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Fire rose around their bed. The walls became charcoal, and heavy, wet smoke filled the room.

“You promised. Had you come on time—”

“I am sorry!” he yelled as the fire consumed the bed.

“Andor,” someone called. “Andor.”

Everything shook, as though a giant stomped on the ground.

“Wake up, Andor.”

He opened his eyes. Fire lit Cathy’s worried face above him, dark against the night. She shook him by the shoulder. The scent of a forest, rotting leaves and wet earth, hit him. An owl hooted. Branches rustled in the wind.

He jerked to sit upright, tugging the cloak to cover his erection. Odin and Thor, he was still aroused after the dream. He still wanted Cathy, despite the horror of everything else he had seen.

“It was just a dream,” she said. “You’re okay. Nothing is chasing you.”

He breathed heavily, his chest tight with the echo of the memories.

“You are wrong about that,” he croaked. “Go to sleep. I am awake now. I shall do the night watch.”

“Are you sure? You barely slept.”

“I will not sleep even if I try.”

As she lay on the ground, huddled in her cloak by the fire, he thought that she was very wrong about nothing chasing him.

The ghosts were. The more he wanted Cathy, the more they haunted him.

And he still could not stop wanting her.

But he had to try.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Lands near Ashbury, Oxfordshire, January 18, 878 AD

For the past three days, all Cathy had seen were trees, the rolling hills of the English—or Wessex—countryside, and Andor’s stern profile as they walked side by side up the road to the northeast. The leaden winter sky and bare forests were the perfect mirror of her mood.

Whatever signs of admiration and appreciation Andor had showed Cathy before were only in her head. He had made it clear that she should stay away. “We should probably go our separate ways,” he had said. He didn’t want anything to do with her. Maybe he had just been surprised to see her naked and had reacted the way any man would to a naked woman. And she had read too much into it.

Cathy looked down at her boots moving on the damp packed-earth road. Her vision blurred and her eyes began burning.

In his rough woolen cloak, with an ax and a long dagger, Andor seemed to her as much a part of the dark, brooding landscape as the solemn trees on either side.

Whereas she… Even without the hot-pink wetsuit, she felt like an outsider, a tourist, as though the very woods and sky frowned at her.

She had kept her promise and not asked any more questions about his personal life, though they burned on her tongue. She forced herself to swallow them, just like she swallowed her words when her mom told her that she chatted way too much and that she already stood out with her height and weight.

Mostly, she and Andor walked in silence.

Every morning, Cathy walked away from their little camp to do yoga. Not too far though, so that Andor could come watch her if he wanted to. But because of that, she could never really get into it.

Secretly, she wanted for him to join her. One, yoga would do him good. Something haunted him, and Cathy firmly believed yoga and meditation could bring him relief. Two, pathetically, embarrassingly, and despite his rejection, she craved his attention. His approval and his compliments had intoxicated her. She wanted more.

But he never came.

Later that evening, while they were setting up camp, she couldn’t keep her anxiety over his opinion of her down anymore.