“Yep.” He nodded.
“She is mean as hell, cold as her realm, hard as nails, uncompromising, half-mummified, and has morose-looking servants who follow her around, doing her bidding.” By the time I finished, Eirik was laughing hard. Only he would find what I’d said funny. It was part of his charm, I supposed. He found humor even in insults. “I also learned yesterday that she’s none of the above.”
Laughter disappeared from his face. “Echo talked?”
“Hayden.”
He blinked. “You talked to Hayden?”
“I needed to talk to one of the orphans from the other realms after I learned that my parents are Immortals and I was adopted. Echo took me to her.” Eirik didn’t react to my announcement. “You know about me and my parents?”
He nodded. “What did Hayden tell you?”
“That they moved around a lot and I was better off here in Kayville shielded from the evil Immortals.” I ran a finger around the edge of my unopened can of iced tea. “We didn’t talk much about anything else. Oh, and she mentioned visiting Hel’s Hall when Celestia was sick or hurt or something along those lines and how your mother was nice. I wanted to know how you and Celestia met, but she wouldn’t tell me.”
He smiled, visibly relaxing.
“What did you think she told me?”
“About Mom, she is the daughter of Loki and a J?tun woman, Angrboda. Grandma Angrboda is crazy, vengeful, and mean. In fact, everything you’ve heard about Mom could be applied to Crazy Granny. Mom just hides her sweetness behind a cold exterior. Because Odin took Mom and her brothers away, Crazy Granny hates all Asgardians. So when I was born, she saw me as a weapon to use against Asgard.”
“How?”
“She is a shifter, like Onyx, Raine’s mouthy pet. Yeah, we’ve met,” he added when I laughed. Raine’s cat didn’t like me for reasons I couldn’t explain. “Quite a number of J?tuns are shifters. Wolves. Serpents. Ravens. Cats. Dragons. Granny is a dragon shifter, which is rare. When I was born with the same ability, she thought she had a weapon to destroy Asgard.” Eirik grinned. “Don’t look at me like that.”
“Dragon shifter? You?”
His grin turned cocky. “Yep. That’s why I eat a lot and have the big guns.” He raised his arms and flexed his biceps. “Shifting back and forth does that to you.”
“Holy crap. It explains a lot. Does Raine know?”
He shook his head. “No, you are the first to know. I’ll show you later. Anyway, Granny wanted to use me to destroy Asgard. Dad and Mom found out, and booted her out of Eljudnir. She became obsessed with hurting them. Fearing for my safety, Dad talked to the Norns and handed me over to them for safekeeping. They brought me to Earth. He didn’t tell Mom he’d colluded with the Norns to keep me safe from Crazy Granny. She thought the Norns did this to her out of spite.”
“Jeez, what is it with people keeping secrets? Don’t they get that secrets hurt? I swear if Echo ever pulled that shit on me, I’d kill him.”
“That’s my attitude, too. Celestia and I swore to never try to shield each other that way. If I did, she would kill me, bring me back to life, and do it again. She’s amazing.”
Wow, she sounded powerful. “Can she really do that?”
“Oh, yes. She can manipulate her life force, but we are digressing. Mom had Grimnirs searching for me. She even sent her Idun-Grimnirs with little results. The Immortals in this town are very good at hiding. Meanwhile, Dad got weekly reports on how I was doing from two loyal Grimnirs, Rhys and Nara.”
“Those two?”
“I guess you’ve met them. They are very loyal to my family. After I was taken, they decided to have a second child. They had a girl. This time, Mom made sure she etched locator runes on her in case she was taken. After a few days, she was told the child had died and was given a body to bury.”
“Oh man. That must have been tough on her.”
“Very. On top of losing me, she’d also lost her baby girl. She shut everyone out, including Dad. Losing my sister and me did something to her. It turned her mean, uncompromising, and cold. Then Maliina saw me and told her.”
“She must have been happy to see you,” I said, feeling sorry for the woman. Betrayed by her husband and the Norns, then losing her second child. No one should have to go through something like that. I couldn’t even imagine her pain.
“She was and she wasn’t, but we worked out our issues. There’s more. Can I have another drink?”
I got him a third can of iced tea and waited as he chugged it. This time I was sure he was deliberately procrastinating. “What is it, Eirik?”
“My sister didn’t die.”
“What happened to her?”
“Crazy Granny happened. She grabbed Einmyria, hoping she had the dragon strain too. When she learned that the baby didn’t, Granny left her in J?tunheim. The Norns found her and brought her to Earth with the other orphans. Dad found out the truth, and started searching for her without telling Mom.”
“I know he’s your father, but he has a lot to learn about relationships,” I said.
“I know, and he has learned. Their relationship was so unusual he was never sure how Mom would react to anything. She’s very unpredictable. But the one thing he knew was her temper. He knew she would have started a war if she’d found out Einmyria was alive.”
“Really?”
“Oh, yeah. She would have come to Earth herself to find her and probably would have jumpstarted Ragnarok because the Asgardians would have come down to defend the people. So he kept it a secret and kept searching for my sister relentlessly. Finding my sister was the first task he gave me when I arrived in Eljudnir.” Eirik drained his drink and shot me a furtive glance. He was acting weird. “It took me weeks of searching among the orphans here on Earth before I finally found her. Having Celestia helped.”
He told me about Celestia. The more I heard about her, the more I was amazed by what she could do. He talked about fighting Crazy Granny, the kidnapping of the orphans, and finally locking Granny up. He made it sound like it was nothing, but I now understood why Echo missed what he called their adventures. They were heroes. Not just to the orphans, but to their parents. For once, Eirik didn’t paint himself as the star of every adventure. He gave everyone his or her dues. The Eirik I’d known would have made sure he was the hero.
“No wonder you’ve been gone forever. You’ve been busy. Finding orphans, searching for your sister. And FYI, your grandmother deserves to be hanged.”
He chuckled. “She’ll stay locked up in Corpse Strand, until Ragnarok. Celestia’s mom too.”
“Imagine if you hadn’t gone home. You would never have found your sister and your mother would still be thinking she was dead.”
“Mom mourned her death for seventeen years. She wore black and covered the halls and paintings with black linens, every year on Einmyria’s birthday. She wasn’t the only one grieving for my sister, the whole castle grieved with her. They all felt her anguish. The pain she repressed inside almost tore her apart. She even kept the nursery the same way it was before my sister died, her baby clothes, blankets, and decor. It was part of her mourning, a reminder of the loss she’d suffered, and she wouldn’t let herself forget. Now that I found my sister, she has hope again. She’s vowed to celebrate and throw balls in her honor.”
It was hard to imagine a ball in a place so cold Echo often arrived frozen whenever he came from there. “I bet she threw a huge one when Einmyria came home. I love that name. It’s unique like yours. Anyway, Hayden told me most of the orphans you rescued chose to return to Earth to be with their Immortal parents.”
“That’s true. None of them met their birth parents. They weren’t as lucky. There hasn’t been a celebration for us yet, but maybe we can have it soon. I’m hoping Einmyria will want to meet Mom.”
Confused, I shook my head. “They haven’t met yet?”
“Not yet, but they will soon.” He leaned closer. “Give me your hand.”
I frowned. “Why?”
“Because I asked.”