Unraveled Read online

  “Said he’d heard so much about you.” Daniel’s eyes found mine beneath the ghastly elevator fluorescents. “He said it was about time you met.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  Like any musty, dank basement, ward four made me want to turn on my heel and bolt back up the stairs two at a time.

  Daniel walked with me as far as the guard station at the mouth of a long, dim hallway before leaving me to finish the last leg alone.

  “Weyrick’s cell is on the left,” he said. “The one with the chair in front of it.”

  The hallway telescoped in my vision, the chair seeming at least a dozen miles away.

  “All right then.” The acknowledgement had been meant to galvanize me. To liberate my ankles from their concrete blocks and prod me into motion. It failed utterly.

  “It’s a little nerve-wracking your first time.” Daniel’s big, warm hand dropped onto my shoulder. “As long as you follow the safety procedures we discussed, you’ll do just fine.”

  “The other…residents,” I began, casting about for the right words.

  “Can’t harm you in any way,” Daniel said. “You’re perfectly safe. Don’t hesitate to holler if you need anything.” With that, he resumed his place at one of the desks and studied the closed circuit camera feeds.

  I remained where I was for the space of one long, deep breath then set out for the desk, all the while lamenting not having chosen quieter shoes this morning.

  Figures moved in the cells on both sides of my peripheral vision but I refused to let my eye stray to them. Talking with Weyrick would require all of the precious little courage I’d plucked up, and I didn’t want to spend it prematurely.

  It’s difficult to explain exactly how unnerving it is to look into an empty cell and know it’s occupied.

  The book that I’d watched migrate from the table to the cot was now on the floor, robbing me of my only clue as to where Weyrick might be.

  Having no point of reference, I blundered ahead with the temerity of the damned.

  “Good morning. I’m Dr. Matilda Schmidt.”

  Nothing.

  I took my time seating myself and setting out my notepad, pen, and case file on the chair’s small elbow desk.

  “You smell of curdled milk.”

  My chair screeched back about a foot when Godfrey Weyrick spoke. He was much closer to the safety glass than I expected. And that voice.

  Working between the walls of my chest like the vibration of a note in a cello’s hollow center. Soaring, touching all, doubling back to do the same again.

  It made me want to weep.

  And not just because I probably did smell of curdled milk—Addie’s parting gift as I hustled her into the day care.

  “My apologies,” I said, speaking roughly in the direction from which the voice had come. “It was a rough morning.”

  “How old is she?”

  Fine hairs on my arm stood at attention while goose bumps rioted up and over my scalp. “How old is who?” I asked.

  “Your daughter.”

  Once upon a time, this kind of revelation would have tipped me into a nail-biting, red-faced frenzy of disbelief and wonder. Truthfully, having some immortal or other recite intimate details about my life had ceased to churn up the awe it used to. Crixus had long ago broken me of that habit, reading my thoughts being one of his favorite games.

  “That’s a neat trick.” I turned over the front page on my notebook. “How did you know?”

  “I would have thought Doctor Wolfe already told you all about my particular proclivities.” His voice bounced from the floor to the area around the stainless steel table in the center of his cell. I followed it with my bespectacled gaze.

  “He mentioned your ability to manipulate the space/time continuum,” I said. “But, I’m not sure how that would tell you I have a daughter.”

  “It doesn’t.”

  “How then?”

  “Later.” He was over by the small cot now. I scrutinized the coarse blanket for a depression, which might give a hint to his specific location, but found none. “Why don’t you ask me what’s really on your mind?”

  “Mr. Weyrick.” I looked up from my notebook and made a show of laying my pen aside. “It’s you who requested my presence. Perhaps you’d be good enough to tell me why.”

  “Please, call me Godfrey.”

  “All right, Godfrey. Why is it you wanted to speak with me?”

  A pregnant pause usually follows this question in my first session with all new clients, human or otherwise. During this one, I felt certain Weyrick was searching my face, deciding what to tell and what to keep.

  “The bounty hunter and I spent a good deal of time talking while he dragged me back to civilization. Well, I spent a good deal of time talking. His vocabulary was mostly a series of evolved grunts so far as I could tell.”

  A smile worked at one corner of my mouth despite my attempt suppress it. Crixus had never been especially gifted in matters of verbal diplomacy and expression. Though his tongue proved exceptionally skillful in other exercises.

  “Where from?” Typically, I tried to avoid interrupting a client when it came to the first telling of their story, but context felt important given the lack of all the collateral details that help form my assessment.

  Like a face.

  “Pardon?” Godfrey asked.

  “Where was—” I hesitated, not wanting to say the name for fear of summoning his image to my sensory memory in devastating detail. “Where was the bounty hunter dragging you back from?”

  “Cairo.”

  I jotted the city down in my book. “Thank you. Go on.”

  “As I was saying, we spent a good deal of time conversing during the long process of my extradition. Nights especially. I don’t require sleep and he didn’t favor it.”

