Page 46 of Ensnared (The Dragon Captured #1)

I thought, when I saw my mother again, I could bring Jade and Coral and Sammy up to see her. She’d see that they’re alright. They could hug her. She could kiss their cheeks.

It never occurred to me that I’d have to carry her like a wounded animal to a bed and nurse her back to standing upright.

“I can’t stay,” she whispers. “I have to go soon.”

“Why?” I ask. “Why can’t you stay here? I’ll bring you food. It’s warm inside.”

She shakes her head. “Even now, she’s calling me. I have to bring her food, or she’ll die.” Her lips twist angrily. “I wish I could resist her.”

I hate this.

I hate it more than anything I’ve ever hated in my entire life. In the end, we load her up with food. I funnel as much energy into her as I can, and then we send her back to the abuser, her captor, to be tormented another day.

“Maybe you should let her die,” Axel says.

My head snaps around toward him.

He holds both hands up. “I’m not trying to pick a fight, but she is in bad shape.”

“You’re the Prince of the Flame,” I say. “You have to be able to do something.”

He shrugs. “There are some things that can’t be changed.”

I think about his secret, how he has two affinities, how he’s led a double life for. . .I have no idea how long. “How old are you?”

“We don’t reckon time in the same way you do.” He shrugs.

“That’s useless.”

“I’m very, very old compared to you,” he says.

Great. Now I feel even more pathetic. “Look.” I start pacing.

“I may be young. I may be human. I may be stupid, but I will not just stand here while my mom’s out there, being mistreated and wishing she could die!

” I fling my hand at the opening in the side of the building, and a three-foot-wide fireball blasts from my hand into the air, sailing outward.

My jaw drops. “What in the world was that?”

“You were saying,” Axel says, “that you’re young and you’re human and you’re stupid.” His mouth curves into a half grin. “Was your next line going to be that you’re powerless?”

“How did I just make a fireball? Or was that you?”

He shakes his head. “All you.”

I jog to the edge of the building and peer over the side. I don’t see anything on fire down there.

“I snuffed it out,” Azar says. “One of the flip sides to making fire is the ability to control it. If not for that, I could destroy everything around me unintentionally.”

Which means that when he burned that neighborhood, he meant to do it. Ugh. I quickly shove my thoughts along, hoping he didn’t hear that one.

“Soon, I’ll teach you how to harness that power.” Axel’s still on the fireball. Thank goodness. “You’ve been entwined for, what? A day?”

It feels way longer than that. “You chose the wrong human for this.”

“I think I found exactly the right one.” He looks serious.

Uh oh. Time to bail before he starts asking for more kissing lessons.

“I should get some sleep.” I back up. “I barely slept last night, we were out so late looking for the kiddos. How about you stay here, since you don’t need to sleep?

Tomorrow, when I wake up, the very first thing I’m doing is learning whatever I can about the bond, about the ensnared, and about what I can do with them.

Maybe I can, I don’t know, learn to transfer a bond. ”

I hate how sad that suggestion makes Axel look.

“You didn’t know I could throw a fireball until I did. Clearly we don’t know what I can do, and I’ve learned that lots of things people think girls can’t do, we can. Lots of things people think fighters can’t do, we figure out. No matter how many times I get knocked down, I always climb back up.”

And I’m monologuing. . . A pep talk for myself.

“Liz.”

My shoulders droop. My heart wilts. Moments ago, I was soaring on the back of a dragon who could destroy the world, thinking how much my life had changed. Now I’m right back to square one.

I can’t do anything.

The world sucks.

Strong arms suddenly sweep me up, one under my knees, one behind my shoulders, and Axel’s carrying me toward the elevator bay. “You’re right. It’s time for bed.”

Bed.

Something about the way that word sounds in his mouth has me all strung out. “I really need to sleep,” I say.

“I know you do,” he says. “You will sleep.”

“I’ll sleep better if you stay up here.”

“Patently untrue,” he says. “Do you really need to go downstairs alone to realize that?”

I think about the discomfort I felt earlier, just when he went outside. I grit my teeth. “You know, we have a word for this. It’s called co-dependent.”

“What does it mean?”

“It’s when people can’t function alone, and they need the other person to feel complete.”

“I like it,” he says.

I shake my head. “No, you shouldn’t like it. It’s bad. It’s a kind of human dysfunction.”

He shrugs. “Maybe dysfunction for humans is high function for dragons.”

It’s like arguing with a lamppost.

“I’m smarter than a lamppost,” he says.

“It’s not fair for you to argue with my thoughts ,” I say.

“Fair is irrelevant. I’m stronger than a post that holds lights on the street. And I can defend you much better than any inanimate object ever could.”

He’s absolutely absurd. “The point is that we need to work toward finding our independence again.”

“You’ll never be independent again.” He narrows his eyes. “Why would you want to? Are you looking into transferring your mother’s bond so you can figure out how to dissolve ours?”

I wasn’t, but I should’ve been. “No.”

“Liar.”

I really am so very tired. As he’s stepping into the elevator, I finally give up on arguing for the night and rest my head against his chest. That makes the bond pulse bright green.

I want to be annoyed, but for some reason, I can’t manage it.

It’s hard to be mad at a man who’s carrying you downstairs when you’re bone tired.

Maybe a stronger woman could manage it, but not me.

In fact, the only thing I do manage to do when Axel carries me to my room is shoo Gideon back to his room, overriding his concerns that Axel’s staying with me again, and check on the kiddos to make sure they’re alright. They must be as tired as I am, because they’re all completely passed out.

