Page 42 of Heart Broken Mate

“Okay, let’s go on,” Bonne said when he saw I wasn’t going to pursue that. “I have gone through the books for mentions ofmedallions and similar things. I got caught up in a big derail, I would confess, but I’m back now, and I have narrowed it down to these two. We read through them, and we might just come up with what the pendants are supposed to mean.”

“There’s three of us and two of those,” I said, pointing at the book.

“Ahead of you at that,” Bonne said and placed four spiral-bound copies of the books in front of us. He had made copies of that while we slept. “Now burn through those.”

I picked up my copy and started reading right there in the dining room. It was asking a lot. I have never been attracted to books. I learned to read at a very early age and got good at it, but it was just one of those things you pick up. On the streets, there was no time to read. Just time to hustle for the next meal and to make sure there aren’t people hunting for you. Even after I got in with James, I didn’t do any reading. We were always training, so now it was a hard job to keep my eyes glued to these pages. Soon, the words all started to swim before me, making my eyes water, and I dropped the first one I picked, just ten pages in. It made a big thud on the floor and caught everyone's attention.

“Not a book person, I take it?” Bonne asked.

“Their spines are good weapons,” I said. “They break bones easily.”

He chuckled a bit at that, and Jade, who was now back in the room, laughed out loud. I didn’t notice he was back. I looked around the room, and my eyes settled on Luke. He looked very comfortable here, with these people. I have never been comfortable with people. And it wasn’t even an issue with him. I wanted to be with him, be around him, hell, even be insidehim. I didn’t struggle to be comfortable with him, but with these people, that wasn’t coming as easily as I wished it would.

I relaxed, though, even though what I wanted the most now was to be back in the room—the small thing it was—and just stare into the ceiling. That was very comforting for me.

“You don’t have to read it,” Luke said.

“Oh, I have to help and do my part.”

“You can come with us,” Nellie said, and I looked up at her. She was preparing to go for a walk with her son. “Come with us. Let’s show you the woods.”

“Is it safe?” I asked. “Won’t people see me out there?”

“I don’t think anyone would. It’s just behind our home. The neighbors aren’t nosy, don’t worry.”

“I want to show you my trap,” the kid said. “I made it all from scratch.”

“Yeah,” Bonne said. “You should go see his trap. Luke and I got it covered. Besides, we have some rather ugly things to discuss. Not good for ladies’ ears or kids’ either.”

“I see,” I said and stood up, following Nellie and Jade outside.

We went out through the back door, which opened to a small yard, and beyond that, a fence opened to the woods. I followed them out there. It was a cold morning, but not so chilly there was a need for a sweater. Only Jade was bundled up in extra clothes.

“I heard about what you did,” Nellie said to me after we passed the fence and were in the woods, following down a well-troddenpath. I could see it wasn’t just humans that walked past this place. No wonder the kid has a trap set.

I didn’t know what to say about Nellie’s statement, so I walked on.

“Luke told us all about it this morning. Bonne made him do it, and I don’t think I would have done the same if I were in your shoes,” she said and stopped walking, turning around to regard me.

“Bonne likes to talk about werewolves a lot for someone who doesn’t want to be one, and I know how hard it is to go up against your alpha. It is a fight against your natural instinct. That takes guts, and you did it for the right reason too. There’s nothing to be ashamed of in that, and definitely not worthy of persecution. In my books, you’re a hero because it could have been my kid those bastards took next.”

Nellie smiled at me and then started towards the kid. “Are you coming or not?” she yelled at me after a while, and then I found that I had stopped walking.

No one had called me that before or even acknowledged me as she did. I had been on the run for killing a man that sold kids, and for the first time since that happened, I felt justified.

We went back to the house after seeing the trap. It was well set but yet to catch game. Luke and Bonne were still going through the books and had not found anything. They had both moved from the dining table and were drinking cups of coffee on the floor in the living room. They had left the pendant, which had now been joined to form a medallion in the dining room. I picked it up and looked at it. That was the first time I looked at it in the form of the medallion. I ran my hand overthe smoother half of the medallion, and it wasn’t really smooth. I felt something grind against my hand, and it was almost unnoticeable.

I turned it over in my hand and felt it again. It was the same thing. The rougher part of the medallion was simply parts of nudges made into the medallion, not the crevices and outcropping on the moon, as Luke and I had assumed.

I glowed my eyes to see the medallion better, and the nudges all linked up to form a pattern. It was even a smaller moon, with something that looked like a cross between an eagle and a wolf jumping out of the woman. Whoever did this was a werewolf and made it visible only to werewolf eyes. What was Bonne saying about werewolves not being romantic enough?

“There’s something on this medallion,” I told them and walked to the living room. “You have to glow your eyes to see it.”

Luke was the first to collect it from me. He turned it over in his hand and checked it out with his eyes glowed. He saw what I saw too.

“It’s a symbol,” he said.

“What does it look like?” Bonne asked.

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