Freya has been looking into luck and growing increasingly frustrated when her findings do not align with her experience. “It’s just so weird, you know?” she told George this afternoon. She’d arranged to meet with all three of them to plan for the wedding, but at the last minute Kara had had to cancel, thanks to some small emergency with her mother. Since they were unwilling to talk about the wedding without the bride, the conversation wandered instead back to what has occupied Freya’s thoughts for days. “Can it really be coincidence that all these bad things happened all at once?”
“But you said that good things were happening too,” George pointed out.
“Yeah, if anything, that makes it weirder. Like there was a luck fight right around our office.”
George laughed, but I was uneasy at how close her words came to the truth.
“I’m serious!” Freya insisted, batting at him with a cushion.
“Hey, hey, careful with those. Kara loves those things more than me.”
“It’s a cushion, tell her to get over it.”
George gave Freya a dry look. “Do you honestly think I would be dumb enough to say those three words to her?”
“You’re right, they’re not great as last words.”
“Not particularly noteworthy, no.”
Freya sighed and plopped the precious cushion—it did have a great many sequins on it—into her lap. “I know it sounds crazy, but I can’t get my head to settle. Life seems very strange right now, and I can’t shake the feeling that there’s something behind it.”
George leaned back against the arm of the sofa. “You mean like someone’s fucking with you?”
Freya made a face. “Maybe on a cosmic level.”
So very perceptive.
“Ghosts?” George asked, with only a twitch of a smile.
She looked at him. “Do you believe in ghosts?”
He shrugged. “I’ve never met one, but the universe is a big place and I’m not ruling anything out.”
Sighing, she slid back to rest her head on the back of the sofa. “Everything I’ve been looking at either says that luck is a reflection of your own viewpoint on the world or some kind of tool of God or fate or whatever you believe in. But I know that something outside my head is going on, I just know it. And as for fate—I don’t know, I’ve always believed that we make our own fate.”
“You do,” I whispered to her—I couldn’t help it. I don’t want her doubting her own freedom.
Freya glanced over her shoulder.
George was no longer smiling. He leaned toward Freya. “So—you’re feeling like there’s a kind of force that’s moving against you with intention?” he asked.
“Not just one, though,” Freya answered, still frowning in my direction. The frown eased a little as she turned back to George. “Because there wasn’t just bad luck. And I couldn’t help but notice that none of the bad luck happened to me.”
“Almost tumbling to your death is not bad luck?” George asked.
“But I didn’t, did I?” Freya pointed out. “I swear, George, my hand was nowhere near the railing—I was holding my coffee in this hand, and the other hand was back behind me, because I’d just used it to hold the door for Kara. But then my heel slipped, and all of a sudden I was holding the railing with a death grip.” She shook her head. “I’ve had this feeling more and more often lately—like there’s someone or something protecting me.”
“Guardian angel?” George used the same tone of voice he had used to suggest ghosts earlier, but it still made me jump.
Freya didn’t agree, but nor did she laugh. “Do you believe in angels?” she asked.
“Do you?”
She turned her head, looking off into the distance—looking right through me. “Yes,” she said, “but I always thought that angels would have more important things to worry about than coffee spills and broken tailbones.”
“What could be more important than you?” I asked her.
“Maybe they do,” George said. “Maybe you’re right in that there have been two forces hanging around the office, and the good came to deal with the bad.”
“Then how do you explain everything that’s been happening to me for the past few months?” Freya asked. “The accident? Or that time that the dog attacked me out of nowhere? And I never feel lonely anymore—I haven’t for months, George. It’s not new weirdness—it’s been around for a while.”
Her eyes were beginning to look a little wild, and George reached out to take her hand. “Hey, hey,” he said softly. “You’re starting to sound a little paranoid, Frey. You really feel this scared?”
She exhaled, shaking her head. “I’m not scared,” she said, “though maybe I should be. I just don’t understand, and I can’t get a grasp on it.”
George studied her face, doubts creeping into his mind. He was wondering whether he should be referring Freya to a psychiatrist.
“Not yet,” I murmured to him. “Just meet her where she is.”
He sighed. “Look, I’m not going to question these feelings that you’re having, Frey, and I don’t think you should, either. Just—you just need to figure out if you trust whatever this thing is, okay? If it’s something that’s helping you, then maybe you don’t need to understand it. But if it’s not…”
The trailing end of the sentence put a few doubts into Freya’s own mind. She sighed and nodded, resolving to do some more searching—perhaps this time involving psychiatric disorders.
I wanted to protest, to tell her that she is not crazy—indeed, that she is more rooted in reality than most people are. But I couldn’t forget the results of my own searching. It has been many centuries since society could accept the reality of angels. Even if Freya could come to believe in her own experience, anyone she told about it would worry about her sanity—and maybe stop trusting in her altogether. I can’t do that to her.
I have to find Asoharith and put an end to all this. I have to make Freya safe, once and for all.