Chapter 8 #3
When he nods, Liz tosses the girl on her back and takes off. She doesn’t fly far or fast, but you wouldn’t know it from the squeals of the little girl. I’m not the only person watching with fondness. After we land, the man tries to give Liz money, but she refuses it.
“It’s okay,” she says as we walk along. “Money is nice, because it allows you to do and try things, but mostly I just wanted to see all this and pretend my life was normal for a bit.”
A small boy pulls on my hand next. I find it a little curious that for the children, I’m the non-threatening one right now. My warrior with wings is the scary one. “Ride?” The little boy asks.
Liz sighs, but after a quick nod from his mother, she tosses the little guy up on her back and zooms him in a quick circle around the square.
When she lands, she says, “These little kids, they all seem to have a pretty normal childhood. Their moms and dads are bringing them here to a Christmas market and buying them nuts. My mom never brought us to places like this. She’d always research them first and discover that they were in some way promoting or padding the pocketbook of someone evil.
” She sighs. “I could have been really embarrassed by her, I guess. She wore strange clothes, and her hair usually looked funny, but I was pretty young when I decided that I would never apologize for her or ever be embarrassed by her either.”
“I thought embarrassment was a feeling,” I say. “You can’t control your feelings, right?”
“Humans say that, but it’s not true. You can choose to sink into your feelings and let them grow, or you can trim them down and cut them off and never let them grow,” she says.
“I chose never to be ashamed of my mom, no matter what other people thought about her. Once I made that decision, it was easy to accept that I wasn’t normal either.
Sometimes it felt like my birthright.” She shrugs.
“I discovered that most of the time, normal’s boring.
” This time, she reaches for my hand. “So I’m your girlfriend, huh? ”
For some reason, I feel. . .strange. I’m excited that she’s touching me, even though we touch all the time, and I’m also nervous. “In this form, I think it’s easiest to say that you are. Does that upset you?”
“So you didn’t really mean it?” She stops, and turns so that we’re facing each other. Then she bites her lip and looks up at me. “It doesn’t upset me.”
I smile.
“It’s actually times like this that I wish we could be normal.
” She sighs. “I wanted to choose something very normal for myself, when I had the chance to choose. My dad chose my mom, and we kids didn’t really get a choice.
But when I did, I wanted someone close to me, someone who was the same as I was. ”
“A human like you.” I frown. “This Gideon I’ve heard about?”
She squeezes my hand, and sadly, she turns to start walking again.
I tug her back and press a kiss to her mouth. “Did you do that with him?”
“You may not remember everything from before, but you’re still the same.” Her eyes are sparkling, and the music around us is nice. Even the cool air appears to be making her happy.
“I take it that I didn’t like this Gideon person before I forgot everything either?”
Her lip curls. “Not at all, but yes. To answer your question, my parents fought all the time, constantly, and I wanted something. . .safer. Something easier. Something more normal, like Gideon, I guess. But then, I met a dragon who was masquerading as a person, and everything in my life changed.”
“If you could go back to that moment,” I say, a moment I don’t even remember, “and if you could walk another direction and change how things in your life went. . .” I find the words hard to say.
The idea of not having Liz with me is a painful one.
But I need to know the answer to this question.
“If you could change things, would you choose to meet me or run the other way?”
It’s as if time freezes for me.
People are still singing. Lights are still blinking. The whiff of pine and roasting nuts still floats past us on the crisp winter air, but it all dwindles into something that doesn’t matter at all while I wait to hear what she would choose if she could do things differently now.
For some reason, I care a great deal for this answer.
“You didn’t give me a choice that day.” Liz frowns.
“I spent a lot of time angry about that, but later on, you told me that if you could release me, you would, because you wanted me to choose you.” She goes up on her tiptoes, and she whispers into my ear.
“And if I had that choice, if I could go back and not meet you at all?” She turns my face until I can see hers perfectly.
“I would burn down a building. I would slay a monster. I would sell my very soul to meet you again, Axel Earth Blessed, and I’d consider it a small price. ”
My heart does something very strange. I feel. . .light. Bright. Good with the world, and I also feel almost scared.
“What about you?” She’s still staring at me. She’s still holding herself very close to my face. “Would you go back, now that you know you lost your memories, that my choices basically killed you, and that you outed your secret to all the blessed to protect me? Or would you choose not to meet me?”
I run one finger down the side of her face slowly. “You brought my people the heart. It’s the only reason we came back to earth. You’ve changed my people in critical ways, but you’ve changed me in many more.”
She drops back to her feet, but she’s still looking up at me.
My hand braces against the side of her face, my fingers splayed, and then I slide my fingers up and into her hair, her red hair.
It’s bright red now, like the red scales of my flame blessed form.
“Thunar’s distrustful, but you’ve given my people all that we’ve needed.
First you helped us find the heart, and then you were willing to die to get it.
You also helped us find a better way to bond the humans that the blessed need to survive.
The real question isn’t whether I would choose you. ”
Her voice is breathy. “What is it, then?”
“It’s what wouldn’t I do to keep you now that you’re mine?”
She shivers.
