Page 66 of Between Broomsticks and Beating Wings
“You have never been as sexy as you are right now,” I blurted, seeing ice and flames lick up her arms simultaneously. I wasn’t sure she was even aware she was doing it. I reached to grab her face, and when her arm grazed me, I hissed back in pain. I peered down to where the pain seared, finding an angry red welt on the back of my hand.
A burn.
“That’s not possible,” I breathed. “Kari, that’s not a false flame. You summoned real fire. Real fire in Helheim, the place where flame has never been.”
“I’m so sorry,” Kari said, shaking her hands out and diminishing the flame. “I hurt you.”
“You magnificent creature,” I whispered. “My flesh will heal, but your seidr will change the nine worlds forever.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
VESSEL FOR THE GODS
Kari
“What are you going to do?” Haddy asked, nervously biting her lower lip as she digested Odin’s appearance in Hel and all that had come with it.
“I don’t know, but we can’t stay here for much longer,” I said, glancing over my shoulder to see her reaction. My younger sister paused, an icicle in her hands. She pressed her lips together for a moment, and I thought she might start crying, the way she had when she left Midgard. After everything that went down yesterday between Odin and Rune, I didn’t think my heart could take her tears too.
“I understand, Kar,” she said. “It’s not very safe for you to stay here, but do you think it will be safer for you in Fólkvangr?” She looked from me to the basket in my hands I’d been using to collect odds and ends around Helheim to use as anchors in my spells.
I sat with her question for a moment, wondering if there was a safe place for me and Rune anywhere in the nine realms. Isighed in defeat and said, “No, not unless Freyja accepts me as her attendant and allows me to sit on her council.”
“And if she doesn’t?” Haddy asked.
I shrugged, swallowing thickly. “I can’t think about that, Had.”
“Is returning to Asgard what you truly want?” Haddy asked, but I didn’t blame her for her concern, or the stream of worried questions she spat my way. She wanted to make sure the decisions I was making weren’t going to end up with me killed by a god, and at this rate, there may be more than one competing to make the final blow.
“It is,” I answered honestly, twisting the handle of the basket in my hands as that knowledge, my ultimate truth, stared me in the face.
Haddy nodded, twirling the ice in her hand, as if the frozen thing were a toy. “Then you’ve got to figure it out. If Freyja has a test for you, you have to crush her, and everyone else’s, expectations. And I know you will.”
“You’re not mad I don’t plan to stay in Hel with you and the rest of the family?”
“Of course not! I didn’t expect,or want,to see you for a long time anyway. I had so many old woman jests prepared and everything. For when you finally got here, no sooner.”
I snorted a laugh, nudging her with my elbow. “Of course you did.”
“But seriously, Kari, if you want to go, you should. Anyway, if you go to Asgard, you can visit me! If you stayed on Midgard, you wouldn’t have been able to. We would’ve gone a lifetime without you.”
“Something tells me Odel and Malfrid would have been fine with that,” I said, the words sour on my tongue.
“That’s not true! They love you, Kar,” Haddy said with a little pout on her cute, pale face.
“Is that why they’ve been avoiding me like I’m a raider for the past three weeks?”
Haddy sighed, dropping the icicle she held, watching as it pierced the powdery snow. Her hand should have been frostbitten by now, but her skin was entirely unmarred. “They just…feel really bad about what they did. They’re embarrassed, so I think sometimes it’s easier for them to not see you at all. They’ll get over it, though. They’ll have to. You’re their older sister. Plus, it’s been giving us more time to chat.” She nudged me with a little smile playing on her lips, and I couldn’t help but smile back, despite my obvious disappointment the turn my relationship with my other sisters took.
“Speaking of, this is the chattiest you’ve ever been. You were so shy when you were alive. What happened?” I asked, shifting my weight, my thumb rubbing the wicker of my basket as I watched her expression harden.
“Yeah, well, there’s no point in being shy now, is there?” she said with a shrug and a straight smile. I hadn’t realized that comment would strike a nerve with her.
“Why’s that?”
“I wasted time on Midgard trying to figure out who I am. I stayed quiet and listened to what everyone else had to say because I thought it was more important than anything I could think up. It wasn’t until I met Rune that I started talking more. She started calling me ‘little mouse’, and I didn’t like that much. She told me I was dead, so what was the point in caring what people thought? She said it was no way to spend my eternal rest. And while I ran away from her and cried the rest of the day, I realized she had a point.”
“She made you cry?” I said, my fist tightening on my basket. I took a step toward her in the snow, as if to physically guard her.
