Born Immortal

Born Immortal Chapter 36

Astyr was in her seventh period P.E. class when she got hit in the head with a basketball. Her mind was on the clock instead of the game she was supposed to be playing. The coach blew the whistle and told them all to head to the locker rooms. They were done for the day, finally.

"What's wrong with you today, Astyr?" Jenny asked in a petulant way. Jenny had no memory of what had happened after they finished watching the movie, but Glin had decidedly broken up with her, giving her a very flimsy excuse. Jenny had been left to come to her own conclusions and, despite Astyr and Hakon being publicly closer than ever, she had decided to take out her anger on Astyr.

Astyr really couldn't care what Jenny thought, though. All of her energy and concentration was focused on the search for the run-down shack where her mother was trapped. There had been a few days of panic when she thought that without Loki her mother would starve to death, but careful examination of Randy's memories had shown that the accomplice Randy had scented was different from the vile man who had pretended to be Loki as a trap for Tyr.

Astyr, Gunnar, Hakon and Glin had been forced to go back to school to keep up appearances but Astyr could barely concentrate on anything any of her teachers said. Even though her body was sitting at a desk, her mind was once again travelling through the dark woods of Randy's memories, searching for clues that could give them a place to start from. The problem was that Randy, so distraught and careless of his own well-being, hadn't cared where he was and hadn't been paying attention.

Astyr, with her photographic memory, could clearly remember every moment of Randy's life and even though it was largely painful, it was the very first time that she was grateful for her gift.

Astyr, in the locker room, mechanically went through the motions of changing back into her black skinny jeans and hot pink t-shirt. When she was done, she grabbed her bag and headed out to the parking lot. Glin and Gunnar were already sitting in the backseat of Hakon's Camaro waiting for her.

Glin had suffered pretty badly in the aftermath of Loki's attack. When Queen Elianna discovered that Glin had been absent from his post during the one time he had most been needed, she had been really angry. When she discovered that he had been away because he was driving his human girlfriend home, she was livid. So, in a fit of intense rage, she had sent a bolt of energy right through his beloved Maserati. What was left of it afterwards greatly resembled a work of modern art. Glin had been demoted in rank and was given orders to never be more than fifty feet away from Astyr at any given time.

Queen Elianna, for her part, had come straight away when she found out that her daughter was alive, but missing. She was staying in a nearby hotel and keeping a close eye on the search. Her first reaction was to suggest bringing in an army of Alfar to comb through the woods, but Tyr reluctantly had to refuse. It would have been too hard to keep the humans in the area from noticing their presence. 

Astyr suggested that they try to reconstruct the part of his journey from the shack back to the mansion since it was the one sure marker they could place, but that didn't make it much easier since Randy had taken a route back that was purposefully misleading in case Loki had discovered he'd been there.

Another problem that Grima had pointed out after watching the memory was that it had taken Randy a couple of weeks to reach the shack. After taking into account just how much ground a lone wolf could cover in one day while tracking a scent, the search area became frustratingly large.

Astyr was really happy that school was over for the day, and for the week as well, because now she had the entire weekend to spend helping in the search. It was more than she could bear sitting in school all day knowing that her mother was out there somewhere and not being able to beat a path straight to her. She spent her evenings on the computer using satellite pictures to try and find the little shack but it was like trying to find one grain of sand on the beach and it left her feeling useless and ineffective.