I thought.
I thought of Crixus’s body. How it felt to be near him, beside him, beneath him. I thought of his nature. Boyish and enthusiastic, capricious as a cat. I thought of his heart. Good. Essentially good, but tempestuous, possessive.
This is the way it would always turn out. He knew it, and wanted me to know it.
And now I did.
“Only I’ll remember this, if I return to my life as it was?” I looked at Liam as I asked this, knowing Weyrick understood my meaning.
“Yes. The hit man will not be aware of this timeline just as you were unaware of it before I brought you into it.
“But what about Crixus? If he asked you to do this, wouldn’t he—”
“I’ll take care of that. It’s a simple matter of deploying a patch in his code. This was the only thing he asked for himself. Loving and losing you was hard enough the first time. He didn’t want to remember it twice.”
The growing ache in my chest had a name and knowing it did nothing to relieve the heaviness there.
Its name was goodbye.
I stood slowly, feeling for the last time my body tight and unchanged by the bearing of a child. Every step toward Crixus hurt. Burdened by the knowledge of what he’d done for me. Lightened by the knowledge of what he’d done to me, that I would get to take the memory of it with me like a lucky stone in my pocket.
Kneeling next to him on the floor, I bent to kiss his frozen grimace, hoping he could feel it wherever he was. Hoping he could keep the love I pressed into his lips if nothing else.
“Thank you,” I whispered into to his small, perfect ear. And then again, “Thank you.”
****
“Thank you again for making time to see me, Doctor Schmidt.”
I sat in the plastic desk chair in front of Godfrey Weyrick’s cell at the end of a long, gray hallway and an even longer, grayer day. Back now in the life I knew, I dragged the new memories with me like asteroids, feeling their pull on me and mine on them. Unable to believe they wouldn’t collide with my world and cause a supernova.
“But I didn’t see you,” I teased, looking at the empty space he spoke from. “Would you care to change that?”
Silence.
“I think not,” he said.
“May I ask why?”
“Because…well…because.”
“Are you ashamed of your appearance?”
“Ashamed? No. Apprehensive, yes. The last time I allowed a human to see me, the result was…unsatisfactory.”
“Godfrey—” I assumed we were now on a first-name basis as he’d poked a hole in the time/space continuum and shoe-horned me through it “—As a practicing paranormal psychologist, I’ve been privy to things that would have most mortals soiling their shorts.”
“I dare say my appearance is a good deal more shocking than anything you’ve encountered, Doctor Schmidt.”
“More shocking than witnessing an emergency kraken-dryad birth on my office couch?”
“Well, perhaps not that—”
“More shocking than what happens when a púca with gastrointestinal issues sneezes and shits down both legs? Have you ever tried getting half-digested souls out of a Persian rug?”
“Oh, all right.” His voice moved abruptly from his metal cot to the top of his steel table “But you must promise not to laugh.”
“You have my word.”
And then, he was there.
Weyrick’s face put me in mind of the pharaohs on Egyptian sarcophagi, for if ever a countenance demanded to be cast in the finest gold and inlaid with precious jewels it was his. Eyes both dark and wise, easy to imagine rimmed with kohl. Full lips even an army of royal artisans couldn’t have carved more perfectly. A kingly nose, exactly symmetrical between the high ridges of his cheekbones.
It was what I found below his face that nearly caused me to asphyxiate my own larynx.
Weyrick had the body of a cat.
A house cat.
An orange, tabby-striped, domesticated kitty. Suddenly, his knocking the cup off his table during our initial meeting made a lot more sense. As did Crixus’s use of catnip in capturing Weyrick.
“You’re—”
“The sphinx,” he said. “Yes.”
“You mean, the giant statue, in Egypt—”
“Carved from my likeness.”
Well, not exactly from his likeness. The sculptors had made considerable proportional errors in Weyrick’s favor. Like ignoring the fact that his human head was almost as large as his dainty cat body. He must have shoulder muscles that would shame Vasili to keep that cranium upright.
Not for the first time since my return, I felt a pang of regret that I hadn’t indulged the urge to steal a kiss from the unbearably adorable Russian vampire before Weyrick brought me back.
What happens in an alternate timeline stays in an alternate timeline.
Crixus’s words. Not mine.
“You mentioned that a goddess cursed you.” Look at his face, Matilda. Look only at his face. Please dear God don’t let him lick his paw or I’ll lose it.
Weyrick’s tail flicked, a universally recognized sign of feline irritation. “Bastet.”
