Page 5 of Moonmarked

By some miracle, I made it. I broke out of the surface and I drew in air, and I saw lights, and I heard screams. I even saw the balcony, so, so high up the palace, and I’d indeed jumped from a fucking world away.

But I didn’t even have time tohopethat I might make it before something cold wrapped around my ankle and pulled.

Sheer terror wrapped around me—and it looked like those same shadows that had been coming for me from the bottom of the river. I wanted to scream, but my jaws were locked, and thank God they were because I was underwater again. There had been light, a little light coming from everywhere around me—those lanterns at the bottom of the river—but now they were gone.

Now there was only darkness, and it wasmovingme in the water, pulling me to the sides like it was trying to knock me out. I tried to push it off me, thrashing as well as I could while also holding my breath, for a good moment—until Rune’s face came in front of my mind’s eye. Until I heard his voice in my head again—those same words as before, an echo of them.

Maybe I hadn’t made it up. Maybe Rune had really told me to jump when I was on that balcony. Maybe he really did have a plan—healwayshad a plan.

It was hard but I forced myself to stop moving, let the shadows pull me whichever way they wanted, hold my breath until my lungs burned. My eyes were squeezed shut tightly, my mind on Rune.

Hang in there, Wildcat,I imagined him saying.Just a little longer…

Then the shadows spit me out like they were suddenly disgusted by the taste of me.

I was moving and I was still in the water, but air was going down my throat, filling my lungs. I tried to see, tried to find something to hold onto as the current now took me forward, but all I saw was darkness and a pale moon in the sky. The water pushed me farther and farther away. I had no idea where the hell I was, just that there was very little light around me now, and I went on for possibly a few minutes before something touched my hand.

I could have passed out from the fear, from surprise, because I had no ideawhatI’d touched until I slammed against concrete with my shoulder.

Suddenly, there was ground underneath my feet, and to my side. I held on as well as I could, tried to crawl out, tried to blink faster, to see better, except my body was exhausted. The best I managed to do was pull myself halfway out of the water, and then my limbs locked down.

Luckily, the current of the river wasn’t strong enough to pull me under again. I was lying on my stomach on the cold hard ground, unable to even raise my head to see what was around me, where I could go, where I couldrun.

My eyes closed. My mind collapsed on itself, and my thoughts disappeared with the slow wind. Even though every instinct in my body was certain that death would find me if I didn’t wake up, unconsciousness pulled me under.

two

My eyes opened.Darkness around me, and a little light came from the distance, which I wasn’t even sure how I saw since I was lying face first against cold concrete.

My muscles screamed, exhausted, but I moved anyway. I forced myself to roll over so that I could better see my surroundings.

A muffled scream escaped me as I pushed myself off the concrete, and then I was on my back, breathing as if I’d been running for miles. Memories started to come back to me, slowly first, then all at once. That word, that awful word—murderer!—repeated itself in my mind in the background while I went through all that had happened.

So sudden. So…impossible.

One minute I had been laughing and crying with the prince of the Seelie Court, the same guy who’d saved my life all those years ago, and the next, I was being accused of murdering him. The next, I was looking at him on the ground,dead.Bleeding. A knife sticking out of his chest.

My God, had that really happened? Part of me wasconvinced it was just a dream, and the other part wished it would be. I hoped with all my being that I woke up any second now, and I was somewhere with Rune instead—on top of a moving carriage, or in a tunnel, or even in the Enclave—anywhere at all. Justnot here.

Unfortunately for me, no matter how hard I squeezed my eyes shut and how deeply I breathed, the night didn’t change. The past didn’t change.

I hadreallybeen accused of murdering the prince I came here to save.

Pushing myself to sit up, I looked at my surroundings, finally motivated enough to even care about where I was. Or that I was somehow still alive.

Even after that fall, and after barely swimming in the river, I was still breathing.

Above me, golden-green stalks of grain swayed in the breeze. Rows and rows of them stretched on either side, taller than me, starting off a couple feet from the edge of the river. I was still in the water up to my hips, but…

It wasn’t a river at all, I realized. It must have been some sort of a irrigation canal because I could see the actual river reflecting light in the distance. It simply poured into this canal that was made out of concrete, and it was lined with what I was pretty sure were grain stalks on both sides.

My heart picked up the beating. The queen’s palace was there, possibly two hundred feet away. It loomed in the darkness, feral, golden,menacingto me now. A place crawling with death, and I’d somehow made it out of there in one piece.

“Rune,”I whispered to the night because it had beenhimwho’d saved me. He’d told me to jump, and his shadows had brought me here. I looked at the otherside, but I couldn’t see much from the stalks, just the sun peeking through the horizon in the distance, bathing the sky in light.

I needed to run as fast as I could, as far as my legs could carry me. I needed to run before anybody found me, and I needed to figure out a way to find Rune.

Not sure how my legs held me when my entire body felt like it had gone through the sewer. Must have been my instincts because I was moving, putting one foot in front of the other no matter how much it hurt. I went straight for the stalks because going back to the queen’s palace now was a bad idea. Averybad idea, and I had already made it my mission to get as far away from it as was possible. As far away from this entire fucking kingdom as I could get.

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