Page 76 of Cursed Shadows 4

I trace its gaze to the tree opposite. The tree directly across.

I’m not ashamed to admit that a trickle of urine escapes me as I stare down the sharp arrow aimed right at me.

The python woke me.

It is warning me… warning me about the dark male crouched on the branch of the opposite tree, arrow notched and aimed at the meat of my thigh.

A sharp breath is sucked in through my blueish lips.

In a frantic heartbeat, I am tugging at the rope around my middle and wriggling off the branch.

The arrow zips.

I hear its song spearing through the air.

And it’s coming for me.

19

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I shove myself from the branch and fall sideways just as the arrow shoots into the bough.

My ribs scream—and I hang off the branch. The rope keeps me tied to the tree.

Scrambling for a blade, I wrench out a sharp silver knife from my belt, then hack at the rope.

My wide eyes flicker between the sawing of the rope and the dark male perched in the tree opposite. He threads out another arrow from his back, then notches it.

His gaze is as focused as his aim.

This one is directed at my shoulder.

I only just healed that.

He releases the arrow.

The blade saws through the frayed rope with apop.

And I fall.

No plan, no scheme, no reason to my reaction.

I just smack my hand down on my backpack, fist a grip in it, and fall.

The narrow, wooden limbs of the tree lash at me. Each strike feels like a whip battering my sides, my skull, my knees—

Until my middle comes smacking down on a bough, and my bag smacks me on the back of the head, hard.

A raspy whine ebbs at the edges of my grunt.

It’s not so much that the air has been punched out of me, but that my ribs are thrumming, and my mind is blurring.

But even in my dull pain, I stay sharp enough to react.

I grab onto the bough and stop myself from falling any further. I might not survive all the way to the packed earth below. And even if I did, what would it cost me? Broken bones and a cracked skull, probably.

An arrow spears above me. So close that it disturbs my braids, as though the python has returned to licking me. The arrow plunges into the tree, right above where my bag has toppled.

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