“And take this,” I said.I slid her the Tarot card.Primed with a self-immolation spell.And told her only to use it in emergencies.
“Thank you,” the past me said, and now she looked like Grynfelda.
“Be careful!”I said.“I’ll stay on the truck.”
And off past-me walked, on the way to skin her ankles and ass after using a shotgun.That, of course, was when I realized how badly I’d messed up.When the actual Grynfelda tapped me on the shoulder.
“You did WHAT?”Vic screamed back in the Cruiser.
“I did the disguise transfer,” I said.“And I gave the past-me the Tarot card.”
“Oh God,” Vic said.“You realize that if past-you decides to use it—for instance, maybe because we change the timeline in any particular way whatsoever, you’re fucked.You know that, right?Thirty-some odd times going around and around and this has never happened once.Anything we do to save you now will definitely create another Paradox.”
“You said to complete the bootstrap,” I said.
“Oh, Stacey.You know what this means, right?”
“What?”I asked though I was afraid I already knew.
“This is our only chance to fix things now,” he said.“We’re all out of extra lives.”
I breathed in.Breathed out.Considered this.
“Then we better make this last one count,” I said.
Chapter8
“So that’s why you couldn’t work this out any more favorably than had already happened,” Judge Volkheim said.
“We were timeline-locked on this last one,” I said.
“Wasn’t Eddie the one on the stand?”Brynholf asked.“Can you correlate this happening?”
“I do remember Stacey in that Grynfelda disguise being weird about something,” Eddie said.“And she was capable of ordering me around.I remember the conversation we had, actually.What she said is how it happened.”
“And then what happened next?”Brynholf asked.
Vicand I drove past a flock of shadowy Tazmynes on some poles.Vic stared at them.
“They’re still comatose.They won’t trigger at the moment because of the aura I have around me.They’re more dangerous when they don’t have a form,” he said.“Then they’re beings of pure shadow.If only there were some way to make them less threatening…”
“Did you miss out on all that the last time around?”I asked.
“I admit Tazmynes are minor creatures I have no issues dispatching,” Vic said.“So I personally haven’t had to pay attention to them.Do you have any ideas?All it would take is a stray thought to trigger them into physical forms.”
“Hear me out,” I said.I don’t know why I said it, other than being really paranoid about bootstraps.“What if we make them ducks?Can you do that?”
He stared at me strangely.
“What—why?”
“Because ducks are non-threatening?”I asked.
“I mean.I guess.I was thinking flies or something.”
“Ducks are probably better,” I said.
He nodded, chanting something into his cupped hands, he released a ball of purple plasm that slowly hovered like a bubble up to the power lines.With a pop noise, each of the Tazmynes slowly burst into physical forms, feathers flying as the darkness around them imploded into their new bodies.I stared up at my old foes and considered that sometimes things only make sense because they made sense at some other point.
