Page 63 of Rejected Moons (Rejected Moons 3)

To Milo, I just say, “I don’t know. I’m starting to think I might.”

“You said you didn’t like having a pack,” he says. “But…I’ve always kind of wanted one.”

“You didn’t go to your mother’s pack, though,” I remember.

“No, they wouldn’t take me,” Milo says. “I did try to go to them as a kid, but they wanted nothing to do with me. I was lucky they let me live, really. I think they liked my mother, and they were reluctant to kill her son. Didn’t mean they were going to do me any favors, though.”

“What do you want to live in a pack for?” I ask.

“I’ve been alone all my life,” he says. “You don’t know what that’s like.”

“Being alone is better than being subject to someone else’s authority,” I say.

“But it’s not like that here, with the three of us,” Milo says. “No one is in charge. There’s no alpha. What if the three of us were a pack?”

“You’re crazy,” I say, spitting out a bone.

“No, I’m not,” Milo said. “We’re three wolves without a home, aren’t we? Three wolves from different packs. This is how new packs form. Rogues get together.”

“And how do covens form?” I ask him, glancing meaningfully at Emlyn.

He’s quiet. “Did you really need to go there?” he asks.

I feel guilty, but only a little bit. I know I have a point, and if he has any sense, he does too. Bringing multiple Moon Casters together—even hybrids, even when it’s only two of them—that’s a dangerous idea.

But at the same time, I like Emlyn. I like Milo.

I wouldn’t mind having them around.

I’m not going to turn her in.

I’ve known for some time that I wasn’t going to. It’s time I just admit it to myself. As great as that bounty would be, I couldn’t do it to her. I can’t just let them kill her.

The whole time we were running from her pack, I wasn’t thinking about what was in it for me at all. I was just thinking about getting usbothto safety.

The knowledge that I’m not going to turn her in after all, that I don’t need to worry about making that decision anymore, is such a load off my mind that I actually laugh out loud.

“What?” Milo says. “What’s funny?”

“Nothing.” It’s not like I can tell him the truth. “I was just thinking what a weird way this is for a harem to come together.”

“True,” Milo says. “Though I never really thought I would be part of a harem at all.”

“I did,” I say. “But I didn’t think that I’dlikeit.” The only way to be with a woman, as part of a pack, is either to be bonded to her as her alpha mate—in other words, ordered by your alpha to be together—or to be one of her secondary lovers, taking her to bed but always having to give her up when she’s trying to conceive.”

Being a part of a harem under those conditions always seemed like a no-win situation. But what seems to be developing between me, Emlyn, and Milo…well, it’s weird and unpredictable, and I’m in this thing with two Moon Casters, and that’s kind of fucked up. But I kind of like it.

“I guess if anyone in the world had the power to tame two Moon Casters, it makes sense that it would be me,” I say aloud.

Milo laughs. “You haven’t tamed anybody, you big gorilla,” he says. “But keep on telling yourself that if it makes you feel better about what’s going on here.”

I roll my eyes, reach over, and snatch away a piece of his rabbit. He lets me, and suddenly the energy between us has shifted. We’re brothers somehow, and it’s the two of us against the world.

Maybe it’s magic.

Maybe it’s Emlyn.

But something has definitely come together between the three of us, and Milo’s right—it’s something worth keeping.

---