Page 124 of Moon Chosen

“I could, but Creature is growing on me.” Rigel pricked his ears at Sora, and the girl grinned. “I think it’s growing on him, too.”

“How do you know that’s not hisI want to eat herlook?” Mari teased.

“Because he didn’t show me those horrible teeth of his. And you didn’t answer my question.”

“Rigel and I are bonded for life. Nothing and no one can change that. I know that much from what my father told Mama, and Mama told me. The rest I know from here.” Mari touched her chest, just over her heart. “And here.” She moved her hand from her heart to her head. “So, I’m not bothered as in jealous. I’m bothered because of the obsession itself.”

“I knew we should have killed him.”

“You may be right,” Mari said.

“What? Did you actually admit I’m right?”

“Don’t get all excited. It’s just this once that youmightbe right,” Mari teased, smiling so that her words held no sting before she continued. “The truth is we won’t know if we made a colossal mistake in saving him until after he’s healed and gone.”

“Are you sorry we didn’t kill him?”

Mari considered before she answered. Finally deciding, “No. I’m not sorry about that. Sora, I’ve watched Companions kill our people with less thought than I give to gutting a rabbit. Even if my choice to save Nik was wrong, what wasn’t wrong was to value life more than they do.”

“If we act like them, we’re no better than them,” Sora said slowly. “I agree with you in theory, I just hope you’re right in practice. Our Clan can’t take much more.”

Mari sighed. “I miss Jenna.”

“I know you two were close.”

Mari nodded. “I saw them take her. Sora, Nik was part of that hunting group, which has me thinking…”

Sora’s brows shot up, and when Mari didn’t continue, she prodded, “What are you thinking?”

“I’m thinking one favor should lead to another.”

35

Had it not been for the fire in his back, Nik would have been sure he was dead and had been sentenced to a particularly bizarre level of hell. From the moment he’d regained consciousness after the river vomited him from the rapids onto the pile of flotsam, his world had become a decidedly strange place.

At first it seemed too dreamlike to be true. The pup found him! Along with a Scratcher female who wanted to kill him, and the pup—his name was Rigel—Rigel’s Companion, a girl named Mari.

Mari was also too dreamlike to be true. At first glance she looked like she could belong to the Tribe. She was tall and slender. Her sun-colored hair was cut short so that it curled, childlike, around her face. But it was her face that gave her away. Her features weren’t all Tribe-like. She did have the fine, high cheekbones and full, bow-shaped lips of the Tribe, but her eyes were wrong. They were bigger and almost almond-shaped. And the color was all wrong. Instead of any of the varying shades of green that marked a member of the Tribe, they were a gray so bright and clear that they were almost silver.

Her eyes reminded him of something, but that something kept skittering away from Nik’s pain-fogged mind.

Though Nik drifted in and out of consciousness while the two women transported him from the river to their home, he was aware of the tension between them—and of the fact that Mari was definitely in charge.

After they reached their home, which they called a burrow, Nik’s memory faltered like a half-remembered childhood incident where you’re not really sure if you actually experienced the incident, or if you just “remembered” it because of being told the story over and over again.

It couldn’t be possible that Scratchers had saved him.

It couldn’t be possible that they had carried him on a litter to the neat, attractive little burrow they called home, removed the spearhead from his back, and tended to all of his wounds.

It couldn’t be possible, and yet there he was, finally fully awake on a comfortable pallet in an underground burrow with the half-grown Shepherd pup he’d spent weeks searching for lying within his reach, and that pup’s Companion, who was also a Scratcher, dozing by the homey warmth of a hearth fire.

“And yet here I am,” Nik whispered to himself.

The pup lifted his head to look at him. Nik smiled and stroked his soft fur, not caring that the movement sent shards of pain through his back.

“Are you really awake?”

Nik looked from the pup to the girl. She rubbed her eyes sleepily and stretched before she poked the fire into life and ladled more water into a pot to boil.