13. Maeve

Even after I eventually stopped crying, sleep didn’t come as easily as I hoped. Chalk it up to jet lag, grief, and the excitement and mystery of an eventful night.

Plus, my new bedroom was bigger than the Crawford’s entire house, and it echoed in weird ways and a cold draft blew in from the window and my parents weren’t sleeping at the end of the hall and my body hummed with need after Arthur’s kiss and…and…

…and nothing was the way it should be.

I tossed and turned in my huge bed, mulling over everything the guys had told me. The memory of that guy – Kalen – licking my face made my skin crawl. I remembered his sharp claws raking at Rowan’s head, and how he’d moved so fast he’d appeared to be in two places at once.

Fairies.What nonsense. Fairies were from storybooks. The steamy romantasy novels Kelly loved to read (she had dozens of them stuffed under her mattress – the Crawfords would have a heart attack if they knew she read books containing both witchcraft and premarital sex) were filled with stories of alluring and tricksy fae. Fairies were some made up mythology – a way for farmers to explain away ruined crops or mothers to assuage their grief over babies that died of disease.

And yet…

The claws…the teeth…the weird green blood…the way they moved and spoke…

Corbin’s question bounced around my skull: If they weren’t fairies, then what the hell had I seen in the field last night?

They could be an undiscovered, undocumented species. That did pop up every now and then. What about that article in last month’s New Scientist about a new hominid species who supposedly interbred with homo sapiens during their migration to Australasia? I wondered what DNA testing on Kalen would reveal.

Last semester I completed a paper on theoretical physics that was absolutely fascinating. One of the tenants of theoretical physics was the idea of a multiverse – that everything within our cosmic horizon of 46-billion light years could just be one universe among many others. And in these different universes, physical properties we take for granted could be completely wackadoodle. There might not be any electrons. Gravity might work differently. Fairies might exist.

All things were possible in the multiverse.

I’d written my essay about the controversy around theoretical science and observation. We can’t observe the multiverse, so any theories made about it can’t be tested. There were scientists out there who believe this means it’s therefore not real science, and others who argue that we should rethink the whole scientific method to account for this.

“Should the success or failure of an idea come down to the fact it helps us account for the data?” I’d asked in the closing paragraph of my essay, indirectly quoting the cosmologist Sean Carroll. I got an A+ on that essay.

Maybe I just needed to apply a little theoretical physics to this fairy situation.

Perhaps when the guys talk about this gateway to the “fairy realm,” what they’re actually talking about is a wormhole that moves between the multiverse? That theory has been postulated many times, although it raises questions about Hawking radiation and the information paradox, but?—

—but it could explain how fairies can enter our world while not actually being observable.

Excitement bubbled inside me as the theory formed in my mind, and I started to ask myself questions after question to refine it. Did the wormholes only work one way? Was the existence of exotic matter from the other universe preventing the wormholes from collapsing the “protective magic” Corbin kept going on about? That would explain why only one fae might be able to go through at a time, but if more exotic matter stabilized a wormhole…

I rolled over and punched my pillow. Dammit. I was never going to sleep if I kept thinking about theoretical physics. I might as well give up now.

“Fine, you win,” I growled at the moon out the window. If I was going to spend the night thinking about wormholes and fae instead of getting my much needed sleep, then I was damn well going to arm myself with information.

I fished my laptop out of my bag, booted it up, and joined the castle wifi network FlynnIsAwesome. I could guess at who set that up.

I typed the words “theoretical physics existence of fairies” into the search bar, but an error box flashed up. I needed Briarwood’s wifi password.

Argh!In all the craziness, I hadn’t even thought to ask the guys for it. I slammed the laptop shut and shoved it across the desk.

I thought about Corbin’s library downstairs – all those shelves of old books, many of which he’d said had been in the castle since its earliest days. There probably wasn’t much about theoretical physics, but they might have observations of the fae from other residents of Briarwood I could use to form my theory.

Maybe I’ll even find observations from my mother.

I crawled back on the bed and hugged the comforter to my chest. With everything that had happened, I hadn’t really stopped to think about the fact that I was in my mother’s home. She had walked these same halls, maybe even slept in this very same room. Who was she, that enigmatic woman in the portrait?

Had she run into fairies, too?