From Hybrid Outcast To Luna novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: The River Line

Her brother carries her over the Nightwood border, her father reads Garrick's mind aloud, and Morwenna swears she will never reject her mate, so the first woman to touch him burns him.

I looked left, and my brother was running alongside me through the pines.

"You're slow," Emmett said, not even out of breath. "Arms up."

He scooped me off the ground and carried me the last stretch to the water.

Emmett is a hybrid like me, and the Goddess gave him the half of the bargain that works.

He went across the river in three strides, with the water barely up to his knees.

Dad and Mum were waiting on the far bank.

Dad stood very still in his long dark coat.

Mum was already on her knees in the grass with her arms open.

Emmett set me down, and she pulled me in so hard that the breath went out of me.

"I've got you," she said into my hair. "I've got you, baby."

I was crying, and I hadn't known I was.

"Dad," I said. "He said the pup is no loss."

"I know. I heard it with you." His voice was steady, but his hands were not. "I'd have come at the first tonic, Morwen, if I had known. I only got close enough tonight."

"Mum, the baby."

"Not yet," Mum said, and put her palm flat on my stomach. "Breathe. Let me listen."

She closed her eyes.

The baby kicked once under her hand, and Mum's whole face broke.

"She's alive," she said. "Still alive, and strong."

"She?"

"I think so," Mum said, and laughed and cried at once.

Across the river, the Redmoor wolves came out of the trees.

Twenty of them, shifted and snarling, with the Beta in front.

They stopped at the water's edge and did not step in.

The land on this bank belonged to the Nightwood Court, and no Redmoor wolf had crossed it in eighty years without an invitation.

Emmett turned his back on them and cracked his knuckles.

"Come on, then," he called. "I've got all night."

Behind the wolves, two people walked out of the pines.

Garrick had put on his Alpha face.

Verity was beside him with her braid half out and tears running down her cheeks.

"Morwen," Garrick called. "Thank the Goddess. You frightened us."

Nobody on my side of the river said anything.

"You've had a shock," he went on. "The tonic is something Verity's been giving you for months. You've been under strain, and the elders upset you. Come home and let us help."

"Please," Verity said. "I'm so sorry. We were so worried."

She was good.

She was better than I had ever known.

Dad took one step forward to the edge of the water.

"You're thinking the river is only waist deep," he said, quite mildly, to Garrick. "You're thinking your twenty wolves could cross before I finish this sentence, and kill my son and my wife, and that you would tell the elders it was self-defence."

Garrick's face emptied.

"You're also thinking," Dad said, "that the baby is only half wolf, and therefore does not count."

The wolves on the bank looked at their Alpha.

The Beta, a big man I had known for six years, took a step back from the water.

"Alpha," he said. "Is that true?"

"He's a mind reader," Garrick said. "A vampire trick. Don't listen."

"Then I won't read the next one," Dad said. "Morwenna. It's yours to say."

I stood up.

Mum kept her hand on my back.

Garrick looked at me, and for the first time all night he looked afraid.

"Morwen, don't," he said. "Whatever you're about to say, think about the baby."

"I am."

I held up my left wrist, where his silver crescent sat on my skin.

"Mum," I said. "What's the oath?"

She was quiet a moment, and then she said it in my ear, word by word.

I said it out loud, so that every wolf on the bank could hear.

"I am Morwenna Rooke, mate of Garrick Hallam, chosen by the Goddess. I hold the bond. I will not reject it, and I will not release him."

Garrick went grey.

"You're not rejecting me?"

"Never," I said.

"But I..." He stopped, and I watched him understand it.

An Alpha whose mate had not rejected him could take no other Luna.

Verity understood it at the same moment.

She grabbed his arm.

"Garrick, don't listen to her. She's lying, she's confused, she's just a..."

Garrick screamed.

Her fingers were still on his sleeve, and the skin beneath the cloth had burned.

When he tore his arm away, the print of her hand stayed on it, black and blistering, and the smell of burnt flesh came across the water.

Nobody on the river moved.

"The Goddess doesn't allow it," Mum said quietly. "A mate who tries to kill the one she gave him can't be touched by anyone else until she lets him go."

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