Chapter 8 Syssi
SYSSI
"Mommy!" Allegra kicked her feet against the car seat and pointed at a passing truck with the intensity of a tiny explorer who had just discovered a new continent. "Big truck!"
"Yes, sweetie. That is a very big truck," Syssi confirmed from the passenger seat.
"Big truck!" Allegra repeated, apparently satisfied that the observation had been properly validated, and turned her attention to the window in search of the next vehicular marvel.
In the car seat beside her, Evie was fast asleep, her head tilted at an angle that would have given an adult a neck cramp for a week. Children were miraculous in their ability to sleep anywhere, in any position.
Amanda glanced at her daughter in the rearview mirror and smiled. "I give her ten minutes after we get home before she's wide awake and demanding that Dalhu take her to the playground. But first, she will want a snack. She's always so hungry when we get home."
"We need to talk to Nancy about their lunches. They are so eager to play that they don't finish their food. She should be firmer with them."
Amanda chuckled. "Poor Nancy. I don't think she has it in her to fight these two monsters. We need to get her an assistant with the temperament of a drill sergeant."
"I love Nancy," Syssi defended the daycare's teacher. "She is sweet and loving, and the kids adore her."
Amanda shook her head. "Kids need rules and discipline, especially strong-willed ones like ours. We are not doing them any favors by coddling them."
"You are right." Syssi sighed. "I wish it wasn't like that, though. I wish hugs and kisses and sweet words led to perfectly well-adjusted kids, but the reality is that we all need some form of restriction to do better."
"Yeah, but Nancy and her staff are all too sweet for their own good."
Syssi laughed. "That's who we hired, so we need to take the responsibility for the outcome."
The daycare center at the university had been Amanda's brainchild, a facility attached to the neurosciences building where clan members who worked on campus could leave their children during working hours.
Amanda and Syssi brought their daughters every morning, and Karen, who worked in administration, brought her twin boys.
It was a small operation, staffed by two very patient human women who had been carefully vetted and thralled to ignore the peculiarities of immortal children.
Not the boys, because they would have to wait to be thirteen to go through the induction ceremony, but both Allegra and Evie had transitioned already, which meant that any cut or bruise healed much too fast to be normal.
Thankfully, they would not develop superior strength until they reached puberty as well, so they were not dangerous to the boys who were still human.
"I feel so bad about Arezoo," Amanda said, merging onto the exit that would take them to the road leading to the village.
"Yeah. Yesterday was rough. I didn't expect her to actually cry over having to wait two more weeks."
She and Amanda had sat down with Arezoo and Ruvon to explain the situation that many of the Guardians would be absent, and Drova couldn't attend because she might be part of the operation.
They couldn't tell Arezoo what the operation was about, only that it had to do with the Doomers' island and rescuing more people from there.
They had been as gentle as possible, framing it as a postponement rather than a cancellation, emphasizing that it was up to Arezoo and Ruvon and that it was only a suggestion to postpone the wedding. They could still go ahead with it this Saturday if they wanted.
Arezoo had said that she couldn't get married without Drova attending, and Ruvon had said that saving people came first, and waiting two more weeks so everyone could attend was the right thing to do.
But Syssi had seen the way Arezoo's lower lip had trembled for just a second before she got it under control, and the way Ruvon's hand had tightened around his mate's.
A few minutes later, Arezoo had excused herself to the bathroom and had come back with eyes that were a little too bright and smelling of tears.
Arezoo had been pouring every ounce of her energy into making her wedding perfect, and now it was being pushed back because the world had the terrible habit of not caring about anyone's personal timeline.
"I was right about Drova being the deciding factor," Syssi said. "Arezoo would have gone through with it even with everything else going on, but not having Drova there was the one thing she couldn't live with."
"I get it." Amanda cast her a fond smile. "I wouldn't have wanted to get married without you there either. It just wouldn't have been the same." She tapped her fingers on the steering wheel. "But I've been thinking."
"Oh, yeah? What's brewing in that brilliant and devious mind of yours?"
"Thank you for the compliment." Amanda grinned. "I was thinking that we can still give Arezoo and Ruvon a party."
