by Amie Gibbons
“Carvi, did this help or make her worse?” Quil asked.
Carvi didn’t answer.
“Carvi?” I asked.
“It was supposed to help,” he said. “But I misjudged here, and it made it worse. It made her worse.”
AB broke away from my mama, wiping under her glasses.
“He left, didn’t he?” AB asked. “Him vanishing was him leaving. He’s said he can wake himself up when he wants. That’s what he did, huh?”
Carvi nodded.
AB’s face clouded. “I’m nothing to him. He never cared about me. He can’t even… I was there for him.
“That day, on the anniversary of his divorce, I mean. He was so sad, and I made sure he had stuff to do that day. Like, I got people together, and we went to the fun center. We played arcade games, skated, and played minigolf and laser tag, basically acted like kids. Then I had everyone over for dinner and poker.
“He was so grateful. I just remember, when I said we were doing all that, he had this look of pure gratitude and sagged with this giant, dramatic thank you. Why do I keep seeing that? Why is that gesture, and the look on his face, and the tone of his voice seared into my brain?
“I was a good friend. How could he leave me?”
I looked at Carvi and he shook his head.
“AB,” I said, “would it help if we go back in your memory to the night you lost it? Like see the event, see if it really wasn’t that bad?”
She paled. “No… not… not now. Maybe later. I don’t know, but, we have real things to deal with now, right? We should focus on that.”
She vanished.
“Whoa!” I said. “Can she do that?”
“She can if she wants it bad enough,” Carvi said. “The idea of going back scares the shit out of her.”
“Which probably means she needs to,” Quil said.
I nodded, and mentally grabbed onto Mama and Quil, pulling them out.
I opened my eyes in the real world and looked at Mama.
“What?” she asked.
“You’re not freaked out?” I asked.
“Oh, my baby, I’m too tired to be freaked out. But yes, this is all going into a book.”
I grinned.
Voices rose upstairs, and something crashed.
I shot out of my chair and ran into the living room just in time to see AB rip out of the guest room and run down the hall and stairs.
Carvi appeared at the bottom and she yelped as she stumbled back, feet catching on the stair, and she slammed to her butt.
“AB, you can’t jump back in the fight and pick at something I said an hour ago,” Carvi said.
“Yes, I can,” she snapped, climbing to her feet. “Because we never addressed it.”
“You can’t leave.”
She waved a hand before crossing her arms.
“So let me get this straight. If a guy sleeps with a girl, it's perfectly fine for him to blow her off and ditch her afterwards, because he doesn't owe her anything. He never made any promises and that's just her fucking problem!” she snapped.
“Pun intended?” I asked, forcing a grin.
She shot me a dirty look before fixing her eyes back on Carvi and I held up my hands.
“That's perfectly fine,” she continued. “That was just sex and it's her too bad that she thought it was more. That's what you said. But, but, I decide to leave, take myself out of a painful situation, stop hurting myself by letting other people hurt me, and suddenly I'm the bad guy?
“You're just like my ex. I decide to cut my losses and walk away from the table because I'm never going to win, I'm never going to get what I want here, and oops, no, can't do that, because then that's out of revenge. That's me being petty and trying to hurt him.
“He ditches me, doesn't call, tells me that you can't make feelings and it's not his problem that I had feelings, and it's fine. But I couldn’t be friends with him, so I ditched him, and it was me punishing him. Why wasn't it a punishment when he did it to me back then, huh? Why was that okay and this isn't? Why the fuck is it always about what you men want?
“You want me to be fine with this? Get over it because it's hurting you for me not to be? Well guess what, it hurts me to have to sit there and watch him with other girls!”
“Honey,” Mama said, “you're switching between him and your ex.”
She covered her face with a sob. “Yeah, I just realized that. He’s said before that he feels like I was punishing him, said me not getting over this so he can rejoin the group, was hurting him. Even though I told everyone to leave me out of it when they decided to hang out with him or not, that just because I couldn't hang with him didn't mean they couldn't. But he's not invited whenever I get the group together, so he says that's the same thing as banning him.
“Doesn't he care that he's hurting me by being around? By flaunting girls in front of me like my feelings don't matter? By telling me that he slept with practically half of Nashville's female population back then, like that somehow excuses him blowing me off after he slept with me? By not even recognizing that he hurt me? That I am sexually traumatized and don’t even know if he assaulted me? By retraumatizing me every time I see him?
“Why is it on me to try to work things out with him just because now he wants to be friends? Why am I the bad guy for wanting to run? Why is it all about him and what he wants? What about what I want?”
“Right now, in this situation, do you want to leave your friends in the lurch when you can help them?” Mama asked.
I glanced over my shoulder.
She and Quil stood in the middle of the living room. I hadn’t even heard them walk over.
AB shook her head. “No. Even I know I'm transferring right now. I'm sorry. I'm ready to be an adult again. We've got a magical fur-ball to solve, we don't need me in the weeds in my emotional one.”
“Same goes for me,” I said. “The whole heartache thing just rears its ugly head at the worst times, doesn't it? It's like it doesn't realize there's more important things going on.”
