by Amie Gibbons
“I…” I shook my head. “It’s an expression. My head’s hurting and you’re making it hurt more.”
“Alternate realities,” Quil said. “Go on?”
“I didn’t quite understand what Karma was going on about when she was talking about all this happening back in the nineties in Alabama. I time traveled then, but I balanced it out. However, I did have some visitors. They were from an alternate reality. They were witches who could jump through realities as easily as a witch here can teleport.”
“You think they caused the imbalance back then?” Quil asked.
“Possibly,” Carvi said.
I held up a finger. “Can we continue this at home, let me get a few minutes to get my head back?”
“Sure, sweets,” Quil said.
###
“There’s alternate realities?” AB asked as we sat around the rental’s kitchen table. “Not theoretical? Not some physicists postulate? You have real life experience that proves it?”
I had a giant cup of coffee and a pile of AB’s meringue cookies and she was sipping on a cup of tea.
Pyro munched on a pile of cotton and silk in the corner.
Still no clue why he likes to be in a corner to eat sometimes. He’s never really explained when I asked. Mostly, I just let him be.
“Yes,” Carvi said. “I have met witches who could travel between worlds. But they seemed to know what they were doing. If they left some kind of imbalance, it was due to extreme negligence, or something happened that made them flee before they could balance it out. It could have been them back then though.”
“Was it finally balanced out?” I asked.
“Right!” AB snapped her fingers and pointed at me. “Could that be what’s spiraling now, like it was calm and just took this long to get going again?”
I nodded, grinning at her.
She so got me.
“No,” Carvi said. “It doesn’t lie in wait.”
AB and I looked at each other and shrugged.
It was an idea.
I picked up one of the light cookies and bit into it.
The sugar dissolved in my mouth like an air puff and I made a little happy sound.
The girl could bake.
“But if somebody here tried ripping into another reality?” Quil said after tossing me a small smile and picking up one of my cookies.
I slapped at his hand, but he yanked it back with its prize way too fast for me to catch.
“Exactly what I was thinking,” Carvi said. “If they didn’t know what they were doing and tried to rip a hole, they could have ripped into something that sucked energy. They could have accidently, or even on purpose if they wanted to destroy the world, dumped energy into another world.”
“Or,” AB said. “Or! Another world could’ve ripped into ours and stole energy. Who’s to say, if there’s an infinite amount of realities, that everyone who goes through them knows what they’re doing? If we could screw up here and make a rip, they could do it there, but maybe they don’t care if they screw with us.”
Carvi sucked in air through his teeth.
“That’d be a yes,” I said. “Carvi, would that be worse?”
“Yes!” he said. “That would be worst case scenario.”
“Why?” I asked.
“Because then we’d have no way of tracking them,” Quil said.
I looked between the guys. “Explain?”
“If it was done here, we can track the person, eventually,” Carvi said. “They’re still here. Even if we can’t get that deficit back, that person can pay for it with their own energy once Karma knows who it is and what they did. If it’s in another world, we can’t track it. I don’t know how to travel between realities. And even if I did, how do you track something across infinity?”
I blinked at him.
If he was waiting for an answer, he was going a long time without breathing.
Not like he needed to.
I took a long sip of coffee.
“Maybe we couldn’t,” AB said, “but those witches you mentioned could, right?”
“Probably,” Carvi said. “I have no way of getting in touch with them though. They vanished. They were supposed to come back and never did. Which was one reason I was thinking they may have been the ones back then to set off the imbalance.”
“How did Karma fix it back then?” I asked. “If it was from an imbalance like that, where the people weren’t here anymore to get to to offset the balance, or whatever, I think that made sense… anyway, how did she fix it then?”
“She had to twist a lot of fate around it. And she said there was extra energy put in that helped. She never told me what.”
“Can we call her back and ask?”
He shook his head. “She wouldn’t answer me back then and I’m pretty sure she won’t now. I asked. She accused me back then and I demanded to know and she, that petty bitch, took pleasure in not telling me.”
I wrinkled my nose at him. “I told ya, stop-”
He held up a hand and my lips clamped shut. “No, lea,” he said, “you don’t get to lecture me. I did nothing wrong. She was being petty then and she is being petty now. She is a being with power who has decided, instead of being helpful, which would benefit all, including her, that she is going to dump this on us without whatever information she has that would be helpful, to spite me, even if she gets fired.”
He paused, staring me down.
I couldn’t look away.
“Carvi,” I said mentally, “you broke her heart.”
“I realize that,” he said out loud. “But instead of crying or even just getting back at me, she is taking it out on all of us. Fate is spiraling out around here, and we can all be hit by it at any second. We are not above it like she is.”
“What about Karma?” AB asked, making Carvi look away from me and at her.
I sagged in my chair.
I hated it when he did that.
“What about her?” Quil asked.
“What if someone did something to Karma?” AB asked. “What if this is directed against her and, since she’s supposed to be outside of it, she somehow created this? I mean, since she’s supposed to be outside of fate, if something dragged her into fate, would it do this?”
