Wolf Girl (Wolf Girl, #1)(43)

Ithaki? Drain my blood? Maybe my head was still concussed, because I was confused about what he was saying. Walsh still sounded so far away, screaming for the guy to leave me alone. I just wanted to sleep. I groaned, my eyelids closing. The man lightly slapped my face, causing my eyelids to flutter open.

“No sleep,” he told me, and looked back up to where Walsh was screaming.

I whimpered as the pain of everything that just happened seeped into my body all at once, and the adrenaline left me. “It hurts.”

He frowned and then nodded. Reaching into a pouch at his waist, he pulled out a small white root. “Chew.” He shoved it in my mouth and I nearly spat it out. It was bitter as all hell, but within a few bites I’d crushed the outside and a sweetness coated my tongue as some of the pain was chased away along with my foggy thoughts.

Oh God. I fell. I fell really bad. The last few minutes were coming back to me now and how badly I’d royally screwed up.

“Get the fuck away from her!” Walsh screamed, closer now.

The man looked over at Walsh sadly and then down at me. “Stupid city wolves. Have you been with them this whole time?” he grumbled, and started to unfold an animal skin from his waist pouch.

Leaning down over me, he lay the animal skin blanket over me, and that’s when I realized I was shivering. He picked up my cuff again and inspected it. “Won’t heal with this on,” he growled, as if he were angry.

What would a random forest caveman wolf have to be angry about on my behalf?

I pointed at him, finally feeling the effects of the pain-relieving root. “Paladin?”

His blue eyes flicked to mine and he nodded, just once, before his head was sliced from his body.

Terror ripped through me as I screamed bloody murder. Crimson blood splattered over me as the man’s head fell to my side and his body tumbled forward.

Walsh was no longer human, because instead of hearing him scream my name, I now just heard the howl of a wolf.

Looking up at the shadow that crossed over my face, I saw a … I don’t know what it was. A pointed-ear fey man that smelled of a wolf? He was dressed in the same crude homemade clothing style as the nice man who’d just tried to help me, but he looked much more sinister. Black hair hung to his waist in a thick braid, and he had small pockmark scars over his greasy face. With one kick, he knocked the head of the Paladin away from me and then leaned down to smell my neck. It was then that I saw a dozen more men behind him, all grinning and holding long, curved and serrated, sickle-type blades.

I screamed again, trying to move, but when I did pain just laced up my body in all directions and I felt dizzy.

Taking a deep inhale of my scent, he grinned. “Little demon, you’re coming with me.”

Then he struck the side of my temple with the blunt end of a sword and I was met with blackness.





When I came to there was a period of confusion. I smelled burning meat, and that bitter yet sweet taste was still in my mouth. Pain wasn’t even a word I could use to describe how I felt. Torture was more apt.

Everything hurt.

My skin, my muscles, my eyeballs, maybe even my eyelashes, I wasn’t sure if there was a part of my body that didn’t hurt.

That’s when everything came back to me in hazy flashes.

I fell.

Bad.

The Paladin man had tried to help me and … I choked on a sob as I remembered his head coming off like that.

Light flickered behind my eyelids and I realized I hadn’t opened them yet. Springing them open, I tuned into the voices in the room.

A man was standing over a woman who sat in the corner of the room. I was in some type of hut with bamboo slat floors and bamboo slat walls, crudely tied together with twine.

“The skin is too damaged from the accident, I will have to sell her in pieces,” the woman was saying as bile crept up my throat.

The man growled. “Then we will heal her first and we can get a better price.”

The woman was silent. “You’re lucky the demon has been bound by the cuffs, or she’d have ripped you limb from limb.”

The man snarled. “Can you heal her or not? I’ll give you ten percent of what she fetches at market.”

The woman sighed. “Fine, but I want twenty percent. Fully healed, her skin alone will fetch enough for both of us to retire on.”

I bit down on my tongue to keep from crying out. Yanking my wrists, a tear slid from my eye as I realized they were bound in front of me.

No. No. No.

“I heard the witches like the bones more than the skin,” the man said.

The woman scoffed. “I’ve been doing this over fifty years. Trust me, a freshly-skinned demon fetches no greater price.”

Freshly. Skinned. Demon.

Demon?

I screamed then. I mean, if I was going to be skinned alive, I might as well fucking put up a fight, and if I didn’t scream I was going to lose my mind.

The man crossed the room quickly and held up a steel mallet.

Oh God.

“Wait!” the witch cried from the corner. “Don’t bash her brain in, I need it whole.”

Oh. My. Leaning over, I vomited onto the man’s bare feet.

He sighed, looking over at the woman. “Can I wash this off? Or is vomit worth something too?”

The woman scowled at him, stepping out from the shadows. “Everything on this little demon is worth something. You don’t pluck a hair from her head without my say so.”