Reg looked at Harrison, her mouth dropping open in disbelief. “Do you think that I released him on purpose? I had no idea that was what was in the closet. I thought… maybe there was something valuable there. I didn’t know it was Weston! Did you know?”
He shrugged. “That was the most likely outcome.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I assumed you knew.”
“How would I know?”
Harrison’s brows lowered slightly as he thought about it. “This is where the breadcrumbs led,” he said slowly. “Didn’t you know they would lead to him?”
Reg dug the sharp knuckles of her fist into her forehead, trying to fend off the headache starting between her eyes. “I didn’t know! Why didn’t you say something to me? If you had told me, then I would have been able to make an informed choice!”
“I told you that you came here because of him. That you could feel his imprint here. I told you that the path led from your house to this. I told you that you had the keys to open the door.” He shook his head. “I did tell you, Reg.”
“You need to… not assume that I know what you mean. You need to tell me clearly, like we’re talking right now. Tell me ‘Weston is probably in the closet and if you use the key to open it, you will release him.’”
Harrison scratched an eyebrow, then nodded. He curled his mustache around his index fingers and released the ends again. “Weston is probably in the closet—” he started out.
“It’s too late now; I already let him out!”
“Well, yes.”
“You were supposed to tell me that before I let him out.”
“To be fair, you didn’t tell me that until after.”
Reg growled in frustration. Harrison scratched the back of his neck. “There is a problem.”
“What?”
“When Weston was previously free… his power was balanced by Destine’s.”
“Yeah?”
“But now…” Harrison fluttered his fingers at the cats. “Destine’s power has been divided. And most of it consumed by your spirit-eater.”
“He’s not my spirit-eater.”
Harrison shrugged, his expression doubtful. “But he is.”
“He took most of the Witch Doctor’s powers,” Reg attempted to move on from the argument about whether Corvin was hers or not. “All except what the Witch Doctor was able to retain when he went into the draugrs. So what does that mean? Corvin needs to fight Weston?”
“They do not need to fight… as long as their powers are balanced.”
“Okay… what then? What does he need to do?”
“Perhaps, as you said, we should tell him directly.”
“Yeah, we probably—”
Reg blinked at Corvin, standing in front of her. He stared back at her. He had a stick razor in his hand, held close to his face as he leaned forward. There was shaving cream layered thickly over his face like a banana cream pie.
Corvin straightened up and looked around the room. His eyes took in Reg, Harrison, and the cats. Looking through the doorway, Reg could still see Francesca in the kitchen. She clearly did not want anything to do with the drama Reg and Harrison were in the midst of.
“Regina…” Corvin greeted. “Nice to see you again…”
“I’m sorry. It wasn’t my idea. He just… poofed you here.”
“I see.”
“Your power is great,” Harrison observed. “But you do not yet have it under control. You struggle to master it.”
Corvin darted a look at Harrison, then shook his head at Reg, his eyes indicating his confusion.
“It’s… it’s about Weston,” Reg said.
“Do we now know exactly who Weston is?”
“Um… I guess he was my father. An immortal. He was bound. And now… he is free again.”
“Regina released him,” Harrison contributed helpfully.
“Uh… yeah. I guess I did. But it wasn’t intentional. It would have helped if someone had given me all of the information. If someone knew how to give a straight answer to a question.”
“Someone did not,” Harrison agreed with a sober nod of agreement.
Corvin’s eyebrows were up as he tried to take all of this in and get caught up on what was going on. “Okay, then. You’ve released an immortal from his exile. I assume that’s going to be a problem.”
“His power is no longer opposed,” Harrison explained. “When he was last loose, he was counterbalanced by Destine. But since your defeat of Destine…”
“He is no longer in the equation,” Corvin contributed.
Harrison was nodding.
“But wait a minute,” Reg interrupted. “If the Witch Doctor was the evil force, and he counterbalanced Weston, then Weston is the good guy, and if the Witch Doctor is not opposing him, that is a good thing, not a bad thing. He can… do good without worrying about being stopped by the Witch Doctor. Isn’t that right?”
“Mmm…” Harrison pursed his lips and shook his head slowly. “No, that is not right.”
Reg sighed in exasperation. “Why not? Doesn’t that make sense?”
“It is not a matter of good and bad,” Corvin said. “I think that rather, it is an issue of having absolute power. You’ve heard the expression that power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”
“You’re afraid he is going to take over the world?” Reg put the question to Harrison. “Is that what you’re talking about?”
Harrison looked down at her. “Humans do have strange ideas of their importance in the universe.”
“Explain to me what he is going to do, then.”
Harrison stared at her for a moment, then looked at Corvin. “In some cases, words do not suffice,” he said helplessly. “We will go to him.”
