Page 20 of Moonmarked

“Don’t give me that. You belong to me and you know it. Be a good girl and go back to your cage. Don’t make memakeyou.”

Good girl.The dog was ashe.

And she was growling louder than before, lowering her head toward the ground, waiting…

The sorcerer growled, too. Just like the dog, she growled and bared her teeth, yellow and crooked and two of them missing.

My God, the sight of her was almost as bad as the monkey monsters that almost killed me when I first came to Verenthia.

“W-we don’t want trouble,” I said—and it was silly, I know. These women here had not followed us so we couldtalkor so that they could make up their minds to let us go—they wouldn’t. That was as clear as the blue sky over us.

The one with the corset laughed—andthat’swhere the sound had come from. She was the one who’d laughed while chasing us. I hadn’t made it up.

“Get them, Eurith! Move!” said the other, and she moved, too—shot forward with those hands raised at us, and then the one who’d caged the dog began to whisper words that made no sense to me at all.

I knew it was over. I knew I wasnevergoing to make it out of the clutches of those sorcerers again, but I still planned to run. I still plan to turn to the side and try to make it back into the forest and disappear into thin air, somewhere where they couldn’t find me.

Except I never got the chance.

The dog moved before I’d taken the second step. She jumped—not at Eurith the sorcerer, but at me. She jumped in the air far too high, and she slammed onto me with both her front paws. Her claws were sharp and long and curved, and at least three of them cut through the jacket and the skin of my arm that I’d raised to try to protect myself from her.

She was too heavy, too strong, and when she slammed onto me, she pushed me back.

A step, two—then nothing.

The dog I just saved threw me right off the cliff’s edge.

I was too stunned to scream. Too stunned to do anything but try to grab thin air, and the dog fell off the edge with me. Whether it was accidental or not didn’t matter—her eyes locked on mine, and she was trying to run on air with as much energy as I was trying to hold on while I could still see her.

Why-why-why?!I shouted at her in my head.I was trying to save you—why would you do this to me?!

Of course, the words didn’t come.

Instead, the stinging on my arm where the dog scratched me intensified, and something else inside me clicked—thewarmth, that energy that burned under myskin, that gathered in my hands like golden lights. The energy that wasrealbecause Rune had witnessed it, too.

The energy I hadn’t once thought to call for while those sorcerers had backed me against the edge of the cliff.

Too late now.

The last thing I remembered before my mind went blank was the dog falling with me, and the faces of the sorcerers screaming in fury from the edge of the cliff.

Logic saidI should be dead. A fall that high would have broken every single bone in my body. I’d passed out before making impact, thank God, but the fall should have killed me.

Instead, I was still alive. Breathing. Thinking. Able to push myself to open my eyes, even though they felt welded shut right now.

I was conscious, and I was not dead.

My heart pounded in my chest. I was lying on the ground on my stomach, and I had dirt in my mouth. The more seconds passed, the more I was aware of the pain in my body, my left leg, but mostly in my right forearm.

Fuck, it hurt. It burned like I had flames dancing on my skin, eating at me little by little, and I couldn’t even scream, couldn’t cry, couldn’t evenwhimperto give myself a tiny bit of release.

But I heard just fine.

Every inch of my skin rose in goose bumps and the fear took a step back when I heard the footsteps. Someone was coming closer to me, and the image of the faces of those sorcerers took over my mind, their fangs and their clawsand those senseless words they’d spewed at me before the dog pushed me off the edge—the dog.

I’d fed her, had let her out of the cage, and she’d thrown me off the fucking cliff on purpose. She’d thrown me down here to fucking die!

But maybe…maybe it was for the best.

---