Soul Bound

Chapter Twenty-seven

Chapter Twenty-seven

My body is on fire. The pain is excruciating.

I guess I'm not dead.

Looking up into the canopy above me, I see the trail of broken branches that broke my fall, illuminated by the moonlight falling through the leaves. The black silhouette of the cliff is so high up... what the hell was I thinking?

The nerves in my left arm scream at me and my neck does the same as I turn to look at where most of the pain is coming from. But as soon as I see it, I wish I hadn't. My forearm has snapped and punctured the skin, the jagged, bright white bone sticking out from the torn flesh.

I look away, seeing it makes the pain that much worse. Don't focus on the pain. I gulp and lie still, waiting for it to start healing, focusing on the soft, moist ground beneath me. There's a thick bed of moss covering the forest floor here. My arm is throbbing—Don't focus on the pain. It'll heal. What's around us? I can smell running water. That'll be useful. I'll need to wash away all this blood and get rid of as much of my scent as I can. This will all have been for nothing if I just lead them right back to River because I bled all over everything.

River! I can't lie here any longer. What if they've found him? What if he came to, confused and alone? I've gotta get up.

I look back at my arm, expecting it to be almost healed, but it isn't. The bone hasn't retracted back into my skin to realign and mend itself; the flesh isn't crawling across the open wound to reattach itself together. The gash remains, as fresh and painful as when I first saw it.

I'm not healing. Shit, I'm not healing. All I can think of are River's wounds, all his scars. He doesn't heal. He doesn't heal because he lost his soul.

Wolf...

I move my arm, distracting myself with the pain as I sit up, cradling my left hand with my right. I rip off the sleeve and bottom layer of my gown and try to tie it into a kind of sling. With my left hand useless, the result is a shabby, bloody looking mess of fabric knotted and looped together. But it'll work for now. Time to move.

I hold my breath as I stand, waiting to be hit with pain, but I'm not. I test them out by running in place. That hurts—shit it hurts—but the majority of it is from rattling my arm and the ache in my head.

The forest is quivering, but quiet with the same eerie silence as before. There are no sounds from crickets or owls or raccoons, just the soft rustling of wind through the trees, whose souls are giving off the barest of light, like they don't want to be noticed.

I take a deep breath, catching the scent of water again. The stream is the best place to start. My lips crack with dryness as I cringe, looking down at the rank and crusted blood on my skin and clothes.

The ground where I fell has only the barest impression in it; the moss absorbed most of the impact. As long as they don't look up, it'll take them a while to find where I landed. I'll have plenty of time to get to the stream then back to River before they realize they aren't looking for a dead body. If I wash all these scents off, and get the blood from my wound to clot, it will be difficult to track me.

That's more than enough of a plan for me, though my arm is slowing me down more than I'd like. I try to focus on everything but the pain. On the soft green beneath my feet that covers this part of the forest like a blanket. On River. On my pack. On how much I hate Faustus and the Order and the horrible, stupid war. I have to stop this.

My pace is slower than I'd like. I'm trying not to jolt my arm too much—I don't need to open the wound up again. Thankfully, the moist, fresh smell of water is getting stronger and stronger. The stream is closer than I thought.