Page 30 of The Goddess is Fierce
I was glad he wasn’t married anymore because I wanted to keep him.
baldur
. . .
Iwas about to face the man who was responsible for my death. I knew I should probably be furious at him. It probably wasn’t normal that I didn’t even want to hit him. It wouldn’t make me feel better and it wouldn’t change anything I went through. It felt bad holding onto any kind of negativity being angry about it.
I had an amazing support system after centuries of isolation and loneliness when I didn’t know who I was. My wife may have given up on me, but the rest of my family didn’t. My father said he and my mother were still very much in love, but they set up shop on two different realms just in case I came back onone. They met once a week on either realm to catch up and be together. I had several siblings who missed me, too.
And then there was Freya. I was honestly feeling bad about the fact that I didn’t remember a thing about her because she was helping me a lot. She had changed my diapers when I was a baby, but she rarely talked about that. Freya was probably one of the few, if theonlygod who got what I was going through for the most part.
Freya had an arrangement with Azren to have her essence dropped in a stillborn baby. She lived without magicormemories of being Freya until she turned eighteen and her witch magic came in. She didn’t always end up with a ton of magic or the greatest families. Freya thought she was going insane until Muninn showed up and made her earn her memories back.
Her mortal bodies had technically died more times than I had. She told me it sucked and a few times, she got murdered for no reason, too. Odin’s admission of what he had done to Loki and Freya sharing some of the reasons someone killed her when she was living in a mortal body were why it was easier for me to just want to forgive Loki and move on.
Loki appeared in a flash of flame and shot his wife a look.
“Never mention the kind of spankings I like in the same sentence with what’s about to go down. I’ve got this coming and I have to sit back and not even use my safe word.”
I asked Odin and Freya a lot of questions about Loki since I couldn’t remember. They said they could never predict what he was going to do, but he could usually fix any problem and had been a fiercely loyal friend until they hurt his kids. Odin said he was always like my fun uncle. When I saw him standing in front of me with tears in his eyes looking at me like that, I had this intense feeling and a flash of something.
“Did we ever do anything together involving butterflies?” I asked.
Loki fell on his knees in front of me sobbing.
“When you were a kid, I’d take you to different realms after your lessons to watch the butterflies. You had to learn to fight and hunt. You hated both because you loathed the violence, so I took you to fields of flowers and let you play among the butterflies. I’m sorry. I’m not sorry for most of the shit I’ve done. I’m not sorry I tricked Thor into doing drag or all the times I stole Freya’s fabulous falcon cloak. I’m not sorry about the time I helped Balthazar coat Felix in magical glitter that wouldn’t come off. But I’m sorry about what I did to you and what happened after. I thought you’d come right back.”
“Dick,” Felix muttered.
“Are you starting to remember?” George asked.
“No. When I saw Loki, I didn’t remember dying or feeling angry with him. I felt this extreme feeling of happiness and saw butterflies. I know you’ve been giving me space and I appreciate it. This might all change when I get my memories back, but I’d rather just move past this. Staying angry with you just feels bad. I don’t want to do it.”
“You might not remember the past, but the old you would have said that, too,” Loki said, smiling at me.
The young seer tossed her white blonde hair over her shoulder and struck a pose.
“Yes, thank you for not beating the shit out of my dad. You both needed this, but you also need to hear our vision.”
“Freydis,” Ravyn warned.
“No, we really do,” I said. “I needed this, but I also really want to catch this killer and I’m guessing the vision was about that.”
I didn’t know the first thing about real seers. Freya taught a few of us Seidr, but it wasn’t the same. There were plenty of fakes around when I was still alive. George told me her Uncle Bjornwas a seer created by Loki and Freydis was her cousin who had her magic activated early from a horseback incident.
“First of all, this is a set vision,” Bjorn said. “If you try to change anything beyond what we tell you, it’s just going to happen to someone else. It’s vital you doeverythingwe tell you or this is going to end badly. Especially since it involves your dodgeball team.”
West gasped. I really liked that guy. He wasn’t just insanely enthusiastic for dodgeball. He really loved George.
“Tell us,” George said.
“We don’t know who is doing this. He’s cloaked in darkness and he knows shapeshifting just as well as Loki does. He’s moved his focus from witches to George now that he knows she’s a god. He’s been watching the dodgeball practices and I don’t think he realizes any injuries she gets on the field are because she’s letting herself get them to play fair.”
“That doesn’t make sense,” Ren said. “He wasn’t interested in her when everyone thought she was a witch. She would have been the strongest witch in the whole school. If his target has always been talented witches, why did he ignore her until he found out she was a god? As far as I know, her necklace would have hidden that from him, too.”
“It would,” Reyson said. “And the only reason I can recognize these fuckers when they’ve shapeshifted their aura is when they left their face the same. If we want to hide what we are, we can. The only people who would have known what George is are her family. You’re right. We are missing something. He wasn’t interested in her when he thought she was a witch, but he’s willing to piss off alotof gods now that he knows what she is.”
“How do we stop him?” I asked.
