Page 25 of Wolf Hunted (Rejected Moons 1)

“Okay,” he says. “Very clever.” But he looks more deeply uncomfortable than I’ve seen him since we got here—since I met him, really.

“You really don’t like this, do you?” I ask him.

“Doyou?” he asks. “I think it’s creepy as hell. You know what they are. You know what they do.”

“If I meet one of them,” I say, “I can ask them what these sigils mean.” It’s the closest I dare come to telling Nate the truth.

“Who gives a damn what they mean?” Nate asks. “The Moon Casters are evil. Any signs they use are evil. And if I saw one, I wouldn’t stop to ask questions. I would kill them where they stood.”

Chapter 17

NATE

I’mgladtogetout of the high rise in the morning. I still feel uneasy, though because Emlyn still has those freakish symbols written on her arm. She’s studying them as if they contain the secrets of the universe.

I’d set my arm on fire before I’d write that kind of freaky shit on my own body. I mean, to each their own,I guess, but I don’t know how she can have those there and not feel like peeling her skin off.

“The coven,” she says as we make our way down the road. “We’re going there today. Right?”

“Well, we’re probably not going togetthere today,” I say.

“What? Why not?”

“This is a big city!” I tell her. “Do you think we can cross the whole thing in a single day?”

“We can if we shift,” she says. “Go on, strip down. I’ll carry your clothes again.”

She’s right, of course, and I can see she has no intention of making this easy for me. “We can’t shift,” I tell her.

“Why the hell not?”

“Because there were wolves around last night, and they probably found the deer we left out in the woods,” I say. “They’re going to know we’re in the area by now. They’ll probably be tracking us.”

She doesn’t argue, which is a bit of a surprise to me. Still, if she’s willing to accept that I’m right about this, so much the better. Maybe wewillfind a coven. It could happen.

Then she says, “I want you to at least tell me where it is.”

“What for?” I ask.

“So that if we get separated, I can still find it,” she says.

“How do I know that when you have the information you want, you’re not going to just bail on me?”

“How do I knowyou’renot going to bail onmewithout telling me what I want to know?”

“Fuck’s sake.” I roll my eyes. “You’re just going to have to trust me.”

And yeah, I know what a hypocrite I’m being. She shouldn’t trust me. I’m lying to her.

But even so, her one-track mind about this is grating. “I promise you,” I say, “the Moon Casters aren’t going anywhere. They’ve ruled the planet for twenty years. They’ll still be in their coven when we arrive, whether it’s two days from now or twenty.”

“Twenty?”

“I’m exaggerating. But does it really matter?”

“I don’t want to fuck around,” she says. “I know what I want to do, so now I want to get it done.”

“And what you want to do, let me make sure I understand, is attack a whole coven of Moon Casters.”

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