“Thunar burned up an egg?” I ask. “And Odin just let him?”
Odin attacked him and nearly killed him, Euphrasia says. But his other siblings came and begged Odin to spare him in memory of his mother.
“Still,” I say. “Did the egg survive?”
From that egg hatched Hyperion, Euphrasia says. And I hear the vanir were released into the world again because of him.
I can’t help wondering whether that’s what the prophecy meant. “That kind of thing is so vague. Like, what does that mean, ‘the doom of the sky-children’?”
What did his egg look like after Thunar burned it?
Euphrasia looks surprised that he asked. It was scarlet, just like it should have been all along, like he burned away all the anomalies.
“We’re going to be late,” Sammy calls. “We have to go.”
If he thinks he’s coming, he’s lost his mind. “Oh, no,” I say, marching out. “You can’t go. You’ve already bonded two dragons. You think I’m sending you alongside the other blessed so you can ‘save’ any more?”
Sammy rolls his eyes. “I’ve tried like ten more times, Liz. I can’t bond any more, clearly.”
He’s tried. . .I’m going to strangle him. With my bare hands.
“Please tell me you’re not really planning to wear that,” Coral says.
“I have a shirt you can wear,” Jade says. “If your clothes are all dirty. I don’t even care if you cut holes for your wings, and it’s way too big for me. Asteria brought back a lot of stuff, but most of it was the wrong size.”
In my defense, she looks very small, and so do all the human clothes. But Asteria’s eyeing my pajamas strangely too. Even though most of your clothing looks similar to us, even I can tell you’re not properly dressed for something important like this.
“Fine,” I shout. I stomp back inside my chambers, rummage through my dresser, and pull out the first thing I can find. It’s an all black shirt and pants, and it makes my wings look unnecessarily dramatic, being all white as they are. While I’m changing, Axel turns into Azar, so we’ll be black, white, and red.
But it’s fine. At least I’m no longer clad in flannel.
When I come back out, all the smiling, happy faces are gone. Thunar’s here, and he looks more than ready to go. Hearing about how he charred Hyperion as an egg didn’t endear me to him, and I hate being powerless even more than usual.
Chapter 8
Azar
After Thunar shows up, I watch the struggle on Liz’s face. She wants to order her siblings to stay put, but she’s afraid to do it in front of him. She’s learning the first rule of the blessed: weakness is anathema.
Any weakness you expose puts you at risk.
She doesn’t struggle long, because while I hid with Liz, Thunar was busy.
Hyperion, he orders. Take the selected blessed through. You know where, right?
Hyperion’s eyes flash, and I can tell he objects to being ordered around, but after a single nostril flare, he glances my direction.
I nod tightly.
He exhales sharply, and then he makes a portal to the location the Prime Minister shared. I’ll take everyone through. You two will follow? Hyperion’s asking me.
But Thunar nods.
In his mind, he’s landed here, and that means he’s now in control. I can ignore it, or I can fight him about it. Yesterday, he made it pretty clear that fighting him about it probably wouldn’t go my way. Plus, there’s Liz to consider. I send Hyperion a private message. Just go. We’ll deal with him later.
We shouldn’t put it off too long.
I don’t know whether Hyperion knows that Thunar tried to melt him as an egg. I can’t help wondering whether that vicious attack changed Hyperion and caused the prophecy to attach to him. Maybe we’d all have been better off if Odin killed Thunar the day he torched Hyperion.
