Page 56 of Ensnared
“Ways that help us betray our people more and more.”
She hisses. “Stop saying things like that. Static is always listening.”
Yes, her dragon’s name is Static. I don’t laugh, but only because she says her stupid master’s always monitoring her. The last thing I need is another electric shock therapy session. I’m still twitching occasionally from the last two hits I took.
I’m a lot less nervous about moving around the camp now that I’m wearing the three daggers Axel gave me. Maybe he’s less nervous about me now that I have them, too. Maybe that’s why he’s gone so much.
I almost fall into a pretty low-stress routine, staying in my little corner of camp, forcing my two hundred humans through their daily exercises, and playing games with the kids. Yes, we’re prisoners of war, but we’re comfortable enough, and I start to feel pretty safe. Sometimes I even forget that we don’t want to be here.
And I can’t admit this to anyone, not even to myself for fear that he’ll sense it, but I almost miss Axel when he’s gone, which is most of the time.
It’s a stupid thing to think. Traitorous, even.
I have no idea what he’s doing, and that should really be my lamentation. If we do escape, which I think about less and less, what will I be able to tell the humans about the dragons? Not much. A pathetic amount, given that I’m bonded to one.
In a rare moment of guilt, I actually sneak away from the house and take a look around. If I manage to stumble on something valuable, maybe I can use it in some way. Maybe I could discover something about the heart that could help me track it back to its hiding place. Maybe I could observe something about the dragons’ plans that could benefit the humans if we’re ever rescued or if we escape. Or maybe, I don’t know.
Sitting at the house and running through the motions with a massive group of mind-controlled humans is not enough. It feels wrong to have become so complacent in my lot.
Am I kicking a hornet’s nest?
Yes.
But I’m scared of who I’m becoming. Even though Axel’s rarely around, his two men always are, so we can’t sneak out without being seen. Even if we did, there are roving patrols of earth dragons all over the area. We’re in the epicenter of the earth dragon quarters.
On top of that, there are literally thousands upon thousands of humans now, crawling all over the place. On boats. In cars. On bikes. Walking around. They’re going to jobs. They’re running the power plant. They’re staffing grocery stores, but as distribution centers. The dragons don’t make us use money. They simply ask that people take what they need, and they require everyone to work a fair amount in return.
Where the food is coming from, I’m not really sure. You’d think that the supply chain from anywhere outside of dragon headquarters would have run dry, but I guess when you have an army of flying nightmares, you can pretty much hijack whatever trucks and trains you want, or raid any supply warehouses you need.
If he would ever come by, maybe I could pry some information out of Axel. As a prince, surely he’s connected. But he spends all his time doing only dragons know what, leaving me to train and retrain humans that will probably never need to do a single bit of fighting.
I’m wandering aimlessly toward the edge of the earth dragon territory, my hand caressing the tiny hilts of my three venom-dipped daggers, when I hear a disturbance.
It’s gunfire.
I haven’t heard that in quite some time.
Guns are kind of a waste with dragons. The bullets can’t pierce their scales, and even if they did, they’d heal from such small punctures almost immediately. In order to kill a dragon, you’d better blow it to smithereens or decapitate it, and both are pretty hard to do. You’d think the humans would have figured that out by now.
I jog in the direction of the sound, fully aware that I might be the only one anywhere near who would be injured by a stray bullet. That’s why I sneak very slowly, and I try to stay behind things while I check out the new area. I’m peering around the corner when a dozen men burst through the back door of a building, several of them clearly speaking into earpieces.
These are my people.
Warriors, here to slay some dragons.
Maybe more than anything else, this is why I’m wandering around. It feels like I’ve forgotten who I am. Like, somehow the bond and the magic and the time I’ve spent with the enemy has fundamentally changed me. That thought might be the most terrifying—without even using his bond to force me, has Axel already tunneled out what makes me me?
Being out here is the first time I’ve felt alive in weeks—since the silver dragon attack, really. That’s also, coincidentally, the last time I spent more than five minutes around Axel. I’m sure that’s not it, though. I wouldn’t come all the way out here just to try and get myself into trouble so I could grab his attention.
That would be idiotic.
No, I’m here to try and find the old Liz. And it worked. Human rebels, right in front of me. Before I can say a word, before I can even think about greeting them, a water dragon rushes through a gap between a shoe store and a burger place, and a dozen earth dragons flank the troops on the other side.
“Surrender,” a man says from the back of the blue dragon.
Ensnared.
“If you don’t surrender, we’ll be forced to kill you.”