Syssi turned to look at her sister-in-law. "What do you mean?"
"Instead of a wedding, we can have a cocktail reception.
" Amanda said it the way she said most things, as if the idea had arrived fully formed and required no further discussion.
"It's common practice in human weddings.
The couple has an engagement party or a cocktail reception before the actual ceremony.
Drinks, appetizers, music, dancing. All the fun of a party without the formality of a wedding.
Arezoo gets to celebrate with everyone who is still here in the village, wear a beautiful dress, feel special, and then in two weeks, she gets the full wedding with Drova and all the Guardians. "
"She would still be disappointed," Syssi said.
"Of course she would. But she'd be less disappointed than having no party at all. This way, she has something to look forward to this weekend and something to look forward to in two weeks. Two parties instead of one. What twenty-year-old doesn't want two parties?"
"She's nineteen," Syssi corrected.
"She's almost twenty."
Amanda had a way of finding solutions to seemingly impossible situations and finding a compromise where there seemed to be none.
"I think it could work," Syssi said. "We should go and tell her the idea right away. She probably needs to get another dress for the cocktail party, provided she likes the idea. She might not want two parties."
"She'll want it. What I worry about is my mother presiding over their wedding. If Khiann doesn't make it, she will be in no condition to do anything, and there will be no one to lead the ceremony. Perhaps I should have a talk with Edna so she can prepare just in case."
The judge was a good alternative, but Syssi didn't want to even consider the possibility of Annani not getting her mate back.
She crossed her fingers in her lap and sent a silent prayer to the Fates. Please let Khiann be found alive.
"Have you tried having another vision about him?" Amanda asked. "To see if he's alive?"
"I tried." Syssi sighed. "Last night, the night before that, and the one before that. I sat in Allegra's room and tried to summon a vision of Khiann."
Allegra amplified Syssi's gift just by being nearby. It didn't always work, but when it did, the visions were stronger and clearer than what Syssi usually achieved without her. The problem was that Allegra couldn't amplify what wasn't there.
"What happened?" Amanda glanced at her. "The wellspring dried up?"
"It would seem so. The Fates gave me nothing. Not even a flicker of anything. I sat there for an hour each night and got absolutely nothing."
"Maybe you were too anxious to relax your mind enough. You care too much."
"It's possible." Syssi stared out the window at the familiar landscape scrolling past. "It's disturbing.
When I was trying to find out about Khiann before, the visions came.
Not always what I asked for, they were either fragmented and confusing or showed me something else, but they came.
Now there's just silence. I don't know what that means. "
"It might not mean anything," Amanda said, trying to sound optimistic, either for Syssi's sake or her own.
"Your visions have always been unpredictable.
Sometimes they come when you summon them, sometimes they show up uninvited in the most awkward moments, and sometimes they don't come at all, no matter how hard you try. "
"I know. But the timing is terrible."
"The timing is always bad. That's the Fates' specialty."
They lapsed into silence, and Syssi let herself sink into the rhythm of the drive. The canyon road narrowed as they approached the village, the trees thickening on either side.
"Big trees!" Allegra announced from the back seat.
Syssi wondered how much she'd understood from her conversation with Amanda. She'd been so quiet that Syssi had forgotten she was there.
"Big trees," she agreed.
"Dark," Allegra said as they entered the tunnel leading to the village. "Echo."
"Yes, sweetie. It's dark in the tunnel, and the engine noise echoes off the walls."
Amanda parked in her usual spot in the underground garage, and the instant the engine stopped, Evie woke up.
"Mama, nack!" she demanded.
"Told you." Amanda produced two large crackers from her bag and handed one to each girl. "That should tide them over until we get home."
They extracted the girls from their car seats, loaded them into their respective strollers, and as they emerged from the glass pavilion, Allegra pointed at things along the way, pausing between bites of cracker to narrate the world around her. Evie just watched silently and nibbled on her snack.
"Arezoo is probably at the new store, helping her mother and her aunts with the move. If we want to talk to her, we should stop there." Amanda angled her stroller toward the path that led behind the office building. "Besides, I want to see how it looks now compared to the old location."