Before Reg could protest or could prepare herself, the room changed around them. Instead of being in Francesca’s living room, they were in a tiny, foul-smelling apartment. Little more than a flop house, it was covered with filth, the walls spattered and stained with unidentifiable matter, garbage on the floor, and the smell of rats permeating the air.
“Where are we?” Corvin asked softly.
There was a hard knot of iron in Reg’s stomach. “I think… I don’t know. Please get us out of here,” she begged.
Corvin gave her an odd look. Reg pressed her knuckle into her teeth. She did not want to be there. It wasn’t fair of Harrison to bring her there. Or for Weston to be there. He had run away. He had not stayed around to see her born or to protect her or Norma Jean. He had disappeared and had not been a part of either of their lives.
But now Norma Jean sat on one of the chairs, giggling and talking animatedly. The person that she was talking to was Weston. He leaned over her attentively, a big smile on his face, treating her as if she were a princess.
Norma Jean was missing teeth, and what she still had were rotting. Her hair was brittle and falling out. She was not the lovely lady she claimed to have been when she left her home as a teenager to start a life on her own. The streets had seen to her quick decline and the loss of her youth, beauty, and health. Reg didn’t understand why Weston was treating her as if she still had those things. Maybe in his eyes, she was something different. Perhaps he could see her the way that she had been.
“This is wrong,” Reg said anxiously. She could no longer hear Norma Jean’s voice in her head. Norma Jean had been a resident there for so long that Reg wasn’t sure what to do without her there. Had Norma Jean been returned to life? Was that what Weston had done?
“Her name is Regina,” Norma Jean was saying to Weston, not inside Regina’s head, but outside of it. “She is just a little thing. You have to meet her.”
“No,” Regina protested. “No, this isn’t right. Norma Jean is dead. This isn’t happening.”
“I don’t know if this really is happening,” Corvin cautioned. “It might just be a vision…”
“She is really there. She isn’t inside of me anymore. She’s alive. That can’t be. Did we go back in time?” Regina looked around the room, trying to remember the place she had lived before going into foster care. She had been so young. She looked around, shaking her head, trying to match it to the imprint in her brain.
“Where is she?” Norma Jean asked, her voice growing more strident. “Are you hiding again, you silly girl? She’s always squeezing into the smallest spaces, hiding away like a mouse.”
Weston straightened up. He walked confidently across the apartment to the kitchenette. There wasn’t a separate kitchen, no separate food preparation or eating area. More like a hotel room, just a few cupboards and a counter for a hot plate. Reg hugged herself tightly.
“No,” she protested, “no, no, no!”
Weston opened one of the lower cupboard doors. Regina saw the pale, dirty little red-haired girl pressed into the corner. The child covered her face as if that would keep Weston from seeing her. Weston reached down and wrapped his long fingers around her body, picking her up. She was a tiny waif of a thing; it took no effort for him to lift her.
“Stop. You need to stop him! This isn’t right. This isn’t the way it happened.”
“If you don’t change things, this is the way it happened,” Harrison said.
“That doesn’t make any sense! This isn’t what happened. You protected me. You made it so that the Witch Doctor couldn’t find me.”
“The Witch Doctor is no longer here,” Harrison explained. “That means that Weston could come. He could see you and affect the course of your life.”
“No! He wasn’t here. He abandoned us.” Reg was frantic. They had to stop Weston from changing everything.
“Isn’t this what you want?” Corvin asked as he scraped the shaving cream from his face into the sink. “Don’t you want him to protect you and your mother?”
Reg pressed her fingers to her temples. How many times over the years had she dreamed of being rescued by her father or by anyone? She had longed for someone to appear in her life and whisk her away to safety. She even prayed for her mother to be returned to life so that she could go back to a stable home and not have to be shuffled from place to place in foster care. Now, if she were to believe Harrison, that could all change. The past could be changed. Weston could rescue them and she could have what she’d always wished for.
But what would that mean?
If Reg stayed with Norma Jean instead of going into foster care, would Reg still be the same person? Would she be wiping out her entire existence? And would staying with Norma Jean be better than foster care? She’d had to deal with a lot of disruption and abuse in foster care, but she knew Norma Jean was just as abusive. Reg would live in abject poverty, moving from flophouse to shelter to sleeping rough on the street. There had been good foster homes, parents who had tried their best to give her what she needed and help her to heal the wounds of the past, even if Reg had always proven to be too difficult a case and had not been able to stay anywhere long-term. There had been therapists and specialists and even hospitalization. Staying with Norma Jean would have meant losing all of those supports.
Staying with Norma Jean would not have been an idyllic life. Norma Jean had just been her first, most traumatic loss, the one from which she had always been trying to recover.