Bound by Prophecy (Descendants Series) - By Melissa Wright Page 0,1

into the wall. As she reached up, she pulled a screwdriver from her back jeans pocket, and pried the lever that held my chain.

An instant later, I slammed into the concrete floor.

Fire spread through my shoulder, but the pounding in my head was replaced with the reverberations of a small, clanging bell. Tingling prickled my limbs a moment before I realized my feet were being jerked, and the twinkling lights flashing against blackness were the first indication to my brain that I couldn’t see anything. The tingle turned to pinpricks and the ringing in my ears quieted as I tried to bat my eyelids open.

The jerking at my feet ceased.

“Can you stand?”

Her face was in my line of sight again, this time sideways.

“Gll…tthhh,” I answered.

She grimaced.

The girl reached down to grab my arm, and the fire increased tenfold. I said something like, “Aaaaah,” and she let go.

Apparently, I’d managed to keep from busting my skull against concrete by shifting my head sideways during the fall, but had taken the brunt of the hit on my shoulder, which was likely now broken.

The girl was pulling up on my other side. “Come on,” she hissed, “we have to go.”

Two deep male voices echoed off the exterior walls of the warehouse.

“Now.”

She yanked hard against me, and eventually my instincts kicked in. Or at least adrenaline. I was up, nearly falling forward before being pulled behind her toward a short flight of metal grate stairs. My right arm swung limp behind me; I was completely unable to support it since my other arm was held within her considerable grip.

As we climbed, I glanced behind us, saw a shadow through the open warehouse door, and then stumbled on the threshold of a back entrance as I was dragged into daylight.

The murky water of the bay lay only thirty yards before us, but I was abruptly jerked sideways and led down the deck through a narrow pass between two storage containers. At the end of the pass, the girl stopped dead to peer around the containers. I leaned forward, heaving in breath. Before I got two searing lungfuls, she was off again, my forearm firmly in her grasp.

I was about to complain, or free myself to lie down, when she slid into a shed.

She pushed me down beneath a boarded window, and I leaned back against the shed wall, half hidden from view of the door as she held it open a fraction of an inch to watch for our would-be pursuers.

It was dim in the shed, and the thin line of light put most of her in shadow. I looked away, quickly surveying our surroundings. An unused maintenance shed, shelves now empty of anything of worth. Dust silhouettes decorated the walls, outlining empty nails that once held pliers and wrenches and spools. A few lengths of wire scattered the floor, along with years-old paper and trash.

I was sure there was something I could use to fashion a sling for my arm, a way to take the strain off my shoulder, but my eyes were back on the girl.

Light filtered through the soft curls of her hair, making the color, somewhere between dark blonde and light brown, appear golden. Her features were petite, aside from her lips, which seemed maybe too full from this vantage point. She was remarkably familiar, and yet, inexplicably, unfamiliar. It was impossible to see her eyes, narrowed on her task as they were.

Her shoulders rose and fell in a way that said she was trying to be quiet, but needed breath as much as I.

A metallic sound echoed in the distance and she pushed the door shut. When she turned, her hands waved frantically in a gesture meant to shoo me farther back and out of view. I felt my mouth quirk at her actions, but any humor instantly fell away when I shifted and pain seared my neck and shoulder anew.

Farther back, I leaned once more against the shed wall.

A missing slat in the half wall protecting me gave me a view of the opposite wall, where the girl had flattened herself against it between a cabinet and a hanging rack in an attempt to hide. She was unaware I watched her.

Two voices floated over us, their direction hard to discern as they reverberated off metal sheds and containers outside. The girl held impossibly still—I couldn’t even be certain she was breathing. My gaze narrowed on her as I attempted to better see in the darkness.

Her lips were moving, and