We ate in silence before getting dressed and tackling the office again. As we got going, I noticed her slipping back into the strange, contemplative mood she’d been in when she woke up. I didn’t pry, giving her the space she needed to work through whatever was going on inside her head. While she did, I flipped through her dad’s address book, checking every person by doing a search on my phone. Every name was benign—other lawyers, a plumber, family and friends who had no connections to anything more powerful than the accounting or marketing firms they worked for.
I put the book aside and nudged Maddy with my toe. “Hey? Space cadet? What’s going on in there?” I said, gesturing to her head.
She jumped, startled out of her reverie, then gave me a guilty smile. “It’s silly.”
It made me a little sad that she’d think anything she said would seem silly to me. “Out with it. I won’t think it’s dumb, I promise.”
Maddy let out a heavy sigh and took a minute to think before speaking. “Do you think reincarnation is real?”
That was definitely not where I thought this was going. She caught me off guard with the question, and I must have had a surprised look on my face. Maddy shook her head and blushed. “It’s stupid, I told you. You know what? Forget I said anything.”
I leaned forward and put a hand on her arm. “Wait. Sorry, but you sprung that on me with no warning. I wasn’t ready for intense spiritual matters, so I apologize. Now, again, reincarnation?”
Maddy rolled her eyes. “Right. Well? Do you think it’s real or not?”
“I’ll be totally honest. I’ve never given it a lot of thought. I think it’s possible. The very fact that shifters exist kind of puts everything on the table. Ghosts? Angels? Reincarnation? None of that sounds as crazy as people who can turn into animals on command, does it?”
Maddy laughed and bobbed her head back and forth. “Pretty good point.”
“Why is this on your mind, anyway?”
“I had another dream last night.”
“A nightmare?”
Maddy winced. “Sort of. Not like the others though. It was bad, but the entire time it felt like it was more of a memory. Like it really happened. You know how dreams always seem sort offuzzy and strange while they're going on? Like anything could happen at any second, and it would make total sense? Like, ‘oh my flashlight turned into a popsicle, or the car vanished, and now I’m floating along the highway two feet in the air’. No big deal, right?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, this felt totally real, exactly like a memory, but it wasn’t mine. I was in an old castle. There were men in a room having a secret meeting. They were talking about killing Edemas and his family. They were going to kill his oldest daughter, the princess, first. In my dream, I accidentally made a noise, and they chased me. One of them pushed me over the side of the banister, and I fell thirty feet. I… I died.”
I shook my head. “Wait. They were going to kill Edemas? So this was like three hundred years ago?”
Maddy nodded. “When I woke up, my wolf was really unhappy—sad and betrayed, completely distraught. Could my wolf have been reincarnated into me? Is she showing me memories of her past life?”
I had no clue if what she was saying was possible or if reincarnation even existed. If this was real, it opened a lot of deepdeepquestions about reality itself. I couldn’t take the time to dive into metaphysical philosophy. Maddy needed answers. Again I let myself wish that Kenneth were still alive. He might not know anything, but it would have been nice to ask the only true expert we’d known.
“It might be nothing,” Maddy said. “But it was just too vivid andrealto dismiss. That’s why I wanted to talk it out with you.”
“Right now, the only things we have to go on are the legends that were passed down in secret. We know Edemas had a ton of kids. The only ones the legends specifically mention are the two babies who were sent into hiding. Maybe there was anotherdaughter? The eldest child who was the first to die before the massive coup? It’s possible.”
Yes, it was possible, but the idea of that princess’s wolf being reincarnated into Maddy’s body was fairly crazy to think about. It almost made me dizzy. It was only a theory, though. Could we confirm it? How the hell would we be able to do that?
I rubbed a hand across my face. “Okay, let’s come back to this once we’ve finished working on this search. There are only so many things we can do at once. We find some information on your adoption, see if we can find your birth mother, then we think about the…the possibility of a reincarnated ghost wolf. Okay?”
Maddy nodded. “Yeah. Sounds good.”
We’d turned the office completely upside down. There was not a single thing we hadn’t looked through. Maddy had even flipped through every book on both massive bookshelves to see if anything had been tucked between the pages. All she found out was that her dad liked to use empty candy-bar wrappers as bookmarks. We moved on to her parents’ bedroom.
While Maddy went through the dresser drawers, I checked in the closet. There was a big cardboard box on the shelf above the hanging garments. Deciding to start there, I pulled the box down and lifted the lid. The first thing I saw was a thick envelope on the top of several photo albums. The hair at the back of my neck stood on end. My instincts told me we’d found something.
“Maddy?” I said, walking out of the bedroom with the envelope in one hand and the box in the other. “I think I found something.”
Maddy dropped what she was doing and hurried over to me. We dumped the contents of the envelope onto the bed and went through them. My initial excitement faded quickly. Theywerethe adoption papers. Everything Maddy’s parents had done to complete the process of becoming her parents. It told us nothingwe didn’t already know. Kenneth’s name was listed as the social worker. Maddy’s birth mother’s name was there, but it was her given name, no alias we could use to try and find her. Every line was cut and dry. We even flipped through the photo albums, and other than a walk down memory lane, there was nothing useful.
“Damn it.” I’d really thought there might have been some clue here.
Maddy gave her head a sad little shake. “I hate to say it, but I was pretty sure we’d never find anything here. We were grasping at straws.”