I lean closer and whisper in her ear. “And the answer is, nothing. Not a single thing in this world.”
She kisses me then, and it’s unlike anything I could ever have imagined. Everything with her’s like this. New. Better. Different. Something I could never have imagined.
But that makes me think.
I pull back.
“What’s wrong?”
“You know, I should be afraid of you.” I start walking, needing time to think this through.
“Me?” She smiles. “Why?” She touches her mouth. “Because you’re afraid of what things you want to do. . .to a human?”
“No. I’m not afraid of that.” I arch one eyebrow. “I look forward to it. I’ve liked everything you’ve taught me.”
“Oh.” She blinks. “Then what?”
“Thunar wants Hyperion and me and all our siblings—all Freya and Odin’s children—dead. He says we’re abominations, and he might be right. I’m both flame and earth blessed. Hyperion might have been something like that, but he was roasted into char as an egg.”
She stops moving and takes my hand again. “You’re not an abomination. You’re amazing. Every single blessed would be lucky to have more than one affinity.”
“I was created from an unnatural pairing—an aesir and a vanir. I should be leery of creating another, even more strange pairing.” I pause. “The earth cannot truly join the sky.”
Jore and Veralden Radien, if their story’s true, taught us that much.
It means that Liz and me, our fingers entwined, our hearts drawing closer, and this feeling I think must be fairly close to love.
. .they’re all doomed to find a terrible ending.
I should walk away from her and this thing I feel, this bond that compels my every action now.
I should do everything I can to keep Liz away from me to keep her safe, too.
We really are doomed, any way I look at it. “I know it’s a bad idea, and I know you and I shouldn’t be doing any of this, and yet, I choose you anyway, Elizabeth Chadwick. I think I’ll always choose you, and I think no matter the cost, I’ll always pay it.”
Her lip trembles. “I took that choice from you.” Her voice is barely a whisper. “Loving me killed you before, killed Azar. Freya told me if you’d let go of your memories of me, Azar wouldn’t have died. It was my memories that weakened you, and you chose to keep them.”
“I’d do that same thing again and again,” I say.
“I’m sorry I took that choice away,” she says. “I told Freya to take your memories and restore Azar’s life, because I didn’t want to be responsible for causing you more pain.”
“If I could make that trade again now, I’d do it,” I say. “My flame blessed side for my memories.”
“But Thunar—”
I shake my head. “He wouldn’t care about me anymore as Axel. No one would.”
“But. . .” She frowns. “You might be able to do it. Your mother, before. . .” She coughs. “She said the memories are still there.” She grabs my arm. “But we’re making new ones. I can remember for both of us. I don’t want that decision weighing on us anymore.”
“I can see it causes you distress, and that’s the only reason I won’t try to make that trade again,” I say.
“But Liz.” I drag her closer until her hands are pressed against my chest. “Don’t ever choose anything that turns you away from me again.
No matter the cost, I’ll pay it. No matter the pain, I’ll bear it. And you’ll let me. Say it.”
Her eyes look pained. Her hands clench against my jacket, balling up the fabric in her fists. “I choose you, too, I promise. No matter how scary, no matter how different we are, no matter how steep the cost, I’ll choose you.”
In that moment, light floods my field of vision, and suddenly, all I can see is Liz, shining like the sun. And then her hair changes. It’s not brown. It’s not red. It’s a golden-red with dark brown on the underneath.
It’s all three colors it’s been.
Her eyes blaze, too, bright greenish-gold, just like mine. All the skin on my body gets tight, and then something inside me expands, and I feel stronger, lighter, and better in every way. “What just happened?” I ask.
“I think we just entwined again,” Liz says. “It felt different the last time. . .but somehow, this was even better.”
“Why now?” I ask. “What did we do?”
“I think we talked,” she says. “We got closer. That was the key last time, and I think it may be the key for all the times.” She smiles. “I’d rather not un-entwine again, though, if it’s all the same to you.”
We walk around a few more minutes, and several shopkeepers offer us things, “free,” they say.
I can’t tell whether it’s because they recognize Liz, or whether they saw her give the children rides, or whether it’s some combination of the two.
I do understand her desire to soak in the Christmas spirit a bit more than I did, even if I’m not sure what the Christmas spirit really is.
It’s joyful here.
In spite of the cold weather, there’s nevertheless a warmth that makes you want to smile, entwine, and kiss. It makes you want to stay here, doing exactly this, forever.
But eventually, we have to join the others. “It’s time,” Liz says.
I want to argue, but I’ve been feeling that, too.
“If we don’t go to Finland now, we’ll miss them entirely.”
I sigh, but I reluctantly climb on her back and take a ride, at least far enough away that we don’t give anyone a heart attack when I switch back to Azar and open a portal.
Only, when I do force a portal open on the edge of the designated space, the scene before us is not at all what I expect to see.
There aren’t besotted humans staring at their equally excited new blessed.
George isn’t amicably chatting with some local humans while his blessed looks on with an indulgent tolerance.
No, when I open the portal, there are vanir and blessed fighting, and Hyperion’s screaming as he swoops down to flame a whole line of vanir.