Serpent's Kiss (Elder Races #3)(52)

That caught Carling’s attention. She looked up. “Are you talking about that ME in Chicago that conducted the autopsies on Niniane’s attackers?”

“That’s the one,” Rune said. “Dr. Seremela Telemar.”

“I read her autopsy reports. She was quite competent.” Her mind went back to earlier in the afternoon when she had come out of the fade and she remembered something. She said, “Why were you looking for your pocketknife?”

He leaned back on his hands and kicked a foot. He said, “I lost it.”

She told him, “I distinctly remember you cutting the twine and then putting it back in your pocket.”

“I didn’t lose it then,” he said. “When I was caught in your memory, I gave it to the priest Akil.”

She breathed, “I never knew.”

“You weren’t supposed to. I told him to keep it a secret from everyone.” He regarded her with a gaze that had turned brooding. “I see two possibilities here. The first possibility is that what happened was self-contained and we changed just your reality—which, believe me, is earthshaking enough all on its own.”

She stretched her hands out on the table, on either side of the scroll. “Tell me about it,” she muttered. “Theoretically it could happen. Some spells work on the power of belief, especially illusions. You can kill someone that way, if they believe in something strongly enough.”

He gave her a thoughtful look but refrained from pursuing that train of thought. “So if you believed what happened was real, that could potentially have the power to physically change you, correct?” he asked. She nodded. He said, “Maybe it would have the power to change me too. I cannot shake the conviction that this has all felt very real when I’ve gone through it. It’s important to remember this does happen to both of us. It’s just that, for me, the events are occurring in a more linear fashion.”

“You haven’t experienced anything physically traumatic in one of the episodes either, like I have,” she murmured.

“Then there’s the second possibility,” he said. “And there’s no point in dancing around it. We might have changed the actual past, and the key to finding that out is to see if we’ve influenced something outside of ourselves.”

She searched his face. “You think you might have actually gone back in time?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “The crossover passages and Other lands have already shown us that time slips. Theoretically, time is also supposed to slow down the faster one travels. Time isn’t a completely uniform phenomenon, and we know the universe must self-correct so that paradoxes cannot happen. Maybe we’re experiencing a slippage so far out of sync, I’m experiencing it as a trip back to the past.”

Paradoxes cannot happen. The universe self-corrects. It flexes, like a breathing entity, absorbing and adjusting to anomalies. It had an automatic built-in defense mechanism. It was generally believed that no one could topple history, not even the gods. If the universe could not accommodate an event, it could not happen. Rivers of events would shift only so much to accommodate change.

“You seem remarkably calm about it all,” she said. She wasn’t calm. Maybe she hadn’t been calm since he had showed up on her doorstep. You should be careful who you invite into your home . . .

He gave her a small smile. “I’m just being clinical right now.”

“You’re good at it.” He really was an excellent investigator. She sat back in her seat and looked up at the ceiling. “And at the moment, I’m not.”

He said gently, “I know it’s scary. Thank the gods all I’ve done so far is stop to talk to a child one afternoon, and prevent someone from beating you much worse than he already had. If I had done more, the repercussions could be much worse.”

He didn’t realize the profound effect he had on her.

She closed her eyes. She thought of all the many times she had looked up at the sky, hoping against hope to see the impossible happen again, and see the strange winged lion-god fly back into her life. All of the nights she had looked at the stars, wishing upon wish to see him one more time. Whether those times had happened in history or they had happened all in her mind, they had in fact happened.

And they hadn’t before he had come to the island and met her child-self. If she and Rune were actually changing the past, something else had occurred, something other than what she now remembered, something similar enough that the flow of time had flexed to accommodate the difference.

Had she once looked at the stars in some original past, and wished for something else so passionately? It was almost impossible to imagine wishing for anything as much as she had wished to see him, one more time.

She murmured, “The knife.”

There was a pause. He said, “Yes, the knife. I told Akil to bury it in a distinctive place, somewhere that I knew would survive the test of time.”

“So aside from consulting with Dr. Telemar, we need to find out if the knife is where Akil was supposed to put it.”

“Yes,” Rune said. Something was in his voice. She couldn’t identify it. She brought her head up to look at him. He was studying her, his brows contracted. He said, “Suspend disbelief for a moment. Forget about asking why or how. What happened after I left? I made Akil swear to look after you.”