Chapter 27
Liz
I was twelve when my mom enrolled me in a summer camp to learn how to cleanse chakras with crystals. They braided my hair into dreads on the first day, and on the second, we all had to get henna tattoos. Mine was calculated to center me, whatever that meant.
I hated every second of it.
I loved my mother a great deal, but all the woo woo nonsense about fortune telling from lines on people’s palms, zodiac signs, and reading crystal energies? I just had no belief in any of that. It was a three-week camp, but on the fourth day, when a girl told me I had a lingering, sickly yellow energy, I put her in a headlock. She didn’t like it, and she tattled.
My dad had to pick me up on his lunch break.
I begged him not to tell my mom.
“We’re all different,” Dad said. “And that’s okay. Your mom will understand that.”
She did not.
But I learned something.
No matter how hard I try, there are some things I will never be. There are some things I just can’t do very well. When they tell you in school that you can do and be the best at anything? They’re lying. Or maybe they’re delusional. I knew when I was quite young that I’d never be the President of the United States. I didn’t pander, and I had no patience for idiots. I knew I’d never read crystal energies or cleanse chakras either. And I hated dreadlocks—they itched like mad.
Dad convinced me on the way home that it was okay if I wasn’t just like my mom. Now that she’s gone, I wish I was a little more like her. Sure, we had a rough few months, but she was devoted, and she loved each of us passionately. When she thought I had died in utero, she searched high and low to find someone who would bring me back, even if she only got to keep me for a few years.
Then she flew to Iceland to recover me, violating their agreement.
I was a warrior. She was a peace-loving hippie. I wrecked her friendship with the proprietor of the crystal camp, and she never yelled at me or even reproached me for it. She trusted me to watch her most precious charges, my siblings, even though she feared me at times. It’s hard to lose a mother, maybe the hardest thing I’ve ever endured.
And I was chucked in a volcano.
Twice.
The thought of planning a wedding without my mother to put in a lucky dreadlock, or loan me something blue, or weave crystals into my hair, it makes my eyes well with tears. Complicated feelings are still real ones. “You’ll give me away, right?” I ask my dad.
He tilts his head, and his eyes well with tears. At least I come by the stupid excess sentiment honestly. “I won’t want to,” he confesses, “but that would have been true no matter the groom.” He forces a smile. “But yes, of course I will. I’m happy to be there for your ceremony.”
My poor, uptight father had his hands full dealing with Mom and her bizarre hippie ideas. Presiding over an inter-species wedding was definitely not on his checklist for life, but he’s putting on a brave face, and I appreciate it.
“I’m carrying the ring,” Jade says. “Or you know, carrying Fluff Dog, and she’s carrying it.”
“Fluff Dog?” I frown. “I don’t think. . .” The voices in my head are getting more persistent and more consistent. At first I worked hard to tune them out. I’d shake my head, I’d practice Axel’s blocking techniques, and it helped.
Nothing’s helping now, several weeks later.
“Are you alright?” Jade asks. “You’ve looked. . .strange lately.”
I laugh, and I’m pretty sure she can’t tell it’s forced. “I’m fine. Just normal bride jitters.”
“The wedding’s in a week,” she says. “You’re sure that’s all it is?”
My smile’s real this time.
And when the woman comes with my mom’s old dress, which belonged to my grandmother first, and she starts talking about how we could modify it to fit my much larger frame, I try my very best not to be distracted by the pleas I now hear constantly in the background of my brain.
How did Jörð ever know I needed her? This constant barrage of begging and demanding is exhausting. I want to shout at all the little whiners to shut the flip up! I inhale and exhale.
So far, I haven’t been able to do anything about all the chatter.
I can’t portal to where the petitioners are. I can’t reply to them as far as I can tell. I can’t do a thing. I’m sure the stories that have spread throughout the blessed about the face-off between Veralden Radien and Azar and the role Jörð played in it have increased the number of demands the earth children are making to Jörð, but that’s only making my life worse.
