Page 9 of Wolf Bonded (Rejected Moons 2)

“I don’t want anything to do with Moon Drinkers. And neither should you.”

“You’ve had me out tracking them!”

“Yeah,tracking. I didn’t tell you to interfere with them.”

“You just wanted me to watch them and do nothing?”

“To report back to me.”

“You’re not going to like what’s next, then.”

Regine’s frown grows. “What, Wilder?”

“We killed two of them.”

“We? You workedwiththese hybrids?”

“They’re not like you think, Regine.”

“Wilder, how long have you lived in this city?”

“All my life.”

“And in all that time, have you ever encountered a shifter who didn’t make it his sole mission to hunt down and kill Moon Casters?”

“I’m telling you, these ones are different. Even the one who isn’t a hybrid, who’s just pure wolf—”

“You brought back apure shifter?”

“Regine—”

“We’re killing them,” she says abruptly, cutting me off. “They’re far too dangerous to keep, and you should have known better than to bring them here. I can’t believe you would put your own coven at risk like this.”

“Regine, come on—”

“No, actually, you know what?” she says. “I don’t know why I’m surprised. You’ve always prioritized your own ambition above the good of the coven.”

I think she means it to sting, but it doesn’t. “No, I haven’t,” I tell her. “I just disagree with you about the best way for us to move forward as a coven.”

“Do you want us to cause the next Lunar Reversal? Do you want to be responsible for that?”

“You’ve asked me that at least a thousand times,” I say. “Of course I don’t. But I also don’t want there to be another global calamity like that at all. And the best way to make sure it doesn’t happen isn’t by running away from shifters. It’s by teaming up with them against the real enemy.”

“You don’t think shifters are our enemy?” She folds her arms across her chest.

“Shifters didn’t cause the Lunar Reversal.”

“Shifters have spent the last twenty years trying to kill us.”

“Because they thinkwedid it, Regine! Because they think we’re going to do something like that again! Don’t you get it? I’ve got hybrids here. I’ve finally got some people who are going to be capable of forgetting about shifter biases and hearing the truth about what we are. Don’t you think that’s something worth doing?”

“I don’t know if this is a good idea,” Regine says.

“But you don’t even think it’s worth finding out? The Moon Drinkers are after hybrids. And these hybrids—and the shifter they’re with—theyteamed up with mein a fight against Moon Drinkers. That’s unprecedented, Regine.”

“Shifters fighting Moon Casters? That’s hardly unprecedented.”

“No,” I say. “Shiftersdifferentiatingbetween Moon Casters and Moon Drinkers. Shifters actually seeming to understand that magic itself isn’t the source of the poison in the world. That there’s more to it than that.”

---