Page 27 of Moonmarked

That fact scared me, too. It had beenthislong since I ran away from the queen’s palace and the Seelie Court, and Rune hadn’t found me. I was glad the royal guard hadn’t, but Rune…

Raja,I told myself.He’ll find me when I make it to Raja.And I prayed that the werewolf planned to keep walking all night long because the sooner I got the hell out of this never-ending forest, the better.

And just as I was thinking that, the entire energy around me shifted.

Both Wolfie and I stopped in our tracks at the same time, though she was walking a couple feet ahead of me.

I couldn’t really put my finger on it, but there was something about the air here. Something…heavier.

The werewolf looked back at me once before we continued ahead, much slower than before.

The trees began to get thinner and thinner as we went. Even the darkness seemed darker somehow, veiled by something more than just shadows.

Possibly less than two minutes later, we saw it.

It was a stone structure nestled between two large, old looking trees, the shape of it barely visible beneath the ivy and rot. It looked half-forgotten, the kind of place that should’ve crumbled years ago, but somehow hadn’t. Something about it felt very, very wrong.

The werewolf growled low in her throat, her head closer to the ground, her tail lowered, but she kept moving, and so did I. The closer we were to the structure, the more still the air grew, like even the wind stayed away from it. Yet something seemed to pull me closer, almost called my name in silence.

It was some kind of a temple, or what remained of one. Four towering pillars framed a raised stone platform, and the walls were half ruined, dented in, broken, yet two torches hung on metal hooks with barely any fire burning atop them.

But what made us both stop for the second time was the altar in the center of the platform, in the shape of a spear pointing at the ceiling, made of dark rock—and the man who was chained to it.

The torches on the walls gave off enough light to see that his skin was basically grey, and there was dried blood covering his arms. Strange glyphs shimmered faintly beneath the skin of his chest, like they’d been burned into him from the inside somehow.

Every hair on my body stood at attention.A sorcerer,the voice in my head said. A sorcerer had done this to this man, had chained a living being to be used for magic. For spells and fuckingpotions.

I wanted to get closer, but the werewolf turned to me and growled—a warning.

“We have to help him,” I whispered as slowly as I could. “He’s breathing. We have to unchain him.” And indeed, his chest rose and fell steadily, though slowly. We werenotgoing to just leave him here to die.

So, I moved again, and this time the werewolf let me. She walked with me, right by my side, her muscles still tense, her head low, that growl coming from deep inside her every few seconds.

When I stepped into the clearing in front of the temple, the man’s head snapped up with unnatural speed.

Why my soul didn’t leave my body in that second is still a mystery to me.

His eyes were almost white—and I’d seen eyes like thatbefore, on that woman. The seer in the queen’s palace. The seer in the prince’s bedroom. Except this man was very different, and his skin was grey, and he wore black clothes, torn and dirty, and the energy about him was all wrong.

“H-Hello,” I whispered, my voice dry as a bone, eyes on those thick chains that wrapped around his wrists, then went behind the spear-shaped stone.

Chained.The man was chained, for fuck’s sake—why was I so scared?

I moved closer despite my screaming instincts, and the werewolf’s low growls. She came with me, stuck close to my left leg, and I tried to look brave, unafraid. I tried to keep my chin up as I approached the poor man.

“Stand still, we’re not going to hurt you,” I forced myself to say. “We’re going to?—”

“You came back.”

I stopped when I was still two feet away from the stone floor of the ruined temple.

“I…wait,what?” Did he really just speak? Or had I lost my mind for real?

The man smiled.

God help me, I had never seen a more terrifying face, not even on the sorcerers—but the sight of him was nothing compared to what he said next.

“My Queen, you came back.”

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