Slátra paced, muttering curses at whatever he was thinking. Hlíf and Rekja were silent as they stood by the door with their weapons already drawn. Hlíf with his sword and Rekja with his bow out like he was a Viking Legolas. Hluti stood cross-armed behind Harper, who sat across from me by Hegnan and offered Rune comfort too. I watched her as she soaked up everything about Hegnan’s way of healing, and I knew she was thinking of easier ways. I knew she had to have been thinking of modern medicine and what she could do to incorporate it into this type of healing.
My heart squeezed that my friend offered a man she didn’t know—a man who allowed others to kidnap her into another realm—comfort. Tears stung the corners of my eyes, and I bit my bottom lip to keep from thanking her profusely for being so sweet to him.
Rune’s invisible lips brushed over my temple as his fingers ghosted through my hair and down my neck. I snapped out of my thoughts and noticed his ocean eyes were on me, with a ghost of a smile curving his lips. I grabbed one of his hands, not caring how desperate that made me look. Bringing his palm to my cheek, I leaned into his touch and kept my gaze on his.
“How,elskan mín?” At my confused look, he said while brushing his other hand over his chest, “How did you put a piece of your soul into mine?”
Licking my lips and swallowing hard at the memory of it, I tried to think of a way to explain it that made sense.
“I was told to give you a piece of my soul to replace what that bitch took from you.” I slipped my hand to his wrist and tightened my grip. He kept his gaze steady on mine, but through our link I felt his revulsion of her and the echo of pain he went through. “So I imagined reaching into myself, taking a piece, and putting it into yours. I watched... felt our souls merging together like someone was stitching two cloths together with an unbreakable thread.”
A heavy silence hung around all of us. I felt everyone holding their breath and their eyes on me. But with a quick glance around the barely lit room, no one was looking at me. Harper was the only one who watched me with her eyebrows bunched. She was the first to break eye contact as she turned to Hegnan, who was cleaning up the herbs to get ready for our hasty leave.
“Do you know what she is?” she asked him.
I drew my eyebrows together as I watched Hegnan, who showed no sign of hesitation about answering her. Rune was always dancing around my questions and never wanted to tell me the truth because he was worried about my mind fracturing. But the closer I watched Hegnan, I saw the split-second pause in his work and his shoulders tensing. Even under all the furs he wore, I saw him stiffen up like a board.
He knew.
I glanced around the room, noticing a shift. Slátra had stopped pacing and was rubbing his gloved fingers over his mouth, his eyes going back and forth between me, Hegnan, and Rune. I peered at Rune with the same confused look.
“I was a goddess in my past life... right?” I asked softly.
My mind was spinning and trying to backtrack. I tried to remember everything I knew and even tried to call back memories from my last life, but nothing came to me.
Rune sighed as he shifted to stand. I shot to my feet and helped him, stumbling a few times under his heavy weight as I helped him stand. I kept contact with him as he looked down at me before he glanced around the room.
“We need to leave,” he said.
He kept his thoughts from me, and I could barely feel his emotions. I didn’t know if I wasn’t feeling them because whatever concoctions Hegnan made along with the mead dulled them or if it was because he tried blocking our link and, somehow, our souls merging. So did that mean I was able to do the same? What was happening?
Why was he keeping things from me still? I deserved to know dammit.
“Rune?” I murmured, meaning for it to sound stronger than how it actually came out. Instead of annoyance, it was full of hurt and insecurity.
He pulled me into him with one arm and held me against him. Kissing my forehead, his hand came to the back of my head and he tangled his fingers in my hair at the scalp. The touch sent goosebumps along my body and made me shudder. My nipples hardened, and my face flushed.
“You’re perfect, Isa,” he whispered and leaned back to look me in the eye. I scowled at him as he avoided answering the question. He sighed again. “You’re not human anymore. If I were to take a guess, you’ve ascended to a goddess, and your powers are coming back to you.”
“Awakening,” Hluti added.
I looked at him with my mouth parted and my heart racing. The memory of Death telling me to awaken played in my head in the span of a heartbeat. His ice-blue eyes flashed in my mind’s eye and glowed as the word repeated in my head with his deep, bored tone.
Hluti unwound his arms from his chest. His amber eyes shifted to me. “You’re going through an awakening, and it’s only a matter of time before you remember everything.” He pulled his full lips into a wicked smile, and it was fucking terrifying coming from him because of the unhinged look it gave him. “And when you do remember, I wouldn’t want to be your enemy.”
ChapterTwenty-Eight
Instead of running away like Rune did the first time, we stuck around in the same realm now that the two missing men in the group were back. We rode in the night with only the stars and moon as a source of light.
The guys made a formation with Harper and me in the center. Rune rode on one side of me with Hluti and Harper on the other. Hegnan and Slátra took the front corners while Hlíf and Rekja were in the back.
The creepy woods still lined on one side, with the fog tendrils dancing and reaching out like they had a mind of their own. I did my best to ignore it, but I still got the creeps from it and the weird feeling to go in there to find whatever was calling out to me.
My eyes strayed every few minutes to the large trees, and every time, my stomach dipped. I knew it had to be a trick of the mind creating images from things that weren’t there. The way my brain made a human figure when it was some inanimate object. It happened all the time back home while I tried to sleep with clothes piled on my chair. It never failed to always look like some creepy demon sitting and watching me sleep.
Slátra meant what he said abouttalkingto the enemies. The men in our small group discussed all sorts of things and what they wanted to do to the people hunting me. It drove all of us crazy, not knowing who was after me. They knew it had to be someone associated with the Wolf king’s clan from the battle centuries ago.
The same battle I kept having dreams about.
