Peppermint (Silver Skates Book 10) by Cali Mann & Silver Springs Library

Author:Cali Mann & Silver Springs Library [Mann, Cali]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Thornfire Publishing Co.
Published: 2021-03-21T16:00:00+00:00

11

Birger

I stared at the old woman. Her face looked so familiar, but I couldn’t place it, like a dream I had seen long ago. Then she said the word, father, in the old tongue and I heard it on my baby girl’s lips again. I stepped forward, sweeping her into my arms and holding her. I traced the lines on her face and looked into her blue eyes. “Inge! Great Odin. How is this possible?”

She stroked the side of my face, and then she hauled back and slapped me. I almost dropped her with the shock of it. Eying her warily, I set her back on her feet. I glanced at Skarde and Roar, who were looking at her with the same wonder I felt. How could my daughter, who was eight when I was cursed, be alive now, a thousand years later?

“What’s going on?” Pepper said.

I couldn’t turn my eyes away from Inge. She looked like my grandmother, but I could see the spark of my daughter in her eyes. “This is my child.”

“That’s not possible,” Pepper said, leaning against the countertop.

Skarde stepped forward, speaking words of magic, and Inge spat at him. Roar crossed his arms over his chest, his face disbelieving.

But I knew my child. “Tell me how this is possible.”

Inge turned and walked into the back room, and we all followed on her heels. She sat in a wooden chair that rocked with her motion and reached for a steaming cup.

I obsessively followed her every motion, seeing Inge, seeing my wife who died when Inge was one, seeing my parents . . . so much history in one body and somehow miraculously she was here. My heart beat against my chest, and I just wanted to take her in my arms, but she kept glaring at me. To be honest, my late wife used to look at me in the same way. “So like your mother.”

She scowled at me and sipped from her cup.

“Tell us,” Skarde said. “How did it happen?”

Inge glared at him even more darkly than she was looking at me. “Loki didn’t think punishing you was enough.”

I felt like a sword had run me through. This was a punishment. Loki had kept her alive as a cruelty. How could that be? “But you’re here.”

“I’m here,” she said. “I’m a thousand years old and trapped in this ancient body for all this time.”

Pepper gasped, and Roar pulled her against him.

“You’ve lived all this time,” Skarde said slowly.

She coughed. “As a human with every ache, every pain that could be visited on a body. Dependent on the generosity of family to care for me, for generations.”

“But you’re alive—” My heart wrenched. My child tortured because of what I’d done? How could Loki do this to her?

“I just want to die,” she said. “Maybe now Loki will let me. Now that you’re here to give that damn thing back.” She gestured to the pendant around Skarde’s neck.

I stumbled, my legs falling out beneath me. My daughter! Tears filled my eyes as pain wracked me.

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