Page 124 of Ensnared

The bond is dark.

“But Liz.”

“It was a long time ago. I still get nightmares sometimes, but I’m fine. Really.” I blink some of the sleep away, realizing that it’s still dark outside. It must still be the middle of the night. “I should go back to sleep. Humans sleep longer than this.”

“The people in that dream who were chanting.”

“Wait, you saw those people?” I shake my head to make sense of his words. “Did you actually see what was happening in my mind?”

“Our bond makes that part simple.”

It should feel invasive, but somehow, it doesn’t. “Huh. I don’t hate that. It’s like, for the first time, I wasn’t alone that night.” I can’t help a little grin. “If you’d been there, things would have gone very differently.”

“Yes,” he says. “They would have.”

“But that woman still would have died.”

“True.”

“What were you going to say about the weird chanting people?” I never remember much about them. Just that one word, over and over. “I still have no idea what shartanu means.”

“It’s the Icelandic word hjartanu,” Axel says. “And it means ‘the heart.’”

No way. “Are you serious?”

“It’s one of the few words we learned in every language that humans speak, for obvious reasons.” His face is solemn, his eyes intent.

“Axel.”

“I know you’re not keen on the idea that this was all preordained.” He brushes the hair back from my face gently. “But it can’t be coincidence that your worst nightmare contains the key to our locating the heart. Can it?”

“How do you know the dream had anything to do with your heart?”

Axel’s eyes drop to my shoulder, and then he swallows.

“Do you mean, because of my birthmark?”

I drag my shirt down, exposing a little more skin than I really feel comfortable with, even though most girls I know would show this much with half their bikinis, but on the top of my left breast, there it is.

A perfectly shaped red heart.

“Those insane people took you because of that, and they were going to throw you into an active volcano.” Axel’s eyes are intense. “It must be related somehow, don’t you think?”

I pull my shirt back into place. “I think that those people were crazy, and now I’m worried that you are, too.”

“It’s the best lead I’ve found in all the time we’ve been here.”

Would it really be so bad to go to Iceland? At least it would get the dragons out of Texas.

“Are you suggesting a relocation?” I ask. “It sounds like a lot of work, but I’m down.”

Axel’s smile isn’t kind. It’s feral, and the dark part of me that I usually ignore really, really likes it.

26

The day of the Boo Bash, Gideon called me. “You trained early today?”

“I promised Sammy that I’d come to his Halloween carnival,” I said.