Page 24 of The Heir
I smiled. “Would it make you feel better if I did? Are you ashamed that you’re attracted to me?”
“I’m not attracted to you,” he said quickly. “I mean, maybe physically, but that’s it.”
“Sorry, but no. I didn’t plant anything in your brain that day.”
“Did you plant anything in my brain when you came to see me on the beach?”
His question intrigued me. “You have to be more specific. Like what?”
He looked away and shrugged with a sound saying I don’t know.
Closing my eyes, I held my fingertips to my temples.
With slight concern in his tone, he asked, “What are you doing? Are you reading my mind?”
“Wow.” Opening my eyes, I watched him. “You’ve thought of me obsessively, haven’t you?”
“No!”
I might not be able to read people’s minds the way Thor imagined, but I could tell a lie and had no problem calling it out. “Liar.”
“Okay, maybe I did think about you.” He threw up his hands. “But merely because I had too much time on my hands and you were the last familiar face I’d seen, all right?”
“Tell me, all those times when you thought about me, what came up?”
He reached out and touched Muninn and muttered, “How annoying you were.”
I chuckled and joked. “More like how good it would feel to give me that spanking.”
He stopped petting the dog and scrunched up his face. “Stop reading my mind. It’s freaking me out.”
It had been a qualified guess based on the fact that I’d fantasized about it myself. Not that I would admit that to him. “Then stop shouting your thoughts at me so loudly.”
“I’m not shouting my thoughts. You’re the one listening in when you shouldn’t. You said it yourself, it’s an invasion of privacy.”
It was becoming a pattern with Thor and me that every time we started a conversation it evolved into an argument. We would end it on a harsh note and stay silent for a long while. Our journey in this drone felt like it had lasted a decade, not least because I had traveled ten hours from the Northlands to get to him.
There was a little over seven hours of flying from the sanctuary to my parents’ house. During the last part of our journey, I curled up to sleep. It was my strategy to avoid talking to him after he tried to get me to disclose the ten men on my list of attractive Nmen. At first, I had repeated that there was no list and reminded him that I’d already admitted as much back at the sanctuary. When Thor still didn’t believe me, I had no other option than to stonewall him by pretending to sleep.
I’m not sure if Thor was truly hungry when he insisted on a break to buy food. I suspected it was his way of being the most annoying he could, and it made me long for the long journey to be over with.
“Home at last,” I breathed when the familiar windmill came into view.
Thor looked up in the wrong direction. “What?”
“There,” I pointed.
“Ah, yeah, I see it. Remind me again, why is it that priestesses live in windmills? My mother told me once, but I can’t remember.”
“The long and the short of the story is that after the ban on religion way back, a new sort of spirituality emerged that centered on science-based discoveries of energy. Quantum physics helped explain phenomena that our ancestors used to call witchcraft. Originally, theologists like my mother were called spiritual advisors, but that never stuck and to the public they’ve always been called priestesses. With all the churches demolished after the Toxic War, someone came up with the idea that they should live in old-fashioned Dutch windmills, which signify the harvest of energy. The vanes are just for show.”
“So what’s the difference between the priests from the olden days before the ban and the new ones like your mom?”
I thought about it. “The biggest difference is that my mother and her colleagues don’t preach. Religions could be limiting with strict rules on what clothes to wear, what literature to read, who to marry, and when to pray. Today there’s none of that. People can live how they choose to as long as they consent to the rules of the Motherlands, which are based on common sense really.”
Thor huffed. “I don’t know about that. You have too many rules for my taste.”
“It’s more like values when you think about it. All our laws are based on principles of fairness, equality, compassion, respect, kindness, peace, love, and understanding.”