  This I knew to be the truth from firsthand experience. The immortal part of Crixus spawned by none other than Zeus him-thunderbolt-hurling-self needed neither food nor sleep to sustain him. But as he’d once told me, he indulged in both for the same reason he plowed any female within thrusting distance—because he liked it. Trouble was, so did the countless females.

  I had been one of them, after all.

  “And what did you talk about, if I may ask?”

  “Oh, the usual. Life. Love. You.” Weyrick’s voice was back by the table. In fact, I was so certain he must be sitting at it that I glanced up, expecting the single chair to have been pushed back to accommodate him.

  It hadn’t.

  The sheen of sweat blooming on my lip cooled in my exhaled breath. My cheeks stung as blood crept up my neck like the mercury in a thermometer.

  “Don’t you want to know what he said?”

  “Not especially. I’m far more interested in how I can be of service to you.”

  “Ahh.” A smile leavened Weyrick’s voice. “But your demigod seemed to think that perhaps it was I who could help you.”

  My pen froze mid-loop. “Help me? How?”

  “We’re in the same business, you and I. You assist people in living their fullest potential by identifying sub-optimal behaviors and modifying them. So do I.”

  “I’m not sure I follow.”

  Weyrick’s sigh was long. Pained.

  “What do you suppose it would be like to know the end from the beginning? To see every eventuality in painstaking detail? To comprehend the pain and suffering born from the most minute missteps? Would you not do everything within your power to mitigate the consequences?”

  I let this idea marinate for a moment before answering.

  “Helping clients cope with the consequences of their actions and make better decisions going forward is considerably different than revoking free will and forcing a particular outcome by willfully rewriting reality.”

  “What a very human way of looking
at things.”

  Never had I been more aware of the unremarkable meat of my body. Serviceable, but limited in comparison to the creatures I was often tasked with counseling. “That is my bias, yes,” I admitted. “Of which I suspect you were aware before you requested to meet with me.”

  “I suppose I had hoped your exposure to beings beyond your own woefully stunted species might broaden your perspective.”

  “But it has, Mr. Weyrick. And the more I see of powerful creatures twisted by either internal or external forces, the more I believe the rules set down by the Bureau of Supernatural Affairs to be not only necessary, but essential.”

  “The Bureau,” Weyrick scoffed. “Tell me, Doctor. If a three year-old showed up at your office tomorrow and dictated a set of rules by which you were expected to abide, would you obey them? That’s how much older I am than the beings who have named themselves my governing body.”

  I’m not certain at which point I became aware that my mouth had dropped open, but I snapped it closed with enough force to clack my teeth together. I knew for a fact that the Bureau of Supernatural Affairs boasted members who counted birthdays by centuries rather than years.

  “I imagine that would be rather frustrating.”

  When Weyrick spoke next, I caught the scent of the one quality I encountered more than any other in beings of his unfathomable age—profound loneliness.

  “Dr. Schmidt. I’ve been blamed for everything from the Black Plague to black holes. I’ve watched generations be born, die, and turn to dust. I’m old and tired and no longer seek compassion or pine to be accepted by my peers.”

  Peers. Now there was an alarming thought. If the BSA were the equivalent of three year-olds, who or what, exactly, would Weyrick consider his peers?

  Now we were coming to the heart of it. “What do you seek?”

  “To be known instead of feared. To help. To be understood. Once. By someone.”

  “If you’ll pardon my saying so, it might be easier for you to be known if you could be seen.”

  Silence.

  “It’s better for all concerned if I’m not.”

  “Why is that, if I may ask?”

  “All sentient creatures share one basic truth. They despise that which is different. I am.”

  The healer in me longed to see his face. To measure the pain in his words against the pain in his eyes.

  “Help me to know you, Godfrey.”

  “To know me, you have to know what I can do. Most individuals find it difficult to comprehend. And even harder to accept.”

  “Mr. Weyrick, in the course of nine months, I went from believing humans were alone in the universe to conversing with the ferryman of the damned about the merits of Valrhona baking chocolate on the very outskirts of hell.” I folded my arms across my chest and leaned back in the desk chair. “Try me.”

  “Fair enough.” The cot’s springs squeaked and I imagined Weyrick rising, pacing as he organized his thoughts. “How familiar are you with the concept of the multiverse?”

  I took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “The theory of the multiverse assumes that anything that can happen, will happen. At any given moment, every possible iteration of every scenario is unfolding in universes parallel to the one we now experience.”

  His silence told me what I had already suspected. He had been hoping to dazzle me. “Doctor Strange is having a minute right now. Parallel universes are kind of a thing.”

  “Right. So you understand that reality is not real according to what you think real means. Not this table.” A metallic clanging suggested that Weyrick had knocked on the aforementioned furniture for effect. “Not this cell, nor the enchanted plastic polymer tasked with containing me, nor your discount designer suit.”

  Right about then, my discount designer pump was to itching kick Weyrick’s non-corporeal nether-bits right up around his non-corporeal ears. Assuming he had either.

  Or both.

  “Observe,” Weyrick said.

  The plastic cup sitting next to the pile of books on Weyrick’s table abruptly slid off the edge, clattering to the concrete.