My liberal arts education had been broad enough to provide me an image to go along with the name. A cat’s face with a woman’s body in the depictions of her I remembered. Almost the precise opposite of Weyrick’s unfortunate configuration.
“I was a priest at the temple of Amun Re, sworn to celibacy. Bastet tempted me to reject Amun Re and worship her. With my mouth. And…other parts of my anatomy. But I refused, so she cursed me. There is no more to tell.”
Surely his voice shouldn’t be quite so resonant coming from such a small body.
“Then I’m guessing Godfrey Weyrick isn’t your real name.”
“Not the name I was born with. No. I’ve been called many things in the course of my life.”
“Is there something else you’d rather I called you?”
“A friend? I don’t expect I’ll have many in here.” Weyrick looked around his cell despondently.
Maybe I could arrange to have a scratching post brought in.
“Friends then.” I clicked my pen closed and began gathering my things. “Would you like me to come visit you again?”
“I’d like that very much.” Now, his tail waved in a lazy “S” pattern.
I could have sworn I heard purring as I walked away.
****
The desert evening air was warm and dry on my skin, rapidly cooling as the sun sank. To the east, a neon backwash from the Strip bled into the sky like a cheap and tacky version of the Northern Lights. But there was beauty in it and I was glad.
The dashboard Bluetooth display lit up, a call coming in on my cell phone and ringing through the Prius’s speakers.
Liam.
I pressed the button to take his call.
“Hello?”
“Hey, babe.” His voice was low, smooth, stone cold sober, but somehow still husky. “How was your day?”
“Weird,” I said. Luckily, this wasn’t at all unusual in my chosen profession. “Yours?”
“Brutal.” Not at all unusual in his. “When will you be home?” Something clanged in the background but I resisted the urge to ask him where he was or what he was doing. I’d long ago learned I probably wouldn’t like the answer.
I glanced at the clock on the dash. “About half an hour. I need to swing by and grab something for dinner after I pick up Addie.”
Cherry bombs of excitement exploded in my stomach with the simple act of saying her name aloud. My baby girl. I craved her solid weight in my arms in a way that made my bones ache.
“Actually, you don’t. I cut out early.”
“Oh?”
“Oh. I picked up Addie and I have dinner covered.”
I heard a round, comforting sound I recognized as a lid clinking down on a pot.
There was something deeply satisfying about a perfect fit.
“What are we having?” I asked, letting him hear the smile in my voice.
“You’re having steak and pasta. I’m having you.”
My mouth watered for a variety of reasons. A familiar, sweet heaviness gathered below my stomach.
“In that case, I hope you’re hungry.” I flipped on my blinker and made the turn that meant I was only five minutes from home.
“Starving,” he said.
Later, we lay together in a cocoon of sheets, sweat evaporating off our cooling bodies as I fit myself around him like a puzzle. My foot pressed to the swell of his calf. My thumb aligned with the dangerous notch making an inroad from hip to groin. Both in the throes of a slack-limbed, satiated stupor.
“We have plans for this Friday, do we?” Liam’s fingers walked a lazy path up my spine and out over my shoulder before retracing their steps.
“Not that I know of. Why?”
“I scored us ringside tickets to see this new superstar fight at the MGM Grand.”
“Oh?” My stomach did a little flip-flop. “What’s his name?”
Liam’s voice retained a hint of the suggestion he had applied to announcing our dinner menu over the phone earlier that evening. “They call him…the Vampire.”
OTHER MATILDA SCHMIDT NOVELLAS
If you’ve enjoyed Unraveled: The New Adventures of Dr. Matilda Schmidt, Paranormal Psychologist, you might want to check out how her story began with The Case Files of Dr. Matilda Schmidt, Paranormal Psychologist series!
Unlovable
Unlucky
Unhoppy
Unbearable
Unassailable
Undeadly
Unexpecting
Disordered – For those overachievers like me who want to nab the whole previous series in one convenient compilation!
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Cynthia St. Aubin wrote her first play at age eight and made her brothers perform it for the admission price of gum wrappers. A steal, considering she provided the wrappers in advance. Though her early work debuted to mixed reviews, she never quite gave up on the writing thing, even while earning a mostly useless master’s degree in art history and taking her turn as a cube monkey in the corporate warren.
Because the voices in her head kept talking to her, and they discourage drinking at work, she started writing instead. When she’s not standing in front of the fridge eating cheese, she’s hard at work figuring out which mythological, art historical, or paranormal friends to play with next. She lives in Colorado with the love of her life and three surly cats.
Cynthia loves to hear from her readers.
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Unraveled Page 9
