Page 41 of Chaos and Crowns

“How have I been the biggest idiot in the history of idiots?” Odelle asked, reaching up to grab her glass of wine from Nora’s coffee table. She had given up on furniture and taken to lying on the floor as she bemoaned her circumstances.

“That’s a little melodramatic,” Nora argued from where she lay on the floor next to her, reaching for another handful of popcorn. It was one of those kind of nights.

“Let’s look at the facts, though. Antony and I spent two whole months dancing around each other because we both thought the other had rejected us. I’m a reporter; doesn’t that mean I’m supposed to be a good communicator?” Odelle reasoned.

“Ok, so maybe you did have a dumb moment or twenty,” Nora conceded around a mouthful of popcorn. “You and Antony worked around it eventually.”

“But we lost a powerful artifact to the Shadow in the process, because we were too busy sticking our heads up our own asses.”

“That probably would have happened anyway,” Nora argued. “The Shadow was most likely controlling the crown before you even encountered it at that party.”

Odelle changed arguments, loose and warm from the wine. “Even so, think of all the awesome sex I missed out on!”

Nora narrowly missed spraying wine on her carpet as she choked on her sip. “I’m sure you’ll make up for it. But really, I don’t need details,” Nora sputtered as she regained her breath.

“Fine,” Odelle conceded, “but it’s true. How could Antony, the member of an order of immortal sorcerers with the most power, get it into his ridiculous brain that he shouldn’t be with someone…just because he’s not a fighter?”

“Think about it; if I have emotional baggage and I’m barely over thirty, imagine how much baggage Antony must be carrying. It’s just something you need to work through. Adam and I did, and we still are working through some of it.”

Odelle rolled onto her stomach, resting her chin on her hands as she regarded her older sister. “But aren’t you and Adam a bit different? I mean, you’re his reincarnated wife that he’d scoured the earth for centuries to find. He knows you’re worth it, and you belong with the Eteria. You’re…special, zolotse.”

“Stop that!” Nora scolded. “You’re your own kind of special.”

“A special kind of weird maybe,” Odelle said, throwing a piece of popcorn at Nora.

“That’s for sure. And my case may have been different, but Adam and I still fell in love with who we are as people today. It wasn’t just a done deal when he found me. We still chose to be with each other.”

Nora’s words were as daunting as they were reassuring. Odelle nearly levitated with giddiness after her interlude with Antony, but his words still gnawed at her. After three thousand years of self-doubt, Odelle wasn’t going to be able to scrub it clean in one afternoon. She worried that she wouldn’t ever be able to fully erase the guilt that Antony carried.

“Antony was right about one thing,” Nora broke the silence of Odelle’s contemplation. “You do need protection.”

“I already have an IUD,” Odelle pointed out, but Nora waved her away with an exasperated hand.

“Once again, not the thing I wanted to talk about.” Nora huffed. “I meant protection from the Shadow. It clearly isn’t happy with you.”

“Is the Shadow happy with anybody?” Odelle asked.

“Considering that it is built from fear and pain, I doubt it, but that doesn’t change the fact that it’s gunning for you.”

“Why though?” Odelle asked. “I’m not much of a threat to it.”

Nora cocked her head to the side. “It clearly doesn’t see it that way. You almost stole the crown out from under its nose. It clearly covets the crown if it was willing to reveal itself to keep you from taking it.”

“So it’s holding a grudge.”

“Probably not worse than being on the bad side of one of your grudges,” Nora teased.

If Odelle had less wine, she might have resisted the urge to stick her tongue out. Now though, she let her sister pull out her childishness.

“I don’t try to pull people to their death in icy rivers,” Odelle argued.

“True. Either way, you should have an Eteria member who can fight off the Shadow stick around you until the danger has passed,” Nora insisted. “I can hang around as much as I can, and so can Adam, but we should loop in some other members too. Maybe Thad…”

“And Seraphina,” Odelle piped up.

Nora made a face like somebody had just held a rotten fish under her nose.

“Look, I know you don’t like her, and you don’t have to, but she’s been nice to me.”