BooksBarbecue
Back The Night and Its Moon
Chapters (64)
  1. Front Cover
  2. Title Page
  3. Copyright
  4. Contents
  6. Pronunciation Guide
  7. Prologue
  8. Part One
  9. One
  10. Two
  11. Three
  12. Four
  13. Five
  14. Six
  15. Seven
  16. Eight
  17. Nine
  18. Ten
  19. Eleven
  20. Twelve
  21. Thirteen
  22. Part Two
  23. Fourteen
  24. Fifteen
  25. Sixteen
  26. Seventeen
  27. Eighteen
  28. Nineteen
  29. Twenty
  30. Twenty-One
  31. Twenty-Two
  32. Twenty-Three
  33. Part Three
  34. Twenty-Four
  35. Twenty-Five
  36. Twenty-Six
  37. Twenty-Seven
  38. Twenty-Eight
  39. Twenty-Nine
  40. Thirty
  41. Thirty-One
  42. Thirty-Two
  43. Thirty-Three
  44. Thirty-Four
  45. Thirty-Five
  46. Part Four
  47. Thirty-Six
  48. Thirty-Seven
  49. Thirty-Eight
  50. Thirty-Nine
  51. Forty
  52. Forty-One
  53. Forty-Two
  54. Forty-Three
  55. Forty-Four
  56. Forty-Five
  57. Forty-Six
  58. Forty-Seven
  59. Epilogue
  60. Excerpt from The Sun and Its Shade
  61. The Night and Its Moon Playlist
  62. Acknowledgments
  63. About the Author
  64. Back Cover

Giving the others the life-or-death chance to get on their feet, she took off into the forest, the smokelike corpse tearing from the trees and covering the space of the campsite as the beseul glued itself to her heels in pursuit. She ran through the woods with the outright panicked sprint of someone who knew death was licking her heels.

Amaris tried to think of what she knew of the beseul, but she couldn’t split her mind between her studies while avoiding fallen logs, dodging trees, and navigating shadows. She knew the creature sizzled in sunlight, forcing it to be a monster of the night. Unless she planned to keep her sprinting pace for the next six hours, the wafting, animated corpse would have its teeth upon her long before the break of dawn.

Think, think, think.

All she knew was that she wasn’t fast enough. She wasn’t running hard enough. She wasn’t agile, or lithe, or strong enough to survive this attack. No matter how hard she pushed, she felt the stench in her nostrils flare, the smoke crawl up closer, the cold bite into the skin of her back. She could not outrun it.

Bob under the branch. Weave through the trees. The voice within her cried for her to move faster. She needed to watch her feet! Breathe, breathe, breathe! She cursed inwardly, obscenities cracking like hail against glass as her feet hit the branches, the leaves, the rocks underfoot. She pushed herself to run faster, faster! The obscenities continued to spill, one word over the other as if her feet did not belong to her. They were separate entities working of their own volition as they refused to trip. Her thoughts remained scattered demands, jumbled anxieties, and a desperate search for a plan.

Amaris didn’t know where she was running, just that she was pulling the unholy entity away from camp, away from her friends. She couldn’t confront the monster in the forest while it was on top of her. There was no room to swing a sword, no room to attack, no room at all. She knew from the whipping wind that she’d never run this fast before, her strong muscles forcing her into a full-out sprint. She called on years of hardened calves and thighs as she’d powered her way up and down the sheer trail at the reev for such a time as this. This is why they’d forced the reevers to run up and down the mountain. This is why they trained. They ran to survive. They ran to live. They ran for exactly this moment.

Her training did nothing to quell her terror.