Aurora by Julie Bertagna Read Free Book Online Page A

kind of child she might produce. How long has Fox suspected what she is? When he looks at her now, what does he really see? An alien creature? A freakish mistake? So he might be tender and close and tell her she is beautiful, but he will never love her as she wants.
    Not now, not ever.
    Pandora can no longer bear the hopping and slithering creatures on the bridge. Is that what she is? More amphibian than human? She pulls away from Fox so fiercely the tiara jolts from her head. The diamonds once worn by a queen of the drowned world sparkle in the gloom as they fall from the broken bridge and splash into the lagoon. Pandora could easily dive from the bridge and rescue it from the depths of the murky waters but, heartbroken, she lets go her crown.
    What Fox once loved as her strange netherworld beauty is now a deformity, inflicted on her by the empire he hates. When he looks at her now all he sees, she is sure, are the sins of the past he yearns to escape.

A SCAR FROM OLD TIMES
     

     
    Harpoon on her back, knife between her teeth, Mara climbs Wolf Mountain, filled with a murderous rage. Shadows chase her as the sun falls behind the western peaks and she moves fast to outpace them. Darkness is the realm of the wolves.
    Lily hasn’t been seen all day, not since she ran off from the lakeside at dawn. She will have gone tracking with the hunters to cool her head, Mara told herself, trying to keep calm. But as the brief day dimmed and the hunters returned with a trussed deer and a clutch of wild rabbits, there was still no sign of Lily. Mara left the little ones with Rowan, saying she’d search once more around the lake, but knowing in her heart that hurt, headstrong Lily must be with Wing.
    The thin moon is a sharpening blade as Mara climbs towards Scarwell’s cave. None of this would have happened if Scarwell had kept her mouth shut, thinks Mara, tucking herself into a rocky crevice to light the resin-soaked torch she has brought – and just in time too as a growl, almost too low for human ears, menaces the dusk.
    Suddenly Scarwell appears above her, on a ledge.
    Mara steadies her nerve. The eyes of the young wolfwoman watch her every move as she hauls herself up on to the ledge, sweating and breathless. Mara raises the torch and sees the wolves perched, still as statues, on the rocks all around.
    ‘What’s our fight this time, Scarwell?’ Mara demands. ‘What is it you want? Why hit out at Lily just to get at me? I know you did. Scar, if it wasn’t for me, you’d still be in the netherworld – maybe dead by now. Why such hate?’
    Scarwell was a child still when Mara, barely older than Lily, found her in the netherworld – a ferocious urchin, abandoned by the world, fighting to survive among the rooftops and land scraps in the drowned city. Mara touches her cheek in an unconscious gesture, remembering the long-faded wound that Scarwell once gave her that, in turn, gave the wolfwoman her name.
    Scarwell stares, the memory sparking in her eyes too.
    ‘Always you take ,’ Scarwell spits out. ‘Once, my urchins all mine. Wing all mine . Then you come to netherworld, take us all away on ships. Take my urchins to Candlewood.’ Scarwell bares her blackened teeth. ‘World is not all Mara’s. Wolf Mountain mine .’ Scarwell stamps her foot on the ground. ‘Girl is like you,’ she mutters. ‘She takes .’
    ‘Lily? Takes what?’
    But the instant she asks, Mara knows. Lily takes Wing. She takes him whenever she can. All summer long, Wing comes down to live by the lake close to Lily. Now that Lily is no longer a child but a striking, fiery young woman, she threatens Scarwell’s bond with Wing.
    ‘Is Lily here, Scar? Is she with Wing?’
    Desolation flits across the wild beauty of Scarwell’s dirty, battle-scarred face.
    ‘Gone.’
    ‘Gone?’ Mara repeats.
    ‘Gone away. Gone .’
    The lake and its mountains seem to swoon out around them in a vast emptiness. In that moment Mara feels the world as Scarwell must,