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She interrupted my thought before I could finish it. “Zaide couldn’t be more excited for children. He’d love them all. I could give birth to kittens, and he’d raise them with pride.” She laughed, and I had to smile.
“I just need time to process,” I told her and changed the subject. “Have you ever had a vision before?”
“Never. I can’t even be sure that it was a vision, but it was so clear and so sudden. Even if it’s not a vision of the future, I know what I want it to look like. And I think that’s really helped Zaide in particular.”
I changed position, trying to get more comfortable, and cast my mind back to when my mother was still around. “My mother’s visions were always sudden. She’d be in the middle of something, then gaze off for a few minutes and eventually return to us, blinking away whatever she saw.”
“Your mother had visions?” Her violet eyes were alight with interest. How I wanted to touch her. I didn’t imagine when we shared our lives and spoke about the past that I’d be in a cage.
“She was cursed with them after the fall. It’s not a typical akari gift.” Clawdia blinked, opened her mouth, closed it, and tilted her head. I frowned. “What is it?”
“Is her name Nisha by any chance?”
It was my turn to be shocked. “Yes. How did you know?”
She gasped and sat up, enthused, and exclaimed, “I’ve met her! I know her. She …” She stopped and blinked, realizing something. “Wow. She’s been seeing me since my past life. She told the protector to hide the potion in Fafnir’s house so I could find it.”
I didn’t know what she was talking about, and she must have remembered that, because she explained everything the protector had told them and also added how Fafnir was, in fact, Mr. Jenkins, her ex-husband.
The Fates had us tied up in threads we couldn’t escape even if we wanted to.
She was meant for me. Zaide was meant for us both. And my mother had been assisting my future from before I was born. It made me feel … loved, to know she’d been looking out for me for so long and continued to do so. I wondered if she’d had a vision of me, as Clawdia had a vision of our children. But it was just another question I wanted to ask her when we finally met again.
“She must have known you were meant for me and ensured you could have been reborn,” I said, and Clawdia nodded her agreement.
“Were you born when I was living my past life?”
“No.” I was not over one hundred years old. I was half that, even if I didn’t look at it. But I didn’t tell her that. Regardless of gender, no one wanted to admit their age, especially when the person asking was so much younger.
“I’ve met your mother, and she doesn’t look old, but according to you, she was there for the fall of the titans, which was ancient Greek days, yes?”
“Yes.”
“So, you’re immortal?”
I shook my head. “Akari live very, very long lives. As did the titans when they had their souls. So do the faei. All our realms have magic to sustain us. Yours does not, and so humans are relatively short lived.”
“Unfair.” She pouted, and I laughed.
“You’ll live as long as I do when we are bonded.” She gave me a shy smile, which did nothing to stop my desire. Changing the subject again, I asked, “Did she look well? When you saw her? My mother?”
She frowned. “You haven’t seen her?”
I shook my head slowly. “She left my fathers many years ago. It was part of the plan for her to hide somewhere even I wouldn’t know about.”
“What—“
“It’s a very long story, my sunlight.” I sighed. She looked a little disgruntled, and I assured her, “I will tell you one day. But not today.”
She hesitated and then smiled as she said, “Her house looks like a fairytale cottage, and she’s beautiful, like you, but she was worried, talking about the future and gazing off.”
Her words lit me up from the inside. “You think I’m beautiful?”
She gave me a look. “You know you are.”
“It’s nice to hear.” I restrained my smile, barely, and changed positions again.
When I looked back at her, she was staring at me again with a kind of melancholic gaze that made me want to embrace her. “You will be all right, won’t you, Baelen?”