Their innocent, sweet faces heal part of the broken shards in my chest from the interaction with Mom.

Not all of them, but some.

I brush my teeth, and then I flop onto the biggest bed I’ve ever seen. It makes king-size beds look like a twin, which is good, because even in his human form, Axel’s massive.

For a moment, I’m ultra conscious that Axel’s beside me, his chest rising and falling as he breathes my air. “Do you use oxygen in this form?” I am exhausted, but sometimes the more tired I am, the more my brain spins round and round.

“Do you really care?”

I ball up my pillow and flip on my side. “I guess not.”

“I do,” he says. “In this form, my body’s closer to yours than in my other form. It’s why we’re not as strong like this. Before we fight, earth blessed always shift.”

“So why did you have those swords?” I yawn.

Axel’s less intimidating when I’m not staring right at him. All that beauty, all that savage grace, it’s a little off-putting to a normal human like me. But just the sound of his voice behind me kind of rolls over me, like a familiar lullaby.

“I thought they were for me, to use once I had mastered this form,” he says.

“But now I wonder. The only blessed yet alive who remembers the time we inhabited this planet, sharing it with your ancestors, is my father. The other elders have reunited with the blessed kin, their mortal bodies dissipating.”

“Your dad used to live on earth?”

“He was like me, the Prince of Flame, when we decided to leave Earth for good.”

Wow, that’s crazy. I yawn again, and this time it’s so big that I hear my jaw crack.

“You should sleep. We have plenty of time to discuss things while we search for the heart.”

“Do you have any leads?” I ask.

“You jump around like a foundling,” he says. “You asked about the swords first, and I never finished. I now believe that I was given them for you.”

A strange sense of destiny washes over me.

What are the odds that I would meet the prince of flame in his weak, human form, just outside my neighborhood? What are the chances that I’d be a bright, and that he’d inadvertently bond me? What does it mean, if it’s not a coincidence?

Fate is stupid. It’s worse than co-dependence.

If I buy into fate, it means I don’t have choices at all. It means all the things I’m doing, all the things that have happened to me, they’ve all been predestined. I was meant to hurt Gideon. I was meant to discover Axel’s secret. I was meant to bond to him and betray my own people by entwining.

He’s saying that the swords that he brought back to earth, the swords buried in a massive boulder that no one could remove, like the stupid Arthurian legend, were always meant to be mine. And I was always meant to be his.

If it’s true, that’s insane.

If it’s true, everything feels futile.

So I choose not to believe it. I choose to believe that my decisions matter. I can change the course of my future, and I can make things better. I can fix my errors and do better tomorrow.

Maybe I’m a stupid human, but I need to believe that, at least.

“You can choose to do good things, and they can also be foreordained,” Axel says.

“Oh, shut up.”

He doesn’t make a sound, but I know just what face he’s making.

“You know, I’ve never seen you eat as a dragon.” I close my eyes.

“Go to sleep, Liz. We can talk about what we eat tomorrow.”

Please, let it not be grubs.

Axel’s laughing as I finally drift off.

But the dream that grips me is not a good one, and it’s not new, either. It starts out like it always does.

I’m just waking up, and I’m exhausted. So tired that I wipe my eyes, but they’re still burning. It’s bright outside the vehicle I’m in. The light is so caustic that I cover my burning eyes with my hands. I’m in a big van with several other people, none of whom I know.

I cry for my mother.

The people in the van are cruel, especially the two men in the front. One of them hits me with a can, covering me with a smelly liquid. Beer. The woman isn’t nice, but she’s not as awful as the men.

It’s cold. Painfully cold, and then we reach the base of a snow-capped mountain.

Somehow, I already know it’s a volcano.

We climb, and we climb, and we climb more. My feet are throbbing. My hands are scraped. I’m dragged by a rope around my neck when I don’t want to go any farther. And then, finally, we reach the top of the volcano.

An active volcano.

I’m dragged toward it. I ask why. I ask them why I’m here. They rip my shirt, exposing my birthmark, the heart-shaped reddish mark that lives just above my left breast. I’m horrified that I’m uncovered, but I soon stop worrying about that.

Lots of people are gathered there, far more than the three who dragged me here.

They’re all chanting.

They keep saying the same strange word over and over. It sounds like shartanu. I have no idea what it means, but then they try to drag me toward the volcano.

They want to throw me inside.

But the woman who brought me here has a prosthetic leg. I noticed it’s not quite right, and when she tries to shove me in, I fight her. Even then, even though I’m quite small, I manage to kick her bad leg, and then shove her into the volcano.

She takes my place, burning to ash.

I run, then, and after I’m caught, I manage to use the woman’s dagger to stab my captor. And then I’m free once more, running as fast and as far as I can.

Before I see the bizarre police cars, I wake up, in a cold sweat, like always. Tears are streaming down my face, and my breathing’s coming in great, gulping gasps.

Like that night, the worst night of my life before the dragons came, my throat feels raw, as if I really have been inhaling ash and screaming again.

You’re okay, now. Axel’s holding me against his chest. You will never be terrified like that again.

“I murdered that woman,” I say, my breaths slowing. “When I was a child. That dream—it really happened. I might have killed the man, too. I’m not sure.”

Axel clears his throat. “They deserved to die for treating a child like that. I would have tortured them first, for a very long time.” His eyes are dark, and I realize that he’s angry.

Very, very angry.

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.