Page 10 of Rejected Moons (Rejected Moons 3)

I’ve dreamed of my own mating night ever since I was a little girl. The night I would be paired with the man who would become the father of my children. I never doubted that everything would go well. I was so confident that I even believed without question that I’d be the one to carry children successfully. I saw no other possible future.

I think of my mother, who died giving birth to her stillborn baby when I was nine years old.

Whatever is going on with me, she knew something about it.

It’s the reason she never wanted me to ask questions about my father. It has to be. She didn’t want the truth to get out.

Well, it’s out now. And I’m going to have to figure out a way to deal with it.

Chapter Seven: EMLYN

Somehow—Ihavenoideahow—I manage to sleep.

I dream, vaguely, about Victor. It’s one of those dreams where I know it’s him even though I don’t actually see him. I’m aware of his presence, mocking me, jeering at me. Rejecting me.

I wake up in a cold sweat, aching to go back to him, tormented by the fact that he’s nowhere near me and that I’ll probably never see him again.

I don’t want to see him again—and yet I’m craving him like oxygen.

I need to make a plan.

I need to know where I’m going.

And as that thought comes to me, I realize I already know where I want to go.

There’s one thing I’ve been preparing myself to do for my whole life, and that’s hunt Moon Casters. Whatever I am, whatever I’ve found out about myself, that doesn’t change. I’ve been training all my life, dreaming of being one of the greatest Moon Caster hunters who’s ever lived.

If I can get hold of one of them, take him prisoner, maybe I can get some answers about who and what I really am.

Before I leave the store, though, I’m going to see if I can find anything to bring with me.

I feel a connection to my mother as I wander through the wreckage, kicking things over as I go, looking for anything that might be useful. This must be what shopping trips were like for her. Looking for treasures to bring home.

In the first few years after the Lunar Reversal, places like this were raided for food and supplies. I wasn’t really a part of all that since I was a child at the time. I don’t have any memories of going through stores and taking what I needed. All my memories come from the years since the pack learned to be self-sufficient. Our clothes are made of animal hides, or else they’re garments that have been passed down from parent to child over the years. The tools we have are mostly things someone already owned when the Lunar Reversal took place. The pack shares almost everything now.

But I’m on my own. I have nothing. So I need to start gathering supplies.

The first good thing I find is a backpack. I unzip it and look inside. It’s pretty spacious, and it ought to hold several things without too much trouble. I stuff in the undergarments I found last night and sling it onto my back.

As I do, I make a fantastic discovery. In addition to shoulder straps, this backpack has two straps that buckle around the waist and the upper chest. I click them into place, noticing how they change the way the weight of the pack is distributed. If I were a human carrying something heavy, that would be helpful.

But I’m not thinking about this the way a human would.

If I adjust the straps just so, this backpack will stay on me even when I shrug my arms out of it. It will stay fastened around my torso—even when I’m in wolf form.

That really feels like a lucky break. One of the hardest things about traveling in wolf form is carrying anything—I’ve already been worrying a little bit about how I’ll negotiate the issue of bringing my clothes with me wherever I go. This solves that problem. It’s so convenient that I almost feel like my mom is helping me out somehow, nudging the things I’m going to need into my path.

“Thanks, Mom,” I murmur, even though I kind of know I’m being silly and superstitious.

Now that I have a backpack that’s going to be so easy to carry, I can get a few more things to wear. I go back to the pile of clothes and sift through it again, picking out a few shirts and pants. I roll them carefully so they’ll take up the least amount of space they possibly can and tuck them into the bag.

Now—food.

Food is a long shot, and I know it. Anything that was fresh in this store when the Lunar Reversal took place will be long gone, of course, rotted away or consumed by animals decades ago. And preserved food will probably have been taken in the early days, by people trying to survive. But maybe something was overlooked.

I’m lucky again. In the very back of the store, set deep on a low shelf, I find some tin cans claiming to contain alphabet soup. I don’t know what that is, exactly—there’s no picture on the label—butsoupis easy enough to understand, at least. I take all six of the cans and load them into my bag.

I don’t really know what else I might need, and I’m about to leave the store when it occurs to me to get one of the scented candles that concealed me last night when the pack came through. If that trick worked once, it can work again. I hurry back to that part of the store and pick out a lavender scented one. That’s a smell that’s found often enough in nature that it won’t seem suspicious or draw anyone to investigate it, and it ought to be powerful enough to cover me if I need it to.

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