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I didn’t get nightmares as often as I grew older, but I never got them when Gideon was asleep on my floor.
He and I might have been an epic disaster in a relationship, or maybe not. Either way, we never got the chance, so there’s no awkward interchanges or sordid past to contend with. There’s nothing but my own memory of the possibility.
Of course, there’s still a chance that the dragons might locate this heart thing and leave.
But now that I’m entwined, there’s not much hope that I’ll be left unless I can somehow work out how to be separated from Azar for more than ten minutes. For about a day, I was kind of freaking out that he now has a dragon fiancée, which was completely insane.
I mean, he’s a dragon. Who cares whether they matched him up with someone equally scaly? I’m a human. My future can’t be with a dragon-man-dragon who has loads of secrets and a lot of questions I never want to answer.
Oh, and by the way. . . He now wants to drag me to the place in Iceland that stars in every single one of my nightmares so that I can help him find something that’s probably in the middle of a volcano. The last thing I want to do is star in my very own version of Lord of the Rings. I’m definitely no Frodo.
I zipped through the front entry of the apartment my siblings and Gideon are sharing, but I’ve been standing in the foyer alone for. . .at least a minute now. No one has even noticed I’m here. “Your security sucks,” I shout.
“Our security?” Gideon walks out of his room, a towel around his waist, running one hand through his clearly wet hair. “What do you mean, security?”
“What—where—my—” I was not expecting to see this much of him. In fact, I can’t remember the last time I saw him without a shirt on. At the gym, we train together a lot, but we don’t share a locker room, obviously, and this is just so much more than I’m equipped to handle right now.
He’s not as bulky as Axel—why am I thinking about Axel? I’m supposed to be practicing staying away from him. I’m probably just thinking about him because he’s the last man I saw shirtless.
Not that he’s a man.
I know he’s not.
“Sammy, Coral, and Jade went downstairs.”
“Downstairs?”
“They’ve been begging Rufus and Gordon to let them race for a while, and?—”
“Race?”
Gideon’s suppressing a smile. “Sammy’s positive that Gordon’s faster than Rufus, but I can’t imagine, with his tiny legs, that?—”
“You’re letting them race on dragons?”
“They can’t go outside or the other dragons will realize they’re brights, or future-brights?” He shrugs. “I’m unclear. But either way, they’ve been stuck inside for weeks now, at the house before here, obviously, and they couldn’t?—”
“Race?”
He shrugs. “Kids love racing. They all do.”
And there aren’t any other kids for them to race in a normal way—on foot or bikes.
The dragons, in a surprising show of decency, transported all the children to the border of the city and dumped them over a period of several weeks after first arriving. My brother and sisters would stand out like sore thumbs if they were to go outside. But the scariest thing of all would be the others discovering their connection to me. Brights—humans capable of being bonded by dragons and controlling other humans—run in families, and in an attempt to curry favor, there’s no way to know how many of the other dragons might try to bond them. Axel says they’re super safe here, but the last thing I need is for him to be wrong.
I can’t even imagine another Ocharta-adjacent situation.
Actually, keeping their existence a secret is one of the main reasons Mom hasn’t seen them yet. That, and Mom’s incessant requests that I mercy-kill her. The last thing the kiddos need is to see their mom begging to die.
In any case, earth dragons are relatively safe around the kids, since they can’t bond humans, and Axel seems to trust Gordon and Rufus. Plus, I feel like the snake and lizard-looking dragons genuinely like Coral, Jade, and Sammy. I’m just not sure quite what that’s worth in the dragons’ world. Are they the kind of critters that are often fond of their food? Like, humans having a lobster tank and naming one of them Spotty and one of them Speckles?
I almost rip Gideon a new one for cavalierly letting them go down there, but I realize it’s kind of pointless. It’s not like he would stand much of a chance in an argument with two dragons.
“What are you doing here?” he asks. “I never get to see you without one of them tagging along.”
Axel or Azar. He has no idea they’re the same person, of course. He can’t know. He thinks that Axel actually likes me—as if he even knows how to care about someone properly—and that the two of them are forcing me to like them back.
“Azar told me that we can only handle being apart once we’ve spent enough time together to be in sync or something.”