“Yeah, it's like emotions aren't rational or something,” Carvi said with a smirk.
We all rolled our eyes at him.
AB took a deep breath. “So where are we?”
“Oh, right!” I said, shaking my head. “I sensed, don’t ask me how I know this, but I do, that it was someone time traveling that caused the spiral. They went back in time to fix something, but the person who did it was separate from the center of the spiral, so I’m pretty sure it’s someone who died and their loved one went back to keep it from happening. So the spiral is around a person who shouldn’t be here.”
Carvi nodded. “Makes sense. We can track that. We can go into the Asgard plane and track what life force is in when it shouldn’t be.”
“We can?” I asked. “I thought we had to make sure I’d be protected?”
He shrugged. “No. We were in the real plane. That’s what you ripped into. You were really there and perfectly fine. We can go in right now and look for the string that isn’t supposed to exist.”
“Well, cook my kittens! Let’s do that!”
###
It only took us about five minutes on that plane for Carvi to say there was nothing out of place like that and to call it quits.
“Now what?” I asked as we sat around the table after explaining we’d found nothing, which meant my theory was wrong. “There isn’t anything in there that isn’t supposed to be, which apparently is easier to find. So what is it that I sensed? Cuz I was so sure.”
AB stared off into the distance, eyes glazed and half open.
Was she asleep?
“How could he vanish like that?” she whispered. “He just left. He has to be a sociopath, right? To not care at all? To blame me and deny all responsibility like that? To be that self-centered?”
Mama cleared her throat.
“Sorry!” AB sat up straight. “Speaking of self-centered.”
“You were traumatized,” Mama said. “It’s gott
en dragged back up. Trust me, I understand fixating like this. It’s hard to beat, especially when you have OCD.”
“Wait, wait, wait,” I said. “What did you just say? You were traumatized, right? What if that's it!”
“I don't get it,” Mama said, looking over.
“I do,” AB said, eyes flying wide. “It's just like last week. It's not a dead person. We can't find the dead person because there isn’t one. But you saw there was grief, so what if it was someone traumatized?”
“We saw it before,” I said. “Both of us would go back in time to change our traumas if we could. What if someone who didn't know what they were doing did just that?”
“But the center for the grief wasn't the center of the spiral, which is why we thought it had to be another person who did the spell.”
“Exactly,” I said, meeting her eyes. “What did you say your brother wanted to do to your ex?”
She snapped her fingers. “So it wasn't the person who was traumatized, it was somebody near them. Somebody who loves them.”
“And who loves you more than anyone in the world? Who would do anything for you. Who would die for you?”
Mama chuckled. “Oh my god, it was a parent. Something horrible happened to their child and they went back in time to stop it.”
“So we still aren't looking for the traumatized person, we're looking for a loved one, probably a parent,” I said.
“How do we track that?” AB asked. “If nobody is alive who should've died, there isn't an anomaly we can track like we were planning. Can we check for an anomaly like someone who traveled through time? Or whose path was changed?”
“Not now,” Carvi said. “It’s already changed, it’s already done. It is now what happened. And whoever did this, did it well enough to cover their tracks so it wasn’t obvious to Karma who did it. She could find out with a little digging, I’m sure; she has access to levels we do not, but apparently she’s too busy to do her fucking job.”
“So, we can’t see what happened because it is now part of the natural order, progression, whatever,” AB said, “so there’s no obvious anomaly, but there’s still something off and it’s still going out and creating a ripple in fate, and Karma left it to us to track even though we can’t and she could? Do I have all that right?”
“Yes. I told you she was a bitch.”
“But she did say she couldn’t track it easily,” Quil said. “It was not obvious.”
“Who has the power and ability to hide their trail, but not balance their forces?” I asked.
Carvi shook his head. “It doesn’t make sense. You either screw up and do this with spells you don’t understand and that sets off an imbalance, in which case, you wouldn’t be able to hide your tracks like that, because if you could do that, you could balance it.”
“You couldn’t,” I said.
Carvi turned hard eyes on me and I locked my gaze down around his chest.
I so did not want to be looking him in the eyes right now.
“I mean,” I said slowly, “that you looked into it and couldn’t go back to save Milo and balance things, but I’m assumin’ you’d know how to cover your trail, so if you decided you didn’t give a flip about the world, you could go back to save him and just hide what you did, and let things spiral out.”
Carvi sighed and I risked a look up.
His face was a blank.
“Yes,” he said, “but I would know the spiral would follow me and most likely get me merely by virtue of being around it. This person doesn’t seem to.”
“Do they remember?” AB asked.
We all looked at her.
She shrugged. “What? If you go back in time, you change whatever event, which means the you that existed before is not the you now, because whatever made them go back in time is now changed. Do they remember?”
“Yes,” Carvi said. “When you do a spell like this and change something, with the proper spells, you have both lives in your memory.”
I shook my head. “This is making less and less sense.”