Carvi shook his head. “Only way that theory would work, only way it’d have anything to do with her, is if someone killed her or tried to, and she traveled back in time, but she knows how to balance her energies. Also, she would die before she’d risk that. She knows it isn’t worth it.”
“You sure?” AB asked. “You just said she’s willing to let us all die, possibly part or all of Alabama or the South, without helping however she could have, just to spite you. You sure she wouldn’t do something to save her own life? If she was going to die?”
Carvi stared at her and she stared back, setting her small chin and crossing her arms.
“I’m just saying,” she finally said, holding up her hands.
“Would she do something that could set this off if it’d screw you over?” Quil asked.
Carvi switched the look to him and Quil met his eyes, calm as anything.
“I’m asking the question, Carvagio,” Quil said. “Would she do that? Did you hurt her that badly?”
Carvi sighed. “I don’t know. We had a fling over a hundred years ago, things ended, and she was upset I was leaving. Then when we ran into each other twenty-five odd years ago, she seemed okay with me, until she wasn’t.”
“What happened?” I asked, smirking.
Cuz we all knew he did something.
“He slept with someone else,” AB said, voice light. “Oh my god, it’s just like me with my ex, isn’t it? Ran into each other again, everybody’s cool with each other, but she still liked you, maybe flirted a little. I’m right, aren’t I?”
Carvi looked at her. “I’m not above spanking you again just for being insightful.”
She grinned big and bright and he smiled back.
She blushed.
>
Oh dear, she really liked him.
“She liked you and then you had sex with someone else,” I said. “After like seventy years, that seems kinda extreme.”
“Maybe for her to still have feelings for him,” AB said. “But what if she was there and they hung out and she got feelings again. Maybe she wasn’t hanging onto what happened way back then, but fell for him again, and he didn’t want her, and then she… What did she do? I was going to guess she flipped out, but I don’t actually know.”
“She walked in on me and someone else,” Carvi said. “She did not take it well and stormed out. After that… things got messy after that. I’ve wondered if she had something to do with how badly things went, to get back at me.”
I did a double take.
“Wait!” I half screamed, throwing my hands up. “Was this all the stuff I saw about that bar you worked at? The Fae attacking and…” I gulped down bile and put the cookie down. “And the massacre, and the… the twins who worked there?”
Carvi pressed his lips together and nodded.
“What happened?” AB asked in a small voice.
“I was working in a bar,” Carvi said after a moment, “taking a break from the vampire world, from being the king. Left Milo to watch things and took a year off. I met a woman and fell in love with her. She turned out to be a Fae. Karma found out I was with her, and not just with her, but in love and about to marry her. That’s when she stormed out.”
Carvi’s face and voice were completely blank, like there was nothing there and he was talkin’ about the weather in China or something.
“Kari showed her true colors and turned on me. I killed her, then her clan came for revenge. They started with my bar; they had the whole town under siege. The witches arrived around that time. They helped me fight her people off, but…”
He wrinkled his forehead like he was trying to remember. “They showed up after I killed Kari, but before the bar was attacked. They asked me for help finding a friend of theirs. When I got back, everything seemed fine, but then the bar was attacked. They showed up after that and helped me defend the town. We… I have seen wars. This wasn’t war, this was civilians who had some experience with guns and maybe a few had a bit of a gift for magic, trying to hold off a horde of Fae.”
“How many died?” AB asked.
Carvi pulled out the pack of cigarettes and knocked them against his hand before drawing one out.
He lit it with a flick of his finger.
Could he always do that and just used the lighter to keep people from knowing it?
Then why wasn’t he bothering now?
He took a drag and breathed out slowly.
“Too many,” he finally said. “We would have been wiped out if the witches hadn’t come back. They put up a shield and it gave us a chance, and we wiped the Fae out instead. There was some drama after that. A demon the Fae hired came back later, took one of the witches, then came for me.”
He pointed to the scar that still drew a jagged few inches down the side of his skull, just past his ear. “That’s where I got this.”
We all stared in silence at him.
“When did the imbalance happen?” Quil asked.
“I don’t know,” Carvi said. “I didn’t know there was one back then. But it was probably around the time Karma was there. Probably why she was there.”
“Could this possibly be related?” I asked. “Since it is in Alabama again?”
“Different part of Alabama, different people around here, and twenty-five years or so difference.” Carvi shook his head. “I don’t think so.”
“Okay,” I said, “but however she fixed it back then might help us figure this out.”
“You said you went back in time back then,” AB said, staring at Carvi as he took another drag. “Why?”
Carvi stared at her, breathing out a cloud of smoke.
“You’re not going to answer?” she asked.
“No,” he said. “You don’t need to know.”
“If this is time travel related, we may need to know how you did it,” I said.
He stared at me. “Very specific spells. I can replicate if need be; however, that has nothing to do with the why.”
He had a point.
“The why could give us insight into why someone would do it now,” AB said, her voice small, like she wanted to keep him calm.
“Same reasons people do anything,” Carvi said. “Love, hate, or fear.”
