Page 25 of Moonmarked

With a deep breath and one last look up at the cliff from where we’d fallen, I followed.

nine

No sorcerers anywhere around us.

The werewolf took us down the riverbed, and we walked for five minutes before she started to climb up a path that led us up to the trees on the other side of it. It wasn’t steep at all, like the ground had fallen down here some time ago, and I climbed behind her without trouble.

From there, she rushed her steps for a couple more minutes, until we were at this small pool of water that came and went into a narrow river stream on both sides of the forest.

Water.

It was water, and it sounded like heaven. The werewolf went to the very edge, sat on the grass in front of the tiny pool, drank a few mouthfuls, then turned her head to look up at me.

Safe,I imagined her saying. It was safe to drink.

I had never moved faster in my life.

Before the minute was over, I drank enough to feel like I might explode any second. When I fell back and sat on thegrass to catch my breath, I felt reborn. A new person altogether. Alive—for real.

As I washed my hands and my face and my hair, questions rushed through my mind.

“They thought I would die within minutes,” I said to the werewolf, who had jumped across the stream—only three feet wide, but still much farther than I’d have guessed she could jump—and was sniffing the trees on the other side calmly.

She stopped to look at me only for a second.

“They said I would die within minutes because I was infected.” I raised my wounded arm, the scratches now clean, still wet. It wasn’t bleeding anymore. In fact, maybe I was seeing things, but the scratches didn’t look as big as they had just minutes ago.

“I was infected because you scratched me.” The werewolf sat on her hind legs near a tree trunk and watched me. “So why didn’t I? They were so sure.” And they were sorcerers—logic said they would know how this stuff worked. They would know if I wasinfectedor if I was going to die. They would know.

A huff—no idea what it meant this time, though.

“Don’t get me wrong, I’m thankful,” I told her. “But nothing makes sense, and I’m just so damn tired of nothing making sense.”

My eyes closed. I breathed in deeply and slipped my hand in the water. The pool was maybe two feet deep, and there were definitely fish in there, except they were small, and they did not come close to me at all, from what little I could see.

When I opened my eyes again, the werewolf had jumped on my side of the stream again, sniffing the grass, coming closer slowly, until she was right in front of me, herneck stretched as she tried to sniff the wound on my forearm.

Not going to lie, I was fucking terrified. Even though I was pretty sure by now that she was not going to bite me or kill me, or even leave me alone on a dry riverbed to die, to know what she was and to have her so close to me fired up every single one of my instincts.

Still, I didn’t move. I let her sniff me and watched with that scream stuck in my throat as she slowlylickedthe wounds a couple of times. Then she blew her nose like she was sneezing—or like the taste disgusted her—and moved back, sat down on her hind legs.

Werewolf.An actual werewolf.

My God, Betty was going to flip the fuck off when I told her.

“Can you…um, you canshift,right? You’re a werewolf.” She watched me passively. “So why don’t you? The sorcerers aren’t here, are they?” I looked around—trees, fewer and farther apart from one another, and more light slipped through the canopy. There was nobody there that I could see. No animals, no sorcerers, just us.

The werewolf didn’t even huff.

“That’s okay,” I said because I had no clue how shifting even worked, if werewolves were the same here as the stories said back home. I thought Rune said that they shifted, but I could have remembered wrong. “That’s fine. I’m Nilah, by the way. Thanks for saving me back there. Can I call you Wolfie?”

A growl—though I couldn’t tell you if it was threatening or not. I squinted my eyes at her and waited…

“Okay. I’ll call you Wolfie. How did you know that I wouldn’t die when you pushed me off the cliff?”

Yeah, I was an idiot because I genuinely expected her tospeakto me just now. And when I realized it, I closed my eyes, smiled at myself.

The werewolf didn’t make a single sound.

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