Page 120 of Elven Lies

She reached into the deep well of her own ability to mask almost anything and conjured another small smile that wasn’t entirely false. “I’m just beat.”

He didn’t look like he believed a single word of it. Not about her just being tired, anyway.

Now that they’d spoken for the first time about their odd connection, Rebecca was sure he could feel something was wrong.

She had to get out of here.

“Iamglad to see you’re awake,” she added for good measure.

After staring at her a moment longer, Maxwell finally seemed to give in. “So am I.”

That was all she could handle.

Rebecca scurried out of the infirmary and down the hall toward her private room in the compound’s residential wing, oblivious to anyone who might have passed her in the halls.

Because she could only think of one thing, and that one thing terrified her. Especially if she was right.

But she had to be sure.

She nearly ripped the door off its hinges before barreling into her room and locking it behind her with a quick locking spell sparking yellow first at her fingertip, then around the doorknob.

Then she turned her room upside down in a flurry, searching anywhere and everywhere for the single bit of proof she didn’t want to find.

Her bedclothes flew in all directions around the room, followed by articles of clothing from the standing dresser as she rifled through them one at a time before giving up.

She searched desperately between the mattress and the box spring, shook out every bath towel and hand towel hanging inthe connected bathroom, and shook out every pair of shoes she owned.

Rebecca had worked herself up into such a frenzy after only ten minutes, the idea of blasting her private room to pieces just to make this easier surged through her mind. Then she rounded her bed and dropped to the floor on all fours to search beneath it.

“Holy shit. There you are,” she murmured, then stretched her arm out beneath the bed as far as it would go until the solid, smooth, cool weight of what she’d been looking for settled between her fingers.

She pulled it out and sat on the floor beside her bed, panting to catch her breath. Feeling the weight of the old rune-inscribed bone tile Rowan had given her—to remind her of “their vow”—clenched tightly in her fist.

Maybe it would be better to just get rid of this thing now, without looking. To throw it away like a dirty secret. Blow it up. Burn it. Flush it down the toilet. Then she’d never have to think about it again.

But that wasn’t true.

If she didn’t see for herself now—if she didn’t know for sure—she wouldn’t stop thinking about it until she found another way to confirm what she desperately hoped couldn’t be confirmed.

Shehadto know…

Her fingers trembled as she uncurled them to reveal Rowan’s bone tile in her open palm. The light, off-white bone etched with old-world runes representing both Bloodshadow and Blackmoon Clans. Representing Agn’a Tha’ros and the Bloodshadow Court and the prophecies that had governed them all for millennia.

Representing who Rebecca had once thought she would become, though not anymore.

It took her another two minutes before she worked up the fortitude to turn that bone tile over in her hand. When she finally did, she nearly chucked it across the room again.

There it was, right there in front of her, etched in bone from the old world. The single rune that turned her stomach to look at now, because she’d just seen it somewhere else minutes before.

The same rune, right here on this bone tile, she now knew was also tattooed on Maxwell’s upper right pectoral muscle.

There was no doubt about it. She wasn’t seeing things. They were absolutely the same.

It didn’t make any sense. Less sense than the two of them having formed some unbreakable connection with each other neither of them understood.

How the hell did Maxwell Hannigan have a tattoo on his chest that matched an old-world elven rune straight from the Bloodshadow Court in Agn’a Tha’ros?

Forget that they were on Earth, or that they had entirely different backgrounds, or that they were already so vastly different from each other. Forget any bit of history between them. It would have been just as mind-boggling for anyone else who didn’t know or share some part of Rebecca’s past to have one of these runes permanently inked on their skin.

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