what's happening to me."

He nodded, his gaze as serious as ever. "I'll try."

He started walking once more, and I hurried to catch up. It was ten a.m., a beautiful sunny day to be outside on the island. I let the calm of that world wash over me as Oliver started his story.

"Rose was the youngest of three children," Oliver began, "and Byron Merlyn's only daughter. she was doted on - a little spoiled according to most counts, but a bright, beautiful girl-"

"She was Byron's model in a lot of his paintings. I know they're considered masterpieces, but if you ask me they're a little creepy."

"Agreed," Oliver said. "Rose felt the same, and was looking for a way to escape. She met Raymond Palmer the First here on the island when she was fourteen and he was seventeen. Two years later, they ran away together."

None of this was surprising so far - I'd known Rose ran away, and she had clearly been with Ray in my visions when they were a little older. "Where did they go?" I asked.

"All over. The war had just ended - this was 1918 - and there was a freedom about things, a recklessness to that time that I think appealed to them both." He paused, drawing up short. I got the sense he was sifting through the story, trying to pick out the most relevant threads.

"Eventually," he finally continued, "they ended up in Europe. Ray's father had a lived a little...outside the law." I looked at Oliver sharply. Now this, I hadn't known. "As a teenager, Ray was sent to Crab's Neck to stay with his grandparents when his father went to prison-"

"For what?" I interrupted.

Oliver glanced at me. "Theft, I think. Petty stuff, but they weren't very forgiving about that kind of thing back then."

"I guess not."

You don't deserve to live this way, Rose, the old Ray - Ray Palmer the First, apparently - said. In the picture in my mind, he and Rose were in a rundown flat that smelled like garbage, a bowl of watery soup on the table and both of them in threadbare clothes. You don't have to live like this. Just one job...

"Ray followed in his father's footsteps," I said out loud. Oliver looked at me in surprise. "You saw that in the visions?"

"Just now," I said. His brow furrowed, an unspoken question between us. "Sometimes, I get whole 'episodes,'" I quirked my fingers in air quotes. "That usually happens when someone touches me."

"Does it hurt?" Oliver asked.

"Sometimes. Not always, but I usually get a headache, and I almost always lose time. I'll wake up an hour, sometimes even a day later, and all I'll remember is the vision."

"But they aren't triggered just by touch," Oliver guessed.

"No. I get flashes that can be triggered by a smell, something someone says, the place where I'm traveling... Most of the time when that happens, though, it's fast - the blink of an eye and then, poof, I'm back again."

He flashed a quick smile. "Poof, huh? Somehow I doubt it's that easy."

"It can be," I said honestly. I paused, refocusing to get us back on track. "So, Ray was a thief. And Rose was okay with that?"

"Not at first, I guess," Oliver said. "But eventually..."

What about this one? Rose asked, the vision appearing so suddenly I stumbled on the path. The forest disappeared once more. The accommodations this time were a lot more luxe than in the last vision - a hotel suite with elegant draperies at the windows and an impressive spread of food at a table overlooking what I thought might be Paris.

Rose sat at the table with a newspaper, Ray across from her. She was looking at the society pages; specifically, a black and white photo of a woman wearing an elegant gown, a glass of champagne in her hand. The caption read, "Princess Mary to visit Paris."

A royal? Ray asked. She's higher profile than we usually do.

But look at that diamond, Rose said. She indicated the necklace around the princess's neck, pushing the newspaper toward Ray.

"They started doing the jobs together," I said aloud, pulling myself from the vision.

Oliver stared at me. "These flashes that you get - can you control them? Think about a specific moment and go to that?"

"No, they're random." He looked disappointed, so I amended, "I mean - the trigger usually determines what the vision will be. So I guess if I wanted to access a particular memory, I could use a specific trigger to try and get there." I hesitated. "But I keep interrupting, just when things are getting good. Sorry. I'll try to keep from flashing you again. I mean-"

"I know what you mean, Felicity," Oliver said, a smile in his voice. He took a deep breath, and any trace of humor vanished as he continued.

The more he told, the harder it was to believe. According to Oliver, Ray and Rose became notorious jewel thieves while they were in Europe - without anyone in the States having any idea what either of them was doing. They traveled across the globe, choosing targets based mostly on Rose's whim.

