BOUND BY THE BLOOD MOON

What the Bond Means

The explanation came in the morning, in a room she was told was called the study, delivered by a man who was clearly accustomed to controlling the presentation of information and who was finding the current situation complicated by the fact that she kept asking questions.

The study was on the second floor of the main hall, a large room with stone walls and a fire and maps she wanted very much to examine more closely and bookshelves that extended to the ceiling and a desk that held the evidence of a serious working life. She sat in the chair across the desk from Caden and kept her notebook open and her pen moving.

He told her what she needed to know in the order he had evidently decided she needed to know it: the Velthari pack, the compound, the Blood Moon ritual, and then, with the specific quality of a person delivering information they would have preferred not to deliver, the Lunara bond.

She wrote everything down.

"The bond," she said, when he finished. "What I felt in the clearing. That was the bond forming."

"Yes."

"It is permanent."

A beat. "Yes."

"Without my knowledge or consent."

He did not look away, which she respected. "Yes. The Blood Moon bond does not require consent to form. It is determined by lineage and by the ritual's conditions. You carry a bloodline called Lunara that activates under specific circumstances. You were in the clearing on the Blood Moon. The conditions were met."

"What is the Lunara bloodline?"

"An ancient human lineage. Women of your line have been bonded to Alpha Kings of the Velthari for as long as the records document. The last Lunara was three centuries ago. Most current scholars believed the lineage extinct."

"They were wrong," she said.

"Evidently."

She looked at her notes. The pen moved. She was building a framework, which was what she did when information arrived faster than existing structures could accommodate it.

"What does it mean practically," she said. "The bond. What does it require of me?"

He was quiet for a moment. "Nothing that you do not choose."

She looked up. "That is a careful answer."

"It is an accurate answer." He held her gaze. "The bond is permanent. What it becomes depends on choices that belong to both of us. I will not make decisions about your life without your agreement. That is not a courtesy. It is the first condition of anything that follows."

She studied him across the desk. He was very controlled. The silver eyes were steady and the expression was neutral and he was, she thought, one of the most self contained people she had ever encountered. She was also quite sure, from her experience of the clearing and the walk and this morning, that underneath the self containment something was working very hard.

"What is the second condition?" she said.

"That you stay," he said. "For one week. Long enough to understand what you are part of. Long enough to make an informed decision."

She looked at the study, at the maps and the books and the fire, and she felt the thread in her chest, warm and present and specific.

"One week," she said.

"Yes."

She looked at her notebook. Then at him.

"I have field work," she said. "Specimens that require regular documentation."

"I will arrange access to the eastern grove," he said. "Your work can continue."

She wrote: eastern grove access. Arranged.

"One week," she said again.

"One week," he confirmed.

She closed the notebook.

"Tell me more about the Lunara," she said.