A/N: This is a quickly written, completely un-betaed story. If you find typos or issues, please feel free to (kindly?) let me know in your reviews or via private message. Please do not harass my usual beta about them! She gets a pass on this one!

Now, we're going with soulmates again on this story, so if you don't know the drill, here's a brief explanation. When your soulmate is born, their first words to you appear on their skin- almost like a tattoo. Romantic soulmates are in black "ink", while platonic are grey. It is possible to have one, none, or multiple in either category. Sometimes there are extenuating circumstances, and the words might appear at a time other than birth, or words might disappear.

Where Asgardians are concerned, soulmates are a little different. When you see your platonic for the first time, you're physically pulled together by fate into an arm clasp that is broken after introducing yourselves. When Asgardians see their romantic soulmate for the first time, their pulled into a head-to-toe embrace that can only be broken by a kiss.

One

I really didn't want to be quoting my mother, but all I could think at the moment was, "why me? Why did this stuff always happen to me?"

It had started out simply enough. One of my neighbors, Mr. Kolakowski, had a goddaughter who in turn had a daughter that had gone missing. Now, said daughter, Isabelle, was eighteen and had just graduated from high school, so the police thought she'd just left. And she was an adult so she was allowed to do so if she so chose.

Isabelle's mother, however, did not think Isabelle had just up and left. Among other reasons was the fact that Isabelle had left all her clothes and shoes behind. Another was that she'd also left her graduation gifts (mostly cash) behind as well.

I was inclined to believe the mother, as I knew I wouldn't leave town with at least my favorite… dozen… pairs of shoes. And even an eighteen year old who had never lived away from home would know enough to know she'd need money for things. Like food.

Of course, I'd protested that I was a bounty hunter, and not a PI, and they would be better off with someone more experienced searching for her. Possibly someone who specialized in kidnappings and runaways. And someone who the cops respected a little bit more because even though I'd gotten better at my job, most of the cops in the Trenton Police Department thought I was a joke.

But they'd continued pleading over my protests and logic, and eventually I'd given in. So the case of Isabelle had become my primary side job. Anytime I wasn't going after a Failure to Appear, or FTA, for my cousin Vinnie's bail bonds company, I was trying to find Isabelle.

As teenagers were wont to be, her friends had been fairly secretive when I'd first approached them. Once Isabelle had reached 48 hours of being missing though, they'd decided they needed to trust someone, and apparently I was it. Then it was information dump time.

I'd gotten details on her first adorable kiss in elementary school, the boyfriend she'd lost her virginity to on prom night, and everything in between. Probably Isabelle would be pissed off when she found out how much I knew about her. Though, to be pissed off, she'd have to be alive, so I would take it.

Through the details of all the stories I was given, I was able to get a fairly clear picture of Isabelle. And like a lot of teenagers, she wasn't quite the paragon of virtue her mother had insisted she was. Don't get me wrong, she wasn't a bad kid, but she also wasn't perfect.

A bit more pressing had given me the name and location of an underground club that Isabelle liked to go to because they didn't card her or her friends. I'd waited until late Friday night, and then I'd gone to investigate.

That was where things had gone badly. Instead of just staking the place out, I'd decided to go in. And as soon as my thirty-something self had walked into the place, there'd been a record-scratch sound and the music had cut out.

Not actually, but close enough. I was easily the oldest person there, and everyone else knew it too. I'd tried to brush it off, and go about my business, ask my questions, the usual. Of course, no one would talk to me, and the second I stepped outside, I was greeted by a sweet-smelling cloth pressed over my mouth.

That was how I found myself in the trunk of a car with my arms tied behind my back. I knew it was the trunk of a car that I was in because I'd been crammed in a variety of things before, including cars, and this one just smelled and felt like a car trunk. Lovely. At least we weren't moving.

I sat there for a few more minutes, waiting to see if the car was going to start up and we'd be on the road again. I was also waiting to see if they were going to come and get me out. Deciding that it seemed as though no one was in a rush to deal with me, I started wiggling around. From what I could tell, the bindings on my hands were actual rope, and a bit of contortion later, I found a rough patch that I could rub the rope against to fray it.

In the movies when someone did that, it didn't take more than a couple seconds. I was willing to concede the point that it probably depended on the type of rope and what you were using to cut it, but really I thought it was mostly Hollywood nonsense. Still, I kept working on it, fearful that any moment I was going to be interrupted by my captors.

Eventually I got the ropes loose and was able to slip my hands free and start feeling around the trunk. When I discovered that my captors hadn't been so thorough as to remove the mechanism for freeing yourself from the trunk if you got trapped inside. Of course, as soon as I released it, it was entirely possible that Hell would break loose.

The alternative really wasn't any better, so I took a deep breath and moved. Throwing the trunk open, I jumped out, hit the ground flat on my belly, and rolled under the car. I peeked out from my hiding spot and hardly suppressed a scream when I saw the dead bodies that were littering the ground on either side.

Seconds later a new set of boots materialized next to the car, and a gruff voice said, "oh, thank goodness you're not completely useless. Come on, get out from under there, I need your help."

Surprised to hear the words written around one of my ankles in grey, almost illegible handwriting, I forgot where I was and tried to sit up, banging my head, hard on the underside of the car. Muttering to myself, I rolled back out from under the car and I wasn't prepared at all for what was in front of me.

"Is that a bow?" I asked.

I had a feeling that the guy could, when he wanted to, have a blank face that would put Ranger's to shame, but at the moment he chose not to use it. Instead he grinned and said, "this you?" and showed me writing on the outside of one bulging bicep.

I nodded just barely managed to nod my head and then I pulled up my pant leg, allowing him to see the writing there. In response, the man looked at my leg and said, "well, I'm glad I have a platonic who at least knows what my weapon of choice is. And you can get yourself out of the trunk of a car."

"It wasn't that difficult once I got loose of the rope, they didn't remove the latch thingy." I looked at the dead bodies and noticed the arrows sticking out of them and said, "I guess you aren't on their side?"

"Hell no. I do not endorse human trafficking. Now what do you say we go free a bunch of missing kids, then we can talk about how you ended up in the trunk of that car as you're not exactly their target demographic."

I let out a sigh and said, "Any chance you've already killed them all and I only have to undo a few locks? I forgot my gun today and they took my purse with my stun gun in it."

With a smile, the man leaned down to one of the dead bodies and pulled a gun off of the belt the guy had been wearing. After rifling through the pockets, he came up with two spare clips and handed all three objects to me. While I stashed the extra clips on my person, he yanked his arrows out of the bodies and put them onto the quiver on his back with ruthless efficiency.

"Come on, it'll be fun," he said before taking off quickly toward the train yard in the distance and leaving me no choice but to follow and hope I was able to keep my platonic soulmate from getting dead.