Page 25 of Wolf Bonded (Rejected Moons 2)

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EMLYN

“Themostimportantthingis that you don’t say anything,” Wilder says. “You can talk to me—quietly—if you have questions during the ceremony. But don’t try to speak to Regine, and definitely don’t speak to any of the women who are receiving their blessings tonight.”

I nod. We’re up on the roof a little early, waiting for the ceremony to begin. A few women are already milling around the rooftop garden, and Regine is here too.

“How many of them are getting blessings?” Milo asks.

“All of them,” Wilder says.

“They’re all pregnant?”

“No,” he says. “Some of them are pregnant. Others are hoping to enhance their fertility. So you’ll see two different blessings performed tonight.”

“Does it work?” I ask.

“What do you mean?” Wilder asks.

“I mean…well, babies aren’t being born here at a better rate than they are anywhere else. So is the fertility blessing really working?”

“I don’t know,” Wilder says. “We do have a lot of pregnancies. It feels like an unusually high number. It’s just that none of the women carry to term. At least, hardly any of them do.”

“So your magic is causing more pregnancies, but it’s not doing anything to help more babies actually be born?”

“I don’t know,” Wilder says again. “Having more pregnancies feels like increasing our odds. That isn’t nothing.”

I nod. I guess it isn’t.

At some sign I don’t see, the women divide themselves into two different lines. They stand facing one another.

Wilder shepherds me and Milo over to the side of the roof, and the three of us take a seat on some flat rocks that someone must have lugged up here for this purpose.

Regine stands in between the two lines and holds up her hands. “Welcome to the night of prenatal blessing,” she says. Her voice is quiet but carrying, and no one speaks. There’s a real sense of solemnity to the whole thing.

Actually, it kind of reminds me of my mating ceremony.

I look up at the sliver of moon. “Why are they doing this now?” I whisper to Wilder. “Why don’t they do it at the full moon?”

“You can’t always wait until the full moon,” he murmurs. “You want to try to do the blessing as close to the time of conception as possible so that the baby has as much time as possible to develop magic. So we have these ceremonies twice a week.”

“Twice aweek?”

“The women who don’t know whether or not they’re pregnant receive a blessing too,” he says. “Every woman here is going to get the prenatal blessing, just in case she’s pregnant. Many of them aren’t. But a few of them might be and not know it yet.”

“Wow.” That’s dedication. “And someone must have done this on my mother when she was pregnant with me.”

“Your father,” Milo says.

I look at him.

He shrugs. “Had to be, right? He was the only Moon Caster who was in your life at all.”

“That’s true,” I say. “But why would he go to all the trouble of performing a blessing if he wasn’t going to stick around for my birth? I never knew the guy.”

“Shifters hate Moon Casters,” Milo points out. “Maybe he didn’t feel safe around your pack. Maybe he felt like they’d kill him if they knew the truth.”

“They probably would have,” I agree. After all, thatiswhat happened to his mother.

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