Chapter 21
EMLYN
It’shourslater,andthe moon is high overhead when I finally come out from between the two rocks that have been sheltering me.
The lakefront beach is made of rough sand, but it’s still much softer than the concrete floors I’ve been sleeping on lately, and the night air is warm. I listen to the little waves lapping at the shore, trying to pick up on any other noises in the night, but there’s nothing.
I’m alone.
At least I got a little bit of sleep. I don’t think I’m going to get any more tonight.
The best thing to do is going to be to just leave this city. I know that. My pack is never going to stop hunting me.
Except, where would I go?
I know there’s a whole big world out there, but I don’t know where anything is, and I don’t know what any of it is like. It could be that every other remnant of a city is completely overrun by Moon Casters, or even by Ravagers. It could be that feral wolves dominate the land between here and the next city.
And at the end of the day, the devil I know is better than the devil I don’t.
There’s also the fact of my mate bond with Victor. Even now, it’s tugging at me—milder than it was when he was right on top of me, definitely, but a hell of a lotstrongerthan it was when I was with Nate.
Maybe Nate was a distraction, and I just didn’t notice it. I don’t know.
The point is, it seems to be affected by proximity. And that means that if Victor gets close to me again, I’m probably going to know it before he’stooclose. I’ll be able to run, the way I did this time.
So ultimately, staying in my city is the best call for now. The pros outweigh the cons.
Which doesn’t make it any less nerve-wracking.
I’m tracing designs absently in the sand with my finger, not really thinking about what I’m doing, when I realize that the image I’m drawing is the form of one of the sigils on my arm. I squint at the picture I’ve inked onto my skin in the dark, and sure enough, I’ve written it down exactly right.
I roll onto my hands and knees and carefully draw the other two sigils next to the first. I take my time and make sure the details are right. This time, I don’t leave gaps in the lines as I draw them. I mimic perfectly what was on the wall in the high rise.
I hold my breath as I draw the last sigil. I’m not drawing these in blood. That should make all the difference. But still…am I prepared for the fact thatsomethingmight happen? What if it does?
I sit back and look at my work, then look up at the moon in the sky.
I can almost hear Nate’s voice—You drew those things under open moonlight? You’re even crazier than I thought you were!
Maybe he’d be right, too. This wasn’t a sensible thing to do. I had no way of knowing what might happen. I don’t even know what these sigils mean. It’s like picking up a weapon without having any idea of how it works, or even which end it fires from. Madness.
But nothingdoeshappen.
My sigils are just pretty pictures on a beach.
I sigh and wipe them away with the palm of my hand, wondering how it can be that I feel a little disappointed by that. What was I hoping for here?
I close my eyes and try to remember what it felt like, back with the pack on the night of the mating ceremony, when my body lifted off the ground.
The fact is that I haven’t seen anything to indicate that I really am part Moon Caster since that one event. And yeah, it’s true that something like that is hard to ignore. It was weird as hell. But couldn’t it have been something else?
I can’t thinkwhatelse, but isn’t itpossible?
Maybe that’s what these sigils do. Maybe they make someone hover off the ground, even if she has no Moon Caster blood at all.
But whatever they do, they’re not doing it tonight.
Am I a Moon Caster or not? Do I have magic? Maybe I hoped that, by drawing these sigils, I would encourage my own latent magic to emerge. But if so, that hasn’t happened.