Page 25 of Rejected Moons (Rejected Moons 3)

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.”

“That’s not your concern.”

“They’re going to destroy you, Em.”

She looks at me. There’s a softness in her expression that I don’t quite understand, and then I realize that this is the first time I’ve shortened her name. If you look at it from a certain angle, it could seem affectionate. It could seem like I’m expressing concern for her.

Which I’m not. I just think she’s making a dumb choice, and I think she should reconsider.

“We don’t have to go anywhere near them,” I tell her. “We don’t actually have to stay in this city. We could go anywhere in the world.”

“And you’d just pick up and come with me? Is that what you’re saying?”

“It might be nice,” I say. “My life here is over anyway. And, you know, after last night…”

“I told you,” she says. “Last night isn’t happening again. It was a one-time thing.”

“Okay, okay.”

She turns to look at me full in the face. “Are you avoiding the question?” she asks.

“No,” I protest.Fuck. How is she onto me already?I really thought I was going to be able to put this off a lot longer.

“Yes, you are,” she said. “Why don’t you want to tell me where the coven is?”

“You’ll take off without me.”

“There’s no reason you should care if I do that, though.” She assesses me. “You don’t know where it is, do you?”

“I told you I did.”

“Yeah. But you were lying. I can tell.”

I think about trying to deny it again, but she sounds so certain. And I mean, really, what’s the point? She’s right.

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