Chapter 2 #3
I try several methods to make him let me go. I try kicking him. That doesn’t work very well, or indeed, at all. I bite his arm. That makes him grunt.
“You’re a feisty little thing,” he observes accurately.
“Get the fuck out of my way,” I say, pushing past him one more time. This time he’s not stupid enough to grab me again. I have no interest in being dictated to by a man. He might have saved Freya, and I can apologize to him later if I feel like it. But right now I have to get to my sister.
Nobody in the hospital gets in my way, but they’re not exactly helping either.
“Freya!”
I call her name.
“Selene!” I hear her voice coming from one of the rooms in the absolute warren of a place.
I follow that sound like it’s my own personal North Star.
She’s not in the emergency room. They’ve wheeled her into the part of the hospital where they try to make it look slightly less hospital-ish with a mural of land spirits gamboling over rolling hills and forests.
It reminds me of the lands where I tended my goats.
I find her in one of the birthing suites, a calm place with traditional music being played. The walls are painted a deep green, and there are several living plants in the room as well. It’s a nice place to give birth.
But my sister is not due for another week.
Freya is sitting up in bed. In the short time it took me to get past the firefighter and find her, they’ve managed to get her into a hospital gown and wipe away most of the smut from the fire.
She still smells like wood char, but I notice there aren’t bandages.
She wasn’t burned. That’s a miracle we will all be grateful for, for a very long time.
I rush to her side and wrap my arms around her. “It’s okay,” I tell her. “I’m here.”
“Selene,” she says, her voice racked with obvious pain as she utters my name. “It’s happening.”
“What’s happening?” I am asking perhaps the most stupid question possible.
A doctor enters the room at a quick stride. “The stress of the fire has triggered labor,” she says. “It’s time to welcome the little one.”
“Selene,” Freya says again, reaching for me. “I need you. Don’t leave me.”
She looks so stricken and so scared.
“They literally couldn’t make me leave you if they tried,” I promise her. “I’ll glue myself to you if I have to.”
She smiles a little at that. “I am serious,” I say. “I’ll nail myself to the floor. I’ll cement myself to the pipes. I’ll reincarnate as a hospital bed…”
“Okay,” she says. “I get it. You can stay as a person. Just don’t…”
“I’m here,” I promise her, just as a contraction makes her contort with pain.
This does not look like much fun.
I’ve helped goats have babies before. It doesn’t look like much fun for them either. There’s a lot of blood, bleats of pain, and pushing, a great and terrible effort on which life and death hang.
Freya grips my hand as tight as she can, so tight I’m not sure I’m going to get that appendage back. I don’t mind. She can have it.
I knew I needed to be here. Everything in my gut and the rest of my body besides told me to follow after her. I can’t imagine what it would have been like if I was making polite conversation with a bulky firefighter, or sitting in a waiting room right now.
Humans have a much harder time than goats, I learn. Freya is like a warrior, sweating, pushing, gasping for air at times.
My eldest sister is an absolute beast. Over the next two hours, she shows me that she is so much more than I ever understood her to be.
She stops being the person I knew and becomes a portal for life itself.
There is blood. There are tears. There are cries.
I am in awe as she performs a miracle for the second time.
The moment I hear her daughter cry, I feel a chill run across me and through me. This is a moment like no other. The mundane is stripped away and I am given an understanding of life in a way that I have never experienced before, and may very well never feel again.
Two hours later, Freya is sitting up in bed, alert and alive, and holding her baby in her arms. She’s had a shower, another great feat in my eyes, and we’ve braided her hair.
The baby has been washed and swaddled, and all is well.
Normality has reasserted itself. The hallowed moment has faded.
She’s eating jelly and the baby is looking at the world with a glassy-eyed confusion that is frankly highly relatable.
The good news is Freya’s husband is on an interstellar courier rocketing toward our position. I’m looking forward to pointing out that he missed the birth again.
For the moment, there’s peace. There’s something about a baby that makes everything seem like it’s okay, even when everything is pretty awful.
We just lost our family’s legacy, but it doesn’t seem to matter in this moment.
I know intellectually that I care; I just can’t quite bring myself to feel it.
“What’s her name going to be?”
“Brenna,” she says.
Brenna is the Old Norse verb meaning ‘to burn.’ As names go, it is quite on the nose.
