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I breathed hard, eyes wide, and hand on my chest, where my heart threatened to burst out. The others lost themselves in their laughter.
After taking a moment to process, I punched Diego in the arm several times. “Don’t scare me like that!”
He was lucky I’d lobbed the butter at him instead of magic.
Diego laughed and fended me off. “I didn’t mean to. It’s not like I can tell which way you’re facing when I teleport.”
I knew that struggle. Teleportation had all kinds of quirks that required experience to overcome—and experience was not something either of us had much of yet. “Why are you here? You said you’d be gone for a few days.”
He held up his phone. “I got your text.”
I blinked and shook my head. “That wasn’t so you’d drop what you were doing and rush back. I only wanted to keep you informed. We’re not even leaving right now.”
“I’m not about to let you go after a maniac of a god without proper supervision. And Tyr definitely doesn’t count as supervision.”
I rolled my eyes, Tyr grunted, and my father laughed.
“Besides,Mamáand I weren’t doing anything, so you’re not dragging me away.”
I shook my head and retrieved my thrown butter stick. Xavier tapped Diego on the shoulder and asked him to follow. He carried glass food storage containers in one arm, as well as a bottle of wine. Diego and I passed each other a perplexed look before he followed his dad out of the kitchen toward his father’s room.
I used my magic to perfectly soften my butter and mixed up my batter by the time Diego returned, alone. “Where’s your dad?”
He rubbed the back of his neck. “With Mamá.”
The house grew quiet.
I blinked. “What?”
“Yeah, I guess he’s finally ready to talk to her.”
“That explains the food.”
Aya sighed wistfully. “Even when mad, he’s a romantic.”
“Let’s just hope the talk goes well,” my dad said. “I don’t care how they patch things up, as long as the tension goes away.”
I agreed.
Dad went back to sorting through his developed photos. Diego kissed me on the forehead before offering to help me bake, while also getting distracted by the babies, which gained me a few more looks from my dad, and another round of me chastising my hormones. Tyr settled in at the island while playing with his precious drool-bubble-blowing cargo.
“Oops,” my dad murmured when one of his photographs got away from him. It slipped across the island counter and onto the floor on my side of the kitchen.
“Got it!” I snatched it before Diego could. I took a look at the picture before handing it to my dad.
The photo was of a woman with pale skin and wavy copper curls. She wore a cobble of leather, and a bustier along with a long skirt. Everything in me froze as I stared into her green eyes. “Dad, who is this?”
“That’s Elin. She’s a close friend of Arran and Hurrit. Poor girl lost her memory about five years ago in an accident. They’ve been helping her out ever since she moved to Bifrost. She’s the one who makes the holistic lotion I brought back for us to test with the residents.”
He paused. “What’s wrong, Ace?”
The picture staring back at me seemed to move, and a flash hit my mind, but not of this moment in the photograph. No, a day in a market, a long time ago.
“Valkyrie?” Tyr said.
“I… I know her,” I said, hardly able to believe the words were coming out of my mouth.
My father straightened. “What?”
