And then I felt it. The thin, cold rectangle of my cell phone. I made an excited squawk. It was dead but my charger was tangled in a bralette. Once I got it separated, Finn plugged my phone into the dash to charge.
While I waited for that, I went back to rummaging through my things. At the very bottom of the bag, I found a book. Jem-Kruk and the Adlrivellir. I flipped through it, but the book fell open to the last page.
And there, in my own handwriting, I’d scrawled important messages to myself.
Senka is your mother, Indu is your father
Don’t Trust Noomi or Illaria
They’re Your Sisters but they LIE
Áibmoráigi is on the northwest mountain beyond Lake Sodalen
The Lady in the Long White Dress is a waterfall
Find the waterfall, find Eliana
Jem-Kruk might be a liar
You and Pan kissed (and you both liked it)
Johan (Hanna’s grandfather) knows the truth about Senka & Jem-Kruk
And then below all that, in big angry letters:
IT’S ALL ABOUT THE BLOOD!
3
Return
The Jeep had hardly rolled to a stop, and I heard Hanna scream as she rushed out the front door. The younger kids followed close behind her—seven-year-old Liam, four-and-a-half-year-old Emma, and three-year-old Niko toddling after—all of them running up the grassy embankment to greet me.
As the kids descended upon me—Emma jumped, boldly but correctly assuming I’d catch her—Mia came out of the house more slowly, because she was wrangling the twenty-two-month-old twins. Luna was fussing, pulling at her dark curly pigtails, even with Mia carrying her on her hip, and Lissa held her hand as she took slow, uncertain steps.
Their house was a large peridot green cottage, surrounded by the big full branches of towering oak, maple, and pine trees, along the thick forest of the bluffs along the Mississippi River. I’d nearly forgotten how beautiful it was here, and how good it felt to be home.
“What happened? Where have you been? Did you see Eliana?” Hanna peppered me with questions the second she let me go, and the other kids followed suit, lobbing their own barrage of inquiries at me.
“Were you working? Will you live with us again?” Emma asked, her voice high-pitched and insistent.
“Why do you look weird? Are you sick? I look weird when I’m sick sometimes,” Liam said knowingly.
“Ulla, Ulla!” Niko shouted, followed by demanding babble I couldn’t understand. He held his pudgy hands to me until I scooped him up.
“Give her space,” Mia commanded, and Finn took the twins from her so she could give me a proper hello. She pulled me into a side hug, since my arms were full of Niko. “Welcome home, Ulla.”
We all went into the house, and I let the kids interrogate me. They didn’t believe me at first when I told them I couldn’t remember what happened, but once they were convinced, they grew bored fairly quickly because all my answers were “I don’t know.”
I sat at the kitchen table, sipping sun tea and hungrily devouring the mulberry tarts Hanna had made. Finn asked his mother to take the younger kids upstairs to play, so it was only Mia, Hanna, and myself sitting around the large farm table.
“What’s going on?” Mia asked, eyeing her husband.
Finn came back from helping herd the children up the stairs, and he took the Jem-Kruk book from my bag. “I don’t know, but it’s definitely odd.” He set the book on the table and slid it across, toward Hanna and Mia.
“Why do you have Grandpa Johan’s book?” Hanna asked, wrinkling her nose.
Mia looked just as confused, and she touched the cover tentatively. “Where did you get this?”
“From the Mimirin,” I said. “I’m borrowing it, technically.” So far, I’d just stolen it and defaced it, but that wasn’t the kind of example I wanted to set for Hanna, so I modified the truth.
Finn sat down beside me and asked them, “What do you know about this?”
“Not much.” Mia flipped through the first few pages absently, her brow furrow deepening, and she shook her head. “Nikolas’s—” She stopped, her eyes flitting to me. “Hanna’s—” She stumbled again, now looking to Finn.
“Nikolas’s father wrote children’s books,” she started again, and this time it went more smoothly. “He published a few of them, but all of that was when Nikolas was very young. By the time I was dating Nikolas, Johan hadn’t written in years and years, and he’d put that all behind him.”
She looked at me and Finn. “Why are you asking about it?”
“Because it’s just like I said!” Hanna announced excitedly. “This book is about Eliana!”
“Maybe,” I allowed. “But there are some things that correlate to real life in unusual ways.”
“What do you mean?” Mia asked.
“I think I’ve met Jem-Kruk,” I said, filling her in on all the things I’d told Finn on the car ride home. “And Senka—Jem-Kruk’s friend mentioned in the book—may be my mother.”
“Wait.” Hanna’s big brown eyes widened. “Are you saying that your mom is related to my father? Does that make us cousins?”
“No,” I told her definitively before she got carried away. “No, I haven’t read anything that suggests that. But it does seem like your grandfather might know something.”
“What about Eliana? I was reading the book, because there were things that matched up. Like the grapefruit pink sky, the suns called Kyr, Nuk, and Veli, and the dragon reference,” Hanna said without taking a breath. “There’s probably even more, but she didn’t remember much—” She gasped. “Do you think that what happened to you is the same thing that happened to Eliana? Like with her amnesia?”
“I—I don’t know,” I admitted. “Maybe, but she had forgotten her entire life. I’m only missing the past month.”
“I bet it’s the same,” Hanna said firmly.
All the while Hanna and I had been talking, Mia had been leaning back in the chair, her arms folded over her chest, and her lips pressed into a tight line that only grew tighter.
“I’m sorry, but I’m having a hard time understanding,” she said. “Nikolas has been gone for a long time. What could he possibly have to do with—with—” She waved a hand in frustration. “With your imprisonment, and my daughter’s elusive pixie friend?”
Mia took a deep breath and the severity of her expression relaxed slightly. “This all seems strange and … overwhelming. For me.”
Upstairs, Liam let out an angry yell, which was followed by Emma screaming.
“Hanna, why don’t you go upstairs and help Grandma Annali with the kids?” Finn suggested. She rolled her eyes, but she complied.
Once Hanna had gone, Finn looked to his wife and apologized. “I’m sorry. I didn’t realize this would be upsetting to you. I wasn’t thinking.”
“No, it’s fine.” She shook her head. “How is this all connected?”
“I think the place in the book is real, and that Johan has been there,” I said. “And I think it’s where my mother and Eliana are from.”