“You’re naming her after the fire?”
“What other name could she have?” Freya murmurs. “It could have destroyed us both, but it brought her to me. Brenna.”
She’s right. This all happened in the way important things do, with the sense that good or bad, it could never have ever happened any other way.
“I’m still hungry,” Freya says.
“I’ll get you something to eat,” I say. The hospital has a restaurant, because it is a civilized place where people need to eat. I should be able to get her a hot meal.
I go down and I order what I know to be her favorite. Herring pie. Freya has always been particularly fond of it.
“We’re just baking a fresh one,” the lady behind the counter says. “It will be about fifteen minutes.”
“No problem. I’ll go for a walk and come back,” I say.
I need a walk. I need to clear my head. A few hours ago, I was going out for bread.
Now I am an aunt again, and my ancestral home, or what would have become an ancestral home if not for a very strange fire, is gone.
I was already feeling quite unmoored in this world, and now it feels like the last physical anchor has been taken.
I am going to float away, and there is nothing I can do about it.
Fate has her hand on me just as surely as she has on Freya.
Just as I have that thought, a big hand wraps around my wrist and I am turned around in the hall.
I am surprised to see Thor, the firefighter again.
He is the intrepid hero who ran into the burning building to save my sister.
I owe him a debt I can never repay. I am more grateful to him than I have ever been to anyone in my life.
Also, he needs to stop grabbing me out of nowhere if he wants to keep his hands.
“Don’t fucking touch me,” I say, snatching my arm away.
“You’ve got a lot of attitude for a little wench,” he says.
I didn’t appreciate how tall he was when the house was burning down, or when we argued outside the hospital. It must be the fact that he’s indoors and the ceiling is just barely tall enough to contain him.
He is massive. 6′7 at least. Maybe taller. It’s hard to tell from down here.
“My sister is alive,” I tell him. “And she wanted me. And she’s had a baby, and the baby is alive. So I guess you saved two lives.”
“Why do you sound annoyed about that?”
“Because you’re all…” I gesture up and down his body.
“And I know I have to be grateful, and you’ll probably ask me to get some mead, and then you’ll ask me to a flower dance.
Because you believe in stupid mating rituals like being chosen and other nonsense.
I’m not interested. Do you understand? I don’t care if my family owes you a debt we’ll never be able to repay… ”
“The only place I’d take a sassy thing like you is over my knee,” he growls.
“Excuse me?”
“You obviously haven’t been spanked enough.”
I stare at him, shocked. I can’t believe he has the absolute fucking nerve to talk to me that way. Spanked enough? What barbaric bullshit talk is that?
“You haven’t been punched in the teeth enough. Bend down and let me do it.”
“You bend over first,” he grins. “And we’ll see if you still feel like punching me when I’m done with you.”
I flash hot for reasons I can’t explain and don’t really want to start trying to understand. This man is trying to, I don’t know, dominate me, and he can fuck all the way off.
“C’mere,” he says.
This time he doesn’t grab me. He beckons for me to follow, and like the curious idiot I am, I do. He’s managed to unlock my greatest weakness. I don’t like being told what to do, but I do love finding out what’s going to happen next.
We go into a supply closet.
“What are we doing? You need some bleach?”
He turns around and looks down at me, and in that moment I have the very visceral realization that I have chosen to put myself in a confined space with a powerful creature twice my size. I reach back for the door, but he shakes his head.
“You’re not scared, are you? Brave little thing like you?”
Oh, an appeal to my ego. That’s going to work way better than I want it to.
“I’m not scared,” I say. “I’m just not here for… whatever this is.”
He smirks at me, and he’s so handsome all thought of resistance goes out of my head immediately. To hell with it. He can do whatever he wants with me. I don’t care.
I try to snap myself back into some kind of reality, but my brain isn’t interested for the moment.
“I like you,” he says, making heat flush through me.
“You don’t know me.”
“I know that you’re brave, and feisty, and you don’t follow the rules. And I know that you desperately need to be disciplined, and most likely more.”
“And you think you can do that, huh?”
“I know I can,” he smirks.
“Oh, yeah? Do it then.”
Thor grips me by the arm, spins me to the side, and a moment later his hand makes sharp, firm contact with my ass. I am glad for the pants underneath my skirt. I bet I would really feel…
“Hey!”