"And then they met Helena Dahrk at a party in Inverness," Oliver continued. He grew distant, almost like he was back there himself. "She was...something. Beautiful, mysterious - and very powerful. I don't really know what happened between them, but for some reason Rose didn't take to her."

Something about the way he said that made me think I wasn't getting the whole story on this count.

"Maybe she was jealous," I said.

He got quiet for a second. "I couldn't say. But for whatever reason, Rose had it in for Helena. Her father was head of a powerful family in Inverness - highly feared at the time. They still are today, actually. Definitely not the kind of people you want to cross. Unfortunately, Rose didn't care. Whatever her motivation might have been, she chose Helena as their next mark."

I winced. "Crap. Bad idea."

"Very bad idea," Oliver agreed. Merlyn Manor was in view now, but Oliver stopped in the glade just outside rather than going in. He sat on a fallen log, more pensive than ever - which was saying something for Oliver. I took a seat beside him, watching as his eyes grew distant again.

"Helena had a necklace - a beautiful piece, handed down for generations. Actually, two pieces. A black opal nested in amethyst, carved in the shape of a butterfly."

I thought of the butterfly-shaped birthmark on Rose's neck - the one I had seen in the painting. My stomach tightened. "Rose had the butterfly birthmark," I said. That necklace was made for me, Ray, I heard her say, an echo through time.

"She did," Oliver said, grim now. "Like you. So, she and Ray decided taking this necklace would be their piece de resistance; the heist to end all heists."

"I'm guessing it didn't go as planned."

"No. They got the necklace, but then Rose and Ray got separated during the getaway. They each took a piece of the pendant on the necklace - Ray had the amethyst, and Rose had the black opal butterfly. The two were supposed to meet at the train station that night."

"But Rose didn't show up?" I asked.

Please don't let me die, Oliver, I remembered her saying. Except...what did Oliver have to do with any of this?

"She showed up," Oliver said. His eyes had gone dark. He stared into the middle distance, completely lost. "But no one really knows what happened after they got separated. When she got to the train station, she was wounded - stabbed, and bleeding out fast. The butterfly was gone, and Damian Dahrk was there waiting for her and Ray."

"Oh no," I whispered.

"Exactly. Ray gave up his part of the necklace immediately, but Rose didn't have the butterfly anymore, and she died before she could tell anyone what she did with it."

"What did Damian do?"

"Cursed them - the entire Merlyn family line. Every generation, another daughter bearing the butterfly would be born; every generation, she would die young, until the butterfly was returned to the Dahrk family."

"They still haven't been able to find it, after all this time?"

"No." Oliver shook his head slightly, pulling himself out of the story. "They've looked everywhere, questioned everyone, but it's just...gone."

"And Ray thinks if he can access the memories I have of Rose's life, I might be able to lead him to the butterfly," I guessed.

"It's the only way to break the curse."

I fell silent, and studied him in profile - his jaw set, eyes still haunted. "There's a question I'm not asking," I said after a few seconds.

Oliver looked at me. "What the Ray from then has to do with the Ray Palmer you know," he guessed. I nodded. He scrubbed a hand across his jaw, and I could tell that he was considering lying - that he was weighing half-truths, thinking about how they would land.

"That's not my story to tell," he finally said. "I think you and Ray should have a conversation about that."

I started to tell him that I knew it wasn't completely Ray's story - that I had seen Oliver there too, or at least some Scottish version of Oliver. Before I could, Oliver looked past me and stood.

"There you are," Malcolm said, a combination of exasperation and unease in his voice. "We couldn't hold breakfast any longer, but Quentin said there were some things you wanted to speak with the family about. Something having to do with the grounds...?"

I stood hastily, barely able to focus on the present after all I'd just learned - and all I still wanted to know.

"Uh - yeah, I have. Or I do - have things to talk about, I mean. Can you just give me a minute?"

"We've already given you hours," Malcolm said coldly. "You two may have nothing to do but traipse around the island all day - or whatever it is you're doing - but Reggie and I have business to attend to. If you want to talk to us, now would be the time."

"We can finish our conversation later," Oliver said smoothly. "We should go in for now, so you can talk to your family."

Reluctantly, I agreed.

And there you have it... A few answers, at least. Thanks as ever for reading, and don't forget to leave a review if you have the notion - I can't tell you how much the reviews I've gotten so far mean, and I'm so pleased people are intrigued by the story. See you next chapter!