52. Chapter 52
Chapter 52
O nce the meeting is over, I find myself wanting to go straight back to where we’re keeping Cain. Instead, I fight the urge and spend some time looking for the right classroom to hold the first meeting of the Bones Quest Team, for which Nimueh and Dryden have volunteered.
Now I’m sitting at the professors’ table, looking around with my eyebrows pulling down.
Sure, it’s great that the Embers have agreed to my proposal. And Alaric has already left with his orders — to take advantage of his position for the purpose of learning anything he can about Baldur’s ancestors.
My own two missions, however, aren’t that clear to me. There’s the problem of the Bones Quest and there’s the problem that made me postpone going to talk to Cain again.
If I let myself do what I really wanted to do, I’d march straight over there and just stare at him and talk to him until I figured him out.
I can’t get him out of my head anyway.
But there’s the slightly inconvenient fact of him seeming to hate me, which wouldn’t be a problem if it weren’t for the fact that it’s getting to me.
Alright, to be honest, it’s making me feel as if a very part of my soul is being ripped out of me.
Even thinking about it is agonizing.
So it’s with a sigh of relief that I welcome Dryden’s knock and him and Nimueh walking into the room.
“So,” he starts as they take their seats opposite me, “finding our mortal enemy’s ancestors’ bones, huh?”
“Should be interesting,” Nimueh says.
“Yeah,” Dryden drawls, “but where do we start?”
Nimueh raises her eyebrows at him. “Are you sure you need to ask that question?”
“Old Norse temples and graveyards, Dryden,” I explain. Then I tease him a little. “You know, Baldur being Norse and all that.” He rolls his eyes at me. I shake my head, turning serious. “No, it’s not where we start that’s the problem.”
“Now I’m lost as well,” Nimueh says.
I lean forward. “The way I see it, we have two options. We can try to get information from books, risk taking too much time and fail to stop Baldur from achieving total world domination. Or we can visit the actual temples and graveyards ourselves, risk getting killed before we’ve even started and fail to stop Baldur from achieving total world domination.”
I lean back, waiting for reactions.
Dryden lets out a dry chuckle. “Holy Word, Anna, you sure you’re not being too optimistic here?”
I raise my eyebrows at him.
He turns serious. “Yeah, no, I get the dilemma.”
“And?” I ask. “Thoughts?”
He shrugs. “I guess I’d like to do whatever you think is best.”
“So incredibly helpful, thank you,” I say with a teasing smile. “Nimueh?”
But when I turn to her, I find her staring out the window with an absent look on her face. “Nimueh,” I call out a little more sharply.
Her head snaps to me. “Yes?”
“Thoughts?”
She scratches her head, her gaze going distant again. “I was wondering about the kind of world in which some beings find their life’s meaning in quiet evenings with the family, and some in world domination.”
I fail to stop myself from letting out a laugh, but I quickly turn serious. “I meant thoughts about the issue at hand.”
Raising her eyebrows, she nods thoughtfully. “Ah, apologies. Maintaining a sense of wonder about the universe has been my lifeline while in Nasgard. And I’ve spent approximately eleven centuries in there, so it might take me a couple of months to stop spacing out like this.” She shakes her head as if to sharpen her focus. And all of a sudden, she’s completely present and frighteningly serious. “Anyway, it was the two options we were discussing, is that right? The slow one that might increase our chances of success and the quick one that might end up in defeat before we’ve even started.”
My mind wants to linger on what she said about wonder, but I nod. “Yes, what do you think?”
She shrugs. “What’s the point of being the Aurora if you’re going to spend all your time hiding?”
For a second, I just keep staring at her. Then my mouth curls into a smile. “Old Norse temples and graveyards it is then.”
And with her way of dealing with stuff, the old bastard has given me an idea on what to do with Cain as well.