Sitting at his work desk, Max flipped through half a dozen college-ruled papers filled top to bottom, front and back, with handwritten numbers. Spotting a familiar sequence, he pulled a page from the group and circled a string of digits—a Laplace transform; specifically, a probability distribution. Right before the transform, he recognized the vector equation that symbolized the Standard & Poor’s 500 Stock Market Index, then eight numbers he remembered from a previous vision which represented Boston Scientific. Would the company’s stock be going up soon? He scanned to the end of the transform—probability of one, so yes. By how much? The next number—seventeen percent. Max grabbed another numbers-laden page off the desk. Already marred with circles, exes, and arrows, he’d scrawled “Jackson Instruments” on the top. He compared this one with the Boston Scientific. Yup, his initial guess had been correct—
“You’re going to the shareholders’ meeting tomorrow, right?”
He looked up as Michael Beauford, CFO of Carressa Industries, stepped into his office. The older man’s craggy face wrinkled even more when he narrowed his eyes at Max. “Don’t start with excuses why you won’t be there, buddy boy.”
Max let his gaze drop back to his papers. “I’m extremely busy,” he lied. He had enough information from his most recent visions with Val to dispense nuggets of financial wisdom through the New Year. While pretending to work hard deciphering the markets for information he already had, he’d quietly begun tinkering with software code, trying to write a computer program that could guess the future on par with his visions. The damn thing wasn’t even close yet, but it kept him busy. At a minimum, he could point to the program if anyone started asking serious questions about how he could be so accurate. He slipped in a wrong prediction every once in a while to throw possible accounting sleuths off his scent—even wrote a program for that, too, to make it look more random.
When he had his fill of coding, he would spend the rest of the day setting up and pulling down backdoor accounts to anonymously funnel money to charities. All told, he wasn’t extremely busy, but he stayed busy enough puttering around the office doing things he liked, with no one to harass or antagonize him as his father had. In truth, he was the happiest he’d ever been. For the first time in his life, he enjoyed going to work.
Except for the goddamn meetings.
Michael scoffed, and Max looked up again to see him fold his arms over his chest as he fixed Max with one of his disapproving-dad stares. Time for a lecture. “For God’s sake, Max, you’re the majority shareholder. You can’t keep skipping these things. Sell your shares if you don’t like it. And why do we keep having this conversation?”
“Because you won’t accept reality.” If he sold his shares, he’d have a boss again. He’d killed the last one in a fit of rage. Sure, that last boss had been his horrible child-molesting father, which made it unlikely to ever happen again, but still. He’d rather not take the chance.
Max tapped his index fingers on the two number-covered sheets of paper. “Boston Scientific is about to acquire Jackson Instruments. Their stock will rise seventeen percent. Suggest to the board we buy into Boston Scientific. I don’t need to be there for that.”
Michael’s eyes flicked to the papers, his face falling into a deep frown. He knew what Max could do, but still couldn’t quite accept it despite indisputable evidence. Did he still think Max was crazy? That’d be some serious cognitive dissonance if he did, since Max had never been wrong. Whatever Michael thought, he’d kept Max’s secret and hadn’t recommitted the “unstable, spoiled rich man-child” to the psych ward—a moniker Max knew most members of the board called him behind his back, among worse things. In fact, Michael was the only one who didn’t treat him like a freak; ironic, given Michael was the only one who knew Max really was a freak.
Michael flinched with effort to look away from the impossible numbers. He sat down across from Max, his usual jovial smile returning. “How’s the new nanny?”
“He seems nice enough. I like him. Val might murder him, though, just to be safe.”
Michael chuckled. “It’s always like that at first. Gracie and I had nannies as soon as the kids were born, and she’d still twist her knickers in a bunch anytime the rug-rats were out of her sight for more than a few hours. Even now she worries if more than a week goes by and they don’t call. They’re in their thirties, for Pete’s sake. Pfft, mothers.”
“Val’s got reasons to be paranoid.” Max chewed his thumb and looked past Michael. She had her reasons, but they weren’t rational. Northwalk had left them alone for five years, when at any time the powerful cabal could have easily waltzed into the condo with guns blazing, grabbed the twins, and disappeared forever. But they hadn’t, so they must have gotten what they wanted from somewhere else. Seemed logical enough to him. In any case, his family couldn’t live in a fortress, or make their curses go away. Lucien might have developed a cure, but his research had disappeared when he died, probably reclaimed by the people who controlled him. All Max and Val could do was provide Simon and Lydia with the best home possible and shower them with love, which was more than his father ever did for him—
“Why don’t you bring the family over for dinner tonight?” Michael asked, interrupting Max’s train of thought. “Gracie’s making some new health crap from a recipe she found online. Don’t make me suffer alone.”
“Maybe. Josephine might come by this evening with her new boyfriend. She wants us to meet him, so I guess it’s serious this time.”
“Bring her, too. And a shotgun. That’s what big brothers are supposed to do, you know—scare the bejesus out of their little sister’s boyfriends.”
Max smiled as he gathered his papers back into a neat stack. “I think she can take care of herself.”
“That’s not the point. Christ, Max, you’re hopeless.” Michael stood. “See you tonight at seven—and at the shareholders’ meeting tomorrow, dammit.” After a finger-point for emphasis, he left.
Max shook his head and fired up the shredder behind his desk. Were other surrogate dads this much of a pain in the ass? He lowered one page into the rotating blades, destroying evidence that might lead to uncomfortable questions in case of an audit, then looked at his watch—ten to twelve. Good chance Aaron Zephyr had gone to lunch by now. If he swung by his office, Max could believably express “surprise” to find the analyst gone, then ask his secretary for his schedule to set up a meeting later. That should give Val something to chew on for a little while anyway.
Max lowered another paper into the shredder. Would she really stake Aaron out if he didn’t give her the schedule? Probably not with her mother in town in just a couple days, but Val tended toward the unpredictable, one of the many things he loved about her—
Wait—what is this? He jerked the half-eaten page out of the shredder to stare at the numbers again. One-two-seven, one-two-seven, one-two-seven, repeated throughout the page. He grabbed an intact paper off his desk. There it was again—one-two-seven, embedded throughout the page. How could he have missed this? He spread out the pages, placing them side by side. After he’d circled every instance of the one-two-seven sequence, he leaned back and took them all in as a whole, looking for a pattern or a numeric cypher.
Then he saw it. Rearranging the pages and accounting for both fronts and backs, the placement of the numbers actually spelled out a word—most of a word, since he’d shredded a page: N-E-V-E-R-M-O-.
Nevermore. As in, “Quoth the Raven ‘Nevermore,’” from “The Raven” by Edgar Allan Poe. What in the hell could that mean? Max almost laughed; the numbers told the future, but his subconscious interpreted them in the strangest ways sometimes. One-two-seven. Nevermore. He guessed it meant something bad. More than that, he had no idea.
Max sighed and dropped the rest of the papers into the shredder. Look out for one-two-seven. Like he didn’t have enough to worry about.