  My sharp inhale of surprise carried in the deserted hallway. I didn’t want to think about what this place must sound like at night, when the mutters and groans could echo in perpetuity.

  “Every time a decision is made, the universe splits. You continue forward in the universe that aligns with the choice you made. For example, in another universe, the cup remains on the table. In that universe, you didn’t jump. You’re still holding your pen. I’m still—”

  “A rabid narcissist?”

  “Have I offended you?” Weyrick asked.

  One of the distinct disadvantages of non-corporeal entities is comments like ‘Your face offends me’ lose all frame of reference. Not that such a response fell within the purview of accepted cognitive behavioral therapeutic methods. “Your point is, reality is a quantum equation eternally in flux, trying to resolve itself.”

  “Yes,” he said. “Precisely that.”

  “And what is your role in this elaborate scenario?” It was the correct question. The one that gave Weyrick carte blanche to brag about his unique capabilities.

  “What I do that no one else can do is directly manipulate the quantum equation. I can keep the universe from splitting, or I can split it into more than two choices. I can affect the base reality of the quantum itself.”

  “Let’s go back to something you said for a moment. You said what no one else can do. Are there no others like you?”

  “No,” he said, irritation naked and plain in his tone. I had failed to express the proper level of awe at his revelation. “No others. I wasn’t born, I was made.”

  “And who made you?” I asked.

  “I will not speak her name. Suffice it to say, she was powerful. Wrathful. She loved me. I loved another. When I refused her, she saddled me with an ancient, powerful curse. She cursed me with immortality so I would have to watch my beloved grow old, wither, and die. But this was not enough. The goddess also cursed me with the ability to alter reality.”

  Goddess.

  Few words in my lexicon created such instant heartburn.

  I’d had the misfortune to run afoul of a few in the course of my career. Jealous, they were. Wildly possessive. Owning endless appetites for adoration and precious little patience for anything or anyone that stood in the way of their getting it.

  I should know.

  Aphrodite and Persephone had once threatened to make my intestines into strappy sandals when a slight error in judgment saw me acknowledging Adonis’s face with my crotch instead of his resentment at being passed around like a supernatural casserole.

  “So this goddess made you immortal and gave you the power to alter reality as we know it. Many would say this wasn’t a curse, but a gift.”

  “Which demonstrates how pitifully little most beings know.” Real bitterness tinged Weyrick’s words. “She knew I would use it to try and save the woman I loved.”

  “And did you?”

  “I tried, of course. Changing this thing, changing that. Hundreds of lifetimes. Instead of watching my love die once, I watched her die a thousand times as I tried over and over to save her. The goddess observed this with great amusement, knowing the paradoxes I would create.”

  “What sort of paradoxes?” It was an overly simplistic question, the kind I lobbed over the net when I was trying to wrap my rudimentary human brain around the conceptual implications of power like Weyrick’s. I could scarcely begin to imagine what effects his tinkering might have had on my own, limited life, much less the fabric of the very universe.

  “Put yourself in my place, Doctor. What would be the first thing you’d try?”

  I considered the question. “Going back in time to undo the curse?”

  “Exactly what I thought. But, it was the curse i
tself that enabled me to go back in time and undo the curse. And by undoing the curse, I also undid my ability to undo the curse. You follow?”

  My left eyelid began to twitch and a fine, sharp pain pierced my forehead just above the eyebrow. I dug a knuckle into the muscle and rubbed.

  My brain hurt.

  “I can see you’re beginning to understand. To use the analogy given to you by Dr. Wolfe, think of the universe like a computer system. Any time a paradox is created, the universe resets itself. It’s programmed to revert to the most recent, most stable version of the code if a new release breaks key features. It’s terrifically agile.”

  Strange to be in a dungeon, surrounded by walls and bars, everything gray and cold and final with such talk of the infinite floating about. The desire to be out of away from this place, back in the sunlight and air was instant and suffocatingly intense.

  “You said that Crixus thought you could help me. How?”

  “You had a difficult morning, did you not?”

  I looked down at the faint orange smudge on my blouse. More likely than not, the remnants of a half-chewed melba toast, strained green beans, and shame had been permanently ground into the treads of my shoes. I wondered if Weyrick could smell them. “What was your first clue?”

  “I don’t need clues. I’ve seen it all. Every detail of your life. Your husband’s life. Your daughter’s life. All unspooled before me like some great tapestry, one thread at a time. Would you like to know how your performance this morning altered the image?”

  Nausea of the kind I hadn’t felt since the first weeks of my surprise pregnancy with Addie washed over me. My mouth filled with salty saliva, my throat tightening out of reflex.

  “No,” Weyrick answered for me. “You wouldn’t like to know. But I’ll tell you anyway, because this is important. One of your husband’s associates is female.”

  “Silvia. I already know about her.”

  “Do you?”

  “Yes. She’s in the market for a mentor. They’re having coffee. Liam and I don’t keep things from each other.”

  I could literally feel his smile. “Does he know how often you think of the bounty hunter?”