Page 5 of Wolf Bonded (Rejected Moons 2)

“Nate,” Emlyn says. “Knock it off, will you? He hasn’t done anything.”

Nate is about to blow his top, I can tell. I haven’t done anything that he can point to, but he knows I’m mocking him, and he knows I have the upper hand on him. He hated me already, just for being a Moon Caster. Now he’s probably having trouble not attacking me.

But I don’t want him to attack me, so I hustle back out the door with Emlyn on my heels.

She waits until we’re in the stairwell, then says, “I don’t know why you had to provoke him.”

So she does know I was provoking him. “Why didn’t you call me out in front of him?”

“I want you to get along,” she says. “In case you hadn’t noticed, I’m the one who wants to be here. They’re the ones you need to convince.”

“I noticed,” I tell her. “What made you want to come?”

“You’re right,” she says. “I’m a hybrid.”

“I know that.”

“Well, I want to know more about myself,” she says. “What I am. The magic I can do…it’s hardly anything. Milo tries to teach me—”

“Milo’s the other guy?”

She nods. “Yeah, but he left his coven ages ago. He’s not experienced.”

“Why’d he leave his coven?”

She shook her head. “I can’t tell you that.”

“Why not?”

“Because it’s his business. It’s not my story to tell.”

I have to respect that. I get the feeling she actually wants me to know the story, but she won’t betray one of her mates.

“All right,” I say. “I’ll ask him sometime.”

She shrugs. “I don’t think he’ll talk to you about it,” she says. “But you can try.”

“He really hates me, doesn’t he?”

“It’s not about you.”

I have no idea what to make of that, but it does make sense. It couldn’t be about me. The guy only just met me. And since our paths crossed, I’ve saved his life twice. Definitely no grounds for hatred there.

But I can see that Emlyn isn’t going to talk about the men she came in with, so I drop that subject and move on to showing her around the building.

I watch her responses as she sees the various common areas we have set up for the coven to use. The dining hall, where everyone gathers at a couple of long tables to eat. The recreation room—we’ve kept board games from before the Lunar Reversal, and the older generation has helped us remember how to play, though I think some of the rules might be starting to slip. The library, where we keep the few books we own.

And the ceremonial rooftop garden.

She falls silent as she sees it—the large sigil painted on the concrete, the various herbs positioned around the corners of the space.

She looks at home here. I can’t help thinking it. Her shoulders relax. The wind catches her dark, wild hair and blows it back from her narrow shoulders, and I could see her belonging to this coven.And I can tell from the look on her face that this is the first part of our coven’s home that looks exactly like what she expected from Moon Casters.

“What do you think?” I ask her.

“It’s…I don’t know. It’s different from what I expected it to be.”

“Yeah, you thought we were going to be summoning demons and stuff, right?”

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