Page 43 of Heart Broken Mate

“See it for yourself,” Luke said and threw the medallion at Bonne, who didn’t look very comfortable. “Just glow your eyes this once, Bonne. It is not going to kill you.”

Bonne grunted and did. His eyes went wide when he saw the pattern on the medallion. He turned it over and almost keeled over in surprise. “Oh my god, oh my god,” he said and stood up suddenly, walking to the stack of books in the dining room.He searched erratically until he saw what he was searching for. He placed it on the floor and opened it. On the front page was the symbol I saw on the medallion. A smaller moon and a weird creature jumping out of it.

“What does it mean?” I asked.

“It’s the moon stone,” Bonne said.

I knew what the moon stone was—a myth. A myth people have been pandering about for ages now. It isn’t real and will never be. No one has ever seen it.

“The moon stone is a myth,” I said.

“But, is it?” he asked. “There are first-person accounts of people that saw it. Those accounts survived.”

“A stone to give werewolves more power? I don’t believe it.”

“How did you get the pendant, Hayley?” Bonne asked.

“My mother gave it to me,” I said.

“Did anyone ever come searching for it when you were younger?”

I nodded my head in response. They killed my father and mother when they came in search of it. I barely escaped death myself. I could still remember the night and hearing my mother thud against the floor. She had died protecting the pendant. Protecting the knowledge of the moon stone. Why would my mother do that?

“What was your mother's maiden name?” Bonne asked. “Was it Heline?”

I looked up at him, surprised that he knew that information and that he even asked at all. No one asks about my mother. But here was Bonne acting like she was special.

“I should have known,” he said, looking for a book again and kept all of us looking at him, a thousand questions burning through our minds. “How could I not have seen that? It was so obvious. Too obvious for me to have missed it.”

He was almost castigating himself.

“What did you miss, Bonne?” Luke asked him.

“Your mother was a Peline, Luke. I knew that the day you told me about your mum and how she liked to talk about her family that grew up in the mountains.”

“She kept saying they were royalty.”

“Yes, and she wasn’t lying. These days, no one recognizes royalty in werewolves because it has all been watered down, and the Tarloux created a sense that royalty cannot be inherited. Power is grabbed and stolen. But that is a lie, an illusion we’ve let ourselves believe for too long, and now, it plays as the truth. The old royal lines were the most powerful werewolves to have ever existed. Their power gave them authority and responsibility, and they took the two rather seriously.”

Bonne rolled the medallion in his hands, and his eyes had a glint in them, suggesting he was enjoying this moment.

“But the werewolf clan started to grow, and people started to question why there were only two lines of royalty. The Heline and the Peline. The Tarloux led that inquiry, and soon, they gathered enough people and sought the extinction of the royalty.There were powerful, but the Tarloux had the numbers. They defeated them and killed everyone in the line.”

He scoffed and tapped the medallion on the table.

“Some other people picked up the name Peline and Heline to assume royalty themselves, so the name never died down. The Peline were mountainous royalty, while the Heline controlled the fields. It was said that two families controlled the moon stone, but the Tarloux never found it, so they spread the story that it was just a myth, but they never stopped searching for it. I think the two families made these pendants to safe keep the moon stone for a time when someone from each family would finally be able to search for it.”

“How do we look for something that’s a myth?” Luke asked.

Bonne turned to the other side of the medallion, still looking at it with his glowing eyes. He was showing us something. I walked to see what it was. I didn’t notice the markings on the other end earlier. They were even finer than that of the symbol.

“It’s a code,” Bonne said. “A code to a map, and I know just how to decrypt it.”

Chapter nineteen (Hayley)

When it got dark, we made our way out of the house. Nellie had made some food for us and promised that it would last at least a week before it started to go bad, but then even if it started to go bad, we could warm it up, and then it would be consumable again. Bonne had restocked our supply of the vial and had tried to push some other reddish thing on Luke, who rejected it and said his answer remained the same. We thanked them, and before we could leave, she hugged me tightly.

“It was good to meet you,” she said, and I smiled back at her. I still wasn’t so comfortable touching her, but I didn’t squirm under her touch. When all this is over, and if I come out of it alive, I’ll be back here.

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