From Hybrid Outcast To Luna novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: The Rookery

Her mother draws months of silver out of her blood, Morwenna tells her family she will hold the bond and keep Garrick and Verity chained together, and the black mark under her cuff starts to burn.

The Rookery has a kitchen table big enough to operate on, and Mum used it.

She laid me down on a folded quilt under the lamp and pressed two fingers to the inside of my elbow.

"Hold still," she said. "This will pull."

It did.

A line of dark heat ran up my arm toward her fingers, and she drew it out of me and flicked it into a bowl of salt water.

The salt hissed and turned grey.

Mum looked at the bowl for a long moment.

"That's months of it," she said. "Not just tonight."

"Verity brought me the tonic every night since I found out about the baby," I said. "That's only four months."

"And before that she gave you morning tea for the nausea. Every day for the first three months of the pregnancy. It's all in your blood, Morwen, laid down in thin little layers."

I stared at the ceiling.

I had thanked her for that tea.

I had told her it was the only thing that helped.

"A wolf pup would have been gone weeks ago," Mum said. "She didn't expect your daughter to hold on. That's why tonight's cup was three times the strength."

"Because she's half vampire."

"Because she's yours," Mum said, and smoothed the hair off my face.

Emmett leaned in the doorway with a mug of tea and a sandwich.

"Don't drink the tea," he told me. "Just on principle."

I laughed, and it came out wet.

Dad stood at the head of the table with his hands behind his back.

He hadn't said a word since we came through the door.

"Garrick has to answer for it," he said at last. "The Moot will want proof. We have the glass, and your account, and a hall full of witnesses."

"And the Elder Mother will say I made it myself," I said. "I heard her."

"She will," Dad said. "So we do this properly. We lodge a complaint with the Nightwood Court under the treaty, and we..."

"No."

They all looked at me.

I sat up slowly, with Mum's hand on my back.

"I'm not rejecting him," I said. "I said it at the river and I meant it."

"Morwenna," Dad said. "Listen to me. If you hold that bond, you're tied to a man who tried to kill you. Every time he's hurt, you feel it. Every time he's afraid, you feel it. The oath works both ways."

"I know."

"Then why?"

"Because he wants out."

The kitchen was quiet.

"Six years," I said. "He wouldn't mark me. He said the elders weren't ready. I told myself I wasn't enough, that it was my fault for being half of something. I stood in that hall tonight with his mark on my wrist and thought I was the problem."

Mum's hand went still on my back.

"He wasn't waiting for the elders," I said. "He was waiting for Verity to be ready to take my place. If I reject him, he's free. He gets his pure-wolf Luna and his clean Alpha seat, and he tells everyone I ran off and killed his child."

"So you want him chained," Emmett said slowly.

"I want them together," I said. "Both of them. Every day, in front of everyone. I want her to be able to look at him and not touch him. I want him to watch her want to and not be able to take her hand."

"That's horrible," Emmett said, with real respect.

"It's the Goddess's law. I'm only holding it."

Dad watched me with a troubled expression.

"This isn't the way to stay safe," he said. "It's a way to stay angry."

"I can do both."

"Can you?"

"Watch me."

Nobody answered.

After a while Mum said, "Bed. All of you. She needs sleep, and so does that baby."

She took me upstairs herself, to my old room at the back, where the window looks out over the valley.

My childhood quilt was on the bed, and she had washed it.

"I won't argue," she said at the door. "You've earned a say in this. But you'll tell me if it starts to hurt."

"I will."

She kissed my forehead and went down.

I lay there in the dark with my hand on my belly, and for the first time all night nobody was chasing me.

I was nearly asleep when the cuff on my right wrist began to burn.

Not the silver mark on my left, the one Garrick had given me.

The other one.

The black crescent had never done anything in twenty-four years, and now it burned hot against the bone.

I tore the cuff open and held my wrist up to the moonlight.

The black mark was darker than I had ever seen it.

It was pulsing slowly, in time with a heartbeat that wasn't mine.

I ran downstairs with the cuff in my hand.

Dad was still in the kitchen.

He looked at my wrist, and for one second his face went blank in a way I had never seen.

"What is it?" I said. "Dad, what is that?"

"It's the silver," he said. "Leaving your blood. Put the cuff back on."

He had never lied to me before.

I knew he was lying now, because his eyes went to the floor.

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