I paused. “And, doesn’t this all sound a little familiar? This sounds a lot like what happened last week, doesn’t it? I mean, there’s trauma, someone wanted to fix it, and they happened to do some spell that they didn’t understand. Carvi, if it’s so hard to time travel, how did some amateur do it?”
“How did magic happen to go awry last week and make the perfect storm for a spell to explode all over the place and create a tulpa?” AB asked, pointing at me. “I mean, magic going wonky like that? We’re looking at astronomical odds, which do happen, so that’s what I was thinking happened there. It was that one-in-a-million, shit happens kind of thing. But this? Someone else pulling off some huge spell when they didn’t know what the fuck they were doing? That’s too big a coincidence.”
“Unless something’s messing with magic,” Quil said. “Giving little things boosts that look like random chance in the ebb and flow of magic.”
“And they happen to be around us?” I asked.
Carvi shook his head. “No. Those are just the ones we’re seeing. This could be happening all over.”
AB snapped her fingers. “Which is why Karma was too busy to deal with this!”
“Possibly,” Carvi said.
“Probably,” Quil said.
“Meaning we still have to figure this out,” I said. “There’s probably something else that is making spells blow up all over the place, and I still have a hit out on me. Am I forgetting anything?”
“I think that’s it in a nutshell,” AB said.
“My witches are finding Marco’s body and will ship him to me,” Carvi said. “You can get visions off him then about the hit.”
“What if he doesn’t know any more than Natalia?” Quil asked.
“That problem’s just gonna have to wait, I guess,” I said. “I mean, there were three assassins who took the job, and all three are out. Two are on our side, and Marco’s, er, captured.”
“We figure out the spiral,” Quil said with a nod. “Then we talk to Karma. See if she knows of any other spells blowing up, as you put it, and if so, if she can figure out what that is. And then we deal with Marco and get information off him about the hit on you.”
I turned around, pressed back up against him, and he wrapped his arms around me, kissing my hair.
“Sounds like a plan,” AB said. “But we still don’t have a plan for figuring out the spiral. What do we do there?”
I blew out a breath. “We have to see the flow of things before they were changed to see what actually happened. So, we do the impossible. We go back in time.”
Chapter twelve
“Are you insane?” Carvi snapped.
AB and I looked at each other.
“Oh, me, me, I am,” AB said, holding up her hand. “Told I was by a therapist and everything, so it must be true. Ariana?”
I grinned and wiggled my hand in front of me. “Depends on the day. Like three to five days outta the month, you don’t wanna be anywhere near me cuz I’m just a rollercoaster. Most guys think that’s insane, right?”
“You’re not cute!” Carvi stabbed his finger towards me then AB. “Nobody thinks you two are cute. You have no clue what you’re asking here.”
“Then explain it to us,” I said. “What would it take to time travel? How much energy? If we don’t change anything, do we have to worry about that balancing thingamajiger you had to do when you time traveled?”
Carvi pulled the pack of cigarettes out of his pocket and smacked them against his hand.
“Do you have to do that or is it like a habit?” I asked as he pulled one out.
He glared at me as he lit the cig with a flick of his finger.
So he was done pretending he didn’t have extra powers, I guess.
He took a deep drag and blew out a puff in my face.
“Hey!” I waved it away.
“Now amplify that by a million,” he said, staring me in the eyes.
What the…<
br />
I squirmed under the glare and finally looked away. “I don’t get it.”
“That is the amount of power you’re looking at. The forces at play could rip us apart. And that’s if we manage to gather that much power, and if we don’t change anything.”
“Ah ha!” I pointed at him. “So we only have to worry about balancing if we mess with anything.”
“Do you have any idea how hard it is not to disturb anything!” He pinched his fingers together as I opened my mouth. “No! You don’t. Because you have never done this. I have. If one of us so much as steps on a bug, we could change history. Do you get that?”
“Then what’s your suggestion?” I asked, propping my hands on my hips and staring him down.
“We get Karma’s ass back here and make her clean up her own mess,” he said, taking a deep drag.
“Even if we could,” AB said, “that still leaves Ariana’s dad.”
“What!” Mama said, looking between us.
AB’s eyes flew wide. “Oops. Was I not supposed to mention that?”
“Mention what?” Mama asked.
“Ummmm.”
“Ariana?” Mama turned to me.
I sighed, closing my eyes. “Mama, Karma said Daddy’s gonna die on election night.”
Mama gasped, and I opened my eyes.
“But,” I said, holding up my hands, “if we solve this for her, Karma said she can work in a pass for him.”
“Meaning she could do it anyway,” Carvi said. “She just won’t do it for free.”
My mouth fell open.
He was right. She hadn’t said she couldn’t do that either way, just that she’d do it for me if I helped her.
“Can you blame her?” AB asked.
I gasped, glaring at her.
“She can’t mess with fate all the time for everybody,” AB said. “Things would go so out of whack so fast if she did. So, it makes sense that she’d say there has to be a trade. Also, we don’t know what she’s dealing with. There’s something else going on that she’s working on. She may not have the time or power to deal with that thing and whatever’s going on here, and certainly not to work in a fate pass after all that. I’m just saying, it makes sense.”
