Page 15 of The Goddess is Angry
“My Uncle Bjorn had sex with my Aunt Ravyn and made my cousin Freydis, who is also a seer. There was an unfortunate incident with a horse and now my cousin can see the future. She mostly sees my love life, but I’m pretty sure this vision was about you.”
That wasa lot,but I didn’t see what that had to do with me. Azren was rarely in the dining hall except for lunch, but they seemed to be here tonight. They zeroed in on us right away and floated over to our table. I knew Azren was tutoring her, but she didn’t know who I was to Azren. Azren might be a little more interested in her than I would have liked, but they wouldn’t have told her my business.
I knew that look. Azren didn’t know if this was a good thing or we were about to start brawling and he’d have to heal my venom from her system so she didn’t die.
“What’s going on here?” Azren purred.
“Some nonsense about cousins and Viking seers.”
“Not nonsense. Her Uncle Bjorn is an amazing seer. The rest of the gods didn’t even attempt to create them because they thought flooding them with visions of the future would drive them insane. Lilith made it a possibility with her demons with the right training and Loki figured out the recipe to make seers without driving them insane. If Bjorn or his daughter has a message for you, then you should listen,” Azren said, sitting next to me.
“You can pass your message, but I’m not dating you if it’s about your love life again.”
George just rolled her eyes.
“Who says I want to date you, either? You’re mean for absolutely no reason. I haven’t done shit to you. Anyway, my cousin says I’m looking for answers and so is the snake. We’re only going to find those answers by working as a team. Now that I’ve actually spoken to you, I’m not looking forward to it any more than you are. Theonlyreason I sat there while you were being rude to me for no reason is because the only way I can figure out the answers to what I want is to help you find yours.”
“Guess you can’t kill me now!” I sneered.
“What the fuck are you talking about? I would have just got up, left, and avoided you after that. What kind of psycho kills someone for being rude? Even my dad just turns them into bugs for a little while unless they hurt someone. What in actual fuck is wrong with you?”
“I’ll bet the first thing you ask if I agree to work with you is to meet in my dorm room so you can steal hair from my brush or scour around for my toenail.”
“First of all, that’s fucking gross. Secondly, my dad has been teaching students to safely use and fight Dark Magic. I grew up in the Library of the Profane. If I had doneanythingdownstairs to learn magic my parents didn’t teach me, my mom would have lost her job and we would have lost our home. Whatexactlyabout any of that makes you think I’m the kind of person who is interested in stealing hair and toenails?”
“Drake?” Azren said. “She’s right. Not all witches are bad, just like not every Basilisk are serial killers. You know they once said that to justify killing your kind. I know your train of thought right now is that you have other options to find out what you need, but seers get their visions from the Fates for a reason. No god can compete with that. George is how you get your answers and I can vouch for her. I think the two answers are tied together.”
Fuck my life. Azren was my mentor and had never steered me wrong before. They even helped me with girls back on their realm. They wouldn’t tell me to work with a witch unless it was safe.
But why did it have to be the witch that was stealing Azren from me?
george
Drake was infuriating. I knew Freydis couldn’t control her visions, but I think I preferred her cryptic messages that a guy I was into was actually a dickface to this one. Kaylee and Lindsay Krauss didn’t like me because of my relationship with Minerva and they ended up losing out because theirs was lacking. There were other people who didn’t like me but it was usually because I worked my ass off at school and dodgeball and they wanted me to be mediocre.
Drake didn’t even have a good reason for hating me. He thought I was a witch, so I was automatically lumped in with witches from a long time ago who did terrible things to Basilisks. Azren talked him into working with us, but Drake couldn’t be bothered to tell me what I was supposed to be helping him figure out before he stormed out of the dining hall.
“How am I supposed to work with him?” I ranted in my dorm room. “He hates modern witches because of something that was done in the past. I don’t even know what I’m supposed to be helping him with!”
“Because he’s not ready to tell you,” Matilda said. “It was different for my dad because the demon who bought him when he was young treated him like a son. It was different for my grandparents. They were bought and raised to be slaves. They were forced to have babies with people they didn’t know to make someone rich and their babies were immediately taken away from them.
“The Hellhounds are free now and have the same rights as demons, but that didn’t erase their trauma. Some of them went to therapy so they could be in the same room with demons without killing them. Some didn’t and never really got over it, so they avoid going to places a lot of demons would be. It’s not just the demons that owned them and mistreated them. It’salldemons.
“You don’t know Drake or what his past is.Youare not even a witch, but you’ve been bullied by a few. It’s not outside the realm of possibility that he went through something terrible with witches. I talked to him in magical combat when he was sparring with Oscar. He was relaxed and having fun.
“You have two choices here. You can keep pretending to be a witch and show him that not all witches are after his parts or you can make an exception for him and take off your necklace in front of him and let him see the truth,” Matilda said.
“You’re going to have to pick fast, cupcake,” Mags said. “We might not know what Drake is trying to figure out, but you’re trying to figure out who murdered Fleur and stop it from happening again.”
“I wish the demons hadn’t trained Freydis to be so fucking cryptic,” I sighed.
Because it would really help me if I knew what Drake was trying to figure out and how it was tied to the campus murders. Since that the Fates had spoken through my cousin, stopping the campus murders was now on my shoulders instead of Azren’s and I couldn’t do it without helping a rude Basilisk who hated me for something I didn’t even do.
“That’s a safety measure. I was visiting Hell with Dad when Freydis was there studying. The Hell seers are different from Freydis and Uncle Bjorn, but it’s this massive responsibility. The Fates give the seers the visions so they can change them. If they give someone the entire vision, they’ll focus on the wrong things. They all think changing one minor detail will make the outcome go in their favor. If you give it to them like a riddle, they focus on the big picture and the tiny details. They are more likely to get successful results changing the vision.”
I threw up my hands.
“She just said I needed to work with the snake. That could have been the only Basilisk at the academy or a metaphor. Freydis has a massive imagination, and she keeps begging to join smutty book club. Remember when she called me when I was thinking about losing my virginity? All she said wasdon’t trust the weasel.She likes animal metaphors. What if I made a whole-ass scene in the dining hall and she didn’t even mean Drake?”
