Forest Moon Rising Read Free

about summed it up.
    With my eyes on the slowly advancing movement through the underbrush, I stepped forward and ...
    Snagged my foot on a blackberry vine stretched taut across my path. The spiked tendril came alive, coiling around my ankle and tugging.
    My face met the dirt. I came to my knees spitting out crushed fern fronds and gagging on something sluglike.
    Then the vine tugged again and I flailed forward.
    A ragged, moss-covered stump caught me across the middle, taking my breath away.
    I heard evil chuckles off to my left.
    I yanked my left foot free of the entanglement and threw myself further off-balance.
    Was that an alien hand pushing against my back?
    Bracken and sword ferns crumbled beneath me as I rolled and tumbled downhill. I tried desperately to grab hold of something. Momentum pushed me faster and faster.
    Sticks dug into me. Reaching shrubs scratched my face.
    And still I rolled. The world twisted and spun. My eyes couldn’t focus. Dizziness robbed me of any sense of direction.
    Then with a back-numbing thump, I fetched up against the base of a tree.
    Every inch of my body ached inside and out.
    Each desperate attempt to draw breath met with knife sharp pain.

    “Miss, miss!” A male voice inserted itself into my hearing.
    “Hhuh,” I mumbled, not yet comfortable with consciousness.
    You can wake up now, babe. Bad guys have gone bye-bye, Scrap sneered at me.
    I couldn’t ignore my imp’s mental jab. It felt somewhere between a migraine and a shrill whistle. Or maybe both at the same time.
    With a wince and a groan, I opened my eyes and tried to raise myself to my elbows.
    Wrong move.
    Fire demons raced around and around my chest, pressing tighter and tighter.
    “Lay still, miss. You might have broken ribs.” That intrusive male voice again.
    Nah, you’re not broken, just bruised and sprained. Had the breath knocked out of you. Scrap landed on top of the jagged stump. He conjured a black cherry cheroot from the ether, lit it with a flame on his fingertip, and blew a smoke ring in my face.
    I had to cough. I couldn’t cough. Each breath hurt worse than the last.
    The man I heard but couldn’t see dribbled some water across my face. The urge to cough the smoke back at Scrap eased.
    The impudent imp waggled his eyebrows at me. See. If you’d broken something you wouldn’t have coughed at all.
    Thanks a lot. I thought you were my friend.
    “Easy now. I’m a paramedic. Let me see if we need to get a crew up here or if you’ll be able to walk out.” The man must have been crouched at my head, uphill and out of my line of sight.
    He pressed gently on my ribs and neck with dark hands. Nothing hurt any worse.
    “She’s not walking on that ankle,” a female said from behind him.
    The man sucked in a whistling breath. He moved around to my side. I recognized him then as the African American who’d passed me going uphill a little while ago. Another shrill breath through a gap in his front teeth. “That needs an X-ray, miss.”
    “Scrap?”
    No answer from my buddy.
    “It’s crap all right,” the woman said. “Raquel Jones.” She sort of offered me a hand to shake, then realized I’d have to sit up to reach it or she’d have to move downhill onto uncertain footing. So she looked at her hand as if at an alien being, then stuffed it into the pocket of her shorts.
    “I’m Jordan Jones,” the man said, putting his hands to better use assessing the damage to my left ankle. “JJ to most people.”
    “Tess Noncoiré,” I said on a sharp inhale as he touched the rapidly swelling and bruising ankle. My lightweight shoes felt six sizes too small.
    Raquel gasped. “Tess Noncoiré the writer? I’ve read all your books. What are you doing in Portland? Research?”
    “I live here now,” I ground out. What a horrible, ignominious way to meet a fan! I tried brushing twigs out of my short sandy blonde curls to fix some of the damage. “I bought a condo in John’s Landing last year.”
    “I’m