Page 24 of Rejected Moons (Rejected Moons 3)

“What are you looking for?” he asks.

“I want to copy those down.”

“Are youserious? You can’t write that shit down. For all you know, it’ll make the building catch fire if you do that.”

“I mean, we know that those signs don’t make the building catch fire,” I say. “Because they’re already written on the wall, and the building isn’t on fire.”

“You know what I mean. They’re some kind of weird magic. You can’t touch that shit.”

“They probably have to be written in blood to do whatever it is they do,” I say. “I really doubt it’s going to do anything if I write them down inpenonpaper.

He groans. “You really do have to have your own way about everything, don’t you?”

“Why would I do things someone else’s way?”

“Not very pack-minded of you.”

“I’m notina pack,” I remind him pointedly. “And neither are you, and it’s because you didn’t want to listen to people who told you what to do.”

He groans and pulls out a pen from his pocket. “I don’t have paper.”

“That’s fine.” I uncap the pen and hold up my forearm against the wall.

“You’re not going to put those things on yourskin?”

“Relax.” I copy the shape of the first one, but instead of drawing the X shape perfectly, I create it as hash marks with gaps in the middle. I show Nate what I’ve done. “See?”

“Okay,” he says. “Very clever.” But he looks more deeply uncomfortable than I’ve seen him since we got here—since I met him, really.

“You really don’t like this, do you?” I ask him.

“Doyou?” he asks. “I think it’s creepy as hell. You know what they are. You know what they do.”

“If I meet one of them,” I say, “I can ask them what these sigils mean.” It’s the closest I dare come to telling Nate the truth.

“Who gives a damn what they mean?” Nate asks. “The Moon Casters are evil. Any signs they use are evil. And if I saw one, I wouldn’t stop to ask questions. I would kill them where they stood.”

Chapter Seventeen: NATE

I’mgladtogetout of the high rise in the morning. I still feel uneasy, though because Emlyn still has those freakish symbols written on her arm. She’s studying them as if they contain the secrets of the universe.

I’d set my arm on fire before I’d write that kind of freaky shit on my own body. I mean, to each their own,I guess, but I don’t know how she can have those there and not feel like peeling her skin off.

“The coven,” she says as we make our way down the road. “We’re going there today. Right?”

“Well, we’re probably not going togetthere today,” I say.

“What? Why not?”

“This is a big city!” I tell her. “Do you think we can cross the whole thing in a single day?”

“We can if we shift,” she says. “Go on, strip down. I’ll carry your clothes again.”

She’s right, of course, and I can see she has no intention of making this easy for me. “We can’t shift,” I tell her.

“Why the hell not?”

“Because there were wolves around last night, and they probably found the deer we left out in the woods,” I say. “They’re going to know we’re in the area by now. They’ll probably be tracking us.”

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