Carling picked up the scroll and stood as well. “I sketched the cavern walls several times and after I transitioned, I tried to find out as much as I could about her. But there were so many Egyptian gods and goddesses, and the truth was often so mangled it was impossible to pinpoint their origins. Many of them were just folktales. I was never convinced she actually existed outside of the priestess’s imagination and in the end I gave up searching for her.” She studied Rune’s face curiously. “What was she like?”
He shook his head. “Being around her was like tripping on a bad dose of LSD. Not that I would know what that was like.” He offered her a bland smile. Carling gave a ghost of a laugh, and he paused to savor the quiet, husky sound before continuing. “She was filled with as many riddles and psychoses as the Sphinx. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if someone told me the legend of the Sphinx was modeled after her. She was always getting her tenses . . .”
Rune’s voice trailed away. Carling waited, watching his arrested expression. She prompted, “What?”
He came back from where he had gone with an internal click that brought his sharp, focused gaze in contact with hers. “She was always getting her tenses mixed up,” he said. “The past, the present and the future.”
“Getting her tenses mixed up?” Carling sucked in a breath. Her hand quested out, and he gripped it with his. She whispered, “What if the beginning of Vampyrism really did start with her? She might have suffered from the same kinds of episodes.”
“Don’t get your hopes up too high,” he murmured gently. “Her brain might have just been on permanent scramble, and anyway, she’s most likely gone now.”
She nodded, although he wasn’t sure how much she was actually paying attention. “We need to try to find out what happened to her.”
“Yes,” he said. She withdrew her hand and he stepped back, allowing her the space to move. She strode back to the cottage’s main room and he followed, watching the graceful sway of Carling’s hips moving in front of him as he explored the strange terrain they found themselves in. “About that second opinion I mentioned. There’s someone I would like to consult on all this, if you don’t mind.”
Carling set the scroll on the table and collected a few things from a nearby shelf, a couple of candlesticks, along with an empty marble mortar and pestle. She opened the scroll again and anchored it flat by using the pieces. Then she settled in her chair to study the ancient drawing in the encroaching shadows of early evening as curiously as if someone else had sketched it.
“I don’t mind, if you think it will help,” she said. “As long as whoever it is can be discreet.”
“She’s a pathologist and a medusa,” Rune said. He settled into his former position, leaning back against the table beside her. “So she has a certain point of view that I think might be useful.”
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.”