Oh, shoot.
For a year or more, she’s been dancing around insanity, but clearly having that last perfect egg that won’t ever hatch pushed her right over the edge into the abyss.
I wish I had some idea of how to bring her back again.
Chapter 21
Azar
We’ve learned a lot from Liz’s dreams, and I know that her past lives hold a lot of information we can yet use. I can’t help being grateful to Jörð or Ama or whoever’s sending these memories, but they’re hard on Liz.
She tosses.
She turns.
She sweats and cries out.
And even though we’re entwined, I can’t see the visions.
Maybe it’s that she’s finally starting to shield, or maybe I’m not meant to see them. Either way, the memory or vision or whatever she’s having now, is just blackness to me. I can tell she’s struggling, and I can sense her discomfort, but I don’t know how to help her.
When she bolts upright in the middle of the night, I pull her against me. “It’s okay.” I make a shushing sound and I run my hand down her hair. “I’m sorry.”
She turns toward me slowly. “Your mother went insane.”
Why does that not even surprise me? “Worse than yours just did?”
Her laughter’s a little unhinged. “Yeah, sadly, I think she might have been. Freya was well-intentioned, but I think my mom was, too.” She sighs and slumps against me. “Azar, I think she’s close to doing something very unsafe.”
“What did she do?”
“She’d just laid another red egg.”
“Mine?” I ask.
Liz shrugs. “I’m not sure. There was a whole room full of eggs, none of which were hatching. She kept staring at them, cradling them, even the burned one that Euphrasia told us Hyperion hatched from. She told me that the æsir and the vanir were the problem, and she wanted to call your father—Veralden Radien—to come and get you.”
“To come and. . .what?”
“Pick you up and take you away from earth, I guess,” Liz says. “I don’t know. She sounded super nuts, and even Gullveig thought so.”
“Crazy or not, her plan worked, at least sort of,” I say. “I mean, she did trap all the vanir in the volcano, and we did leave earth.” I snort. “Actually, crazy or not, she must’ve been an evil genius, right? She did it, mostly.”
“She didn’t call Veralden Radien,” Liz says. “And he didn’t collect you.”
“Her plan shifted a little.” I shrug. “It happens.”
Liz laughs. “Please don’t go crazy.” She presses a kiss to my cheek. “I like you how you are.”
“My brain’s already swiss cheese,” I say. “I can’t remember anything past the moment we met.”
She closes her eyes and leans against my chest. “It’ll come. Freya the lunatic told me those memories are in there somewhere.”
“Oh, good, my insane mother’s the source of our hope.”
“She seemed super lucid right before I killed her,” Liz says. “And that’s when she told me that. And you did recover one memory, right?”
That’s true, but I can’t figure out why. It could have been that we had just entwined, or that we fought the vanir, or that I worked with Liz to do it. “It was a useless memory. You’re barely in it.”