Yeah, that was helpful.
“Can you take me to whatever layer or whatever we call it, to see these types of spells?” I asked.
He looked at me.
“You said it was like the astral plane, but not. Can you take me there?”
“Dimensions,” he said. “Different dimensions are within one reality, and, possibly.”
I squinted at him.
Wait a second.
“Is it the same place you took me to when you were checking the home office?” I asked.
He nodded. “Very good, lea.”
“What do we call that dimension?”
He just smiled.
And took another deep drag.
Grrrrrrrrr.
“I’m getting sick of y’all not answering me, or being all riddley… speaking in riddles, you know what I mean!” I said.
I took another drag of coffee and picked back up my cookie, popping the rest of it in my mouth.
Yummmmm.
I’d learn how to bake just to be able to make these.
“You don’t get to know,” Carvi said. “It’s a, you can only know it if you figure it out for yourself kind of thing.”
“You’ve said that before.”
“And I meant it.”
I shrugged, turning in my seat. “AB, what do you know about different dimensions?”
She smiled, and Carvi chuckled.
“Smart girl,” Carvi said.
AB shrugged. “I don’t know. There’s tons of them. There’s different layers within them. What do you want to know?”
“What the different ones are called?”
“Oh man.” She shook her head. “There’s so many. Not an infinite amount like alternate realities, but still, there’s going to be a lot. I couldn’t name them all. The ones humans can get to… like easily, are the ones like the astral plane and limbo. But after that.” She blew out a puff of air. “You have all the different heavenly layers, the hell ones, the dark ones…”
She paused and looked at Carvi. “Are those real, by the way? My studies say they are, but, that seems a little too much for me.”
“Are what real?”
Geez, he was being obtuse!
“Heaven, hell, all that,” AB asked, giving him a smirk.
So she thought he was being difficult too.
Carvi shrugged. “What do your studies say?”
“That’s a yes,” she said. “There’s many different layers souls go to after they die, if they don’t get stuck. The theory is there’s a lot of different ones to accommodate different beliefs, but nobody stays there, that they are reincarnated. And you only are there as long as you want to be or believe you should be.”
“Huh?” I asked, taking another long drag.
This was all way too much for my foggy brain.
“Like if you were horrible in this life,” AB said. “Like Stalin, or like a serial killer. Those guys would be in a hell dimension to pay for their sins, until they didn’t believe they should be anymore. Then they’d be reincarnated, but as something small, so they could work their way back up. But all this is just theory. It’s not real… unless it is.”
Carvi shrugged. “I can neither confirm nor deny that is how it works after death. I can say, the mortal mind could not take these higher planes of existence.”
He paused as he took a drag and winked at me. “Except Ariana could.”
“What?” Quil snapped, looking at me. “How did you test that? You took her there knowing what it’d do to her!”
&
nbsp; “No.” Carvi held up a hand. “She was pissed and stupidly followed me in when I told her to stay. I grabbed her to throw her back out, but she was fine. She couldn’t comprehend it, so she only saw what her brain interpreted it as, which was a chess board, but her mind was fully intact.”
“Well,” Carvi said, shrugged, “as in tact as it was before.”
“Hey!” I said.
“You’re cute when you’re mad.” Carvi tossed his butt on the floor and stomped it out.
I stared at him.
“Yes, lea?”
“You aren’t gonna clean that up?”
“I may.”
He was on one tonight, wasn’t he?
Maybe the talk about his bar and town set him off. He didn’t like focusing on bad things like that. Look how he acted whenever I brought up Milo.
“You,” I said, shaking my head.
I got up and bent down to grab it in front of Carvi, staring up at him as I went.
He grinned and stared at my chest as I did.
“Stop that!” I said mentally.
He blinked at me as I stood up.
“You can’t flirt with me like that in front of AB,” I said.
“She knows what we are, lea.”
“She likes you, Carvi.”
“And I like her. I showed her how much about two hours ago. She’s fine. I am keeping a very close eye on her emotional state. Right now, she’s amused and wondering if she should be jealous, but she’s not.”
“You sure?”
“Positive.”
I nodded and walked to the trash to toss the cig.
“So, what do we know are possibilities?” I asked as I turned back around and held up a hand, flicking up a finger.
“We have time travel.” I put up another. “Somebody ripping into another reality and sending energy out or losing it on accident or whatever.” Put up the third. “Then someone bringing somebody back from the dead, which I’m guessing is bigger than putting them back like we did.” And put up the last finger. “And someone from another reality ripping into this one and taking energy out, which means we’d be screwed.”
“Sounds about right,” Quil said. “How do we know putting the men back on Halloween didn’t trigger this?”
“Because I balanced the energies there,” Carvi said. “And that wasn’t as big a deal as dragging the soul back from one of the afterlife dimensions. The souls were tied to limbo and they had not moved on. The spell kept them from doing so. That wasn’t so much bringing them back from the dead as it was fixing bodies and putting souls that weren’t actually dead back in. If that makes sense.”