Moonbound

A moment in time, many years ago... The moon hung fat and silver above the tree line, close enough that it seemed to lean in and listen. Past midnight, the coven grounds had gone still even the crickets had quieted, as if the whole forest understood it was keeping a secret tonight. "Miriam, shh ... someone's going to hear us." Garrett's whisper came rough against her ear, half warning, half plea, because his hands weren't doing much to help his own case. Miriam giggled, the sound bright and reckless in the dark. "My coven is asleep, Garrett. We're deep enough in the trees. No one will hear us." She tipped her chin up, daring him. "Please don't stop kissing me." He chuckled a low, rolling sound that she felt more than heard, vibrating against the curve of her throat and dragged his mouth in a slow line of kisses from her chin down to her collarbone, unhurried, like he had all the time in the world and intended to spend every second of it on her. He pulled back just enough to look at her properly. Moonlight silvered the sharp lines of his face, caught in the dark blue of his eyes until they looked almost black. He cupped her jaw in one broad hand, thumb tracing her cheekbone like he was memorizing it. "Goddess, you're beautiful." She smiled, suddenly shy in a way that didn't suit her at all. "And you are quite handsome. Whatever am I to do with you?" "Love me forever," he said, and there wasn't a shred of teasing left in his voice. "Always," she answered, and meant it with everything she had. "High Priestess. She has arrived." The coven attendant bowed and slipped back through the heavy oak door before High Priestess Agatha had even turned from the mirror above her mantel. She studied her reflection a moment longer than necessary, the severe knot of her silver-streaked hair, the sharp set of her mouth before gliding out to the lounge where the Knight family waited. It was a grand room, all deep reds and old gold, sofas arranged like a stage for exactly this sort of conversation. At its center sat Aled Knight one of the last of the founding wizards, his power radiating off him like the heat of summer, Stone his wife Raven beside him with her hands folded too carefully in her lap, and between them, their daughter. Miriam. If the girl weren't a Knight, Agatha would have had her removed from coven grounds years ago. As it was, she settled into the chair across from them, crossed her ankles with practiced elegance, and folded her hands over her knee. "Aled. Raven. Thank you for coming at such an hour." Aled inclined his head, jaw tight. "Your telegram implied urgency." "It's come to my attention," Agatha said, letting the words unspool slowly, savoring them, "that Miriam has been associating with werewolves. Not merely in the way of business, I'm told. Someone saw her kissing one. In the woods. Like a common girl with no name to protect." Miriam's stomach dropped straight through the floor. How. They'd been so careful. Her mind raced through every cousin, every servant, every person who might have followed her into the trees and sold the sight of her for gossip. Aled turned to his daughter slowly, and for a moment the only sound in the room was the fire cracking in the grate. "Miriam. Is this true?" She opened her mouth. Nothing came out at first, just the useless, mirrored shock on her mother's face, though for entirely different reasons. "Miriam." Her father's voice sharpened. "I asked you a question." "Yes, Father." Her chin came up even as her eyes burned. She would not cry in front of Agatha. She would not. "I'm seeing a werewolf. We're in love. I don't understand why the coven is so against it. We trade with wolf packs constantly." What followed was exactly what she'd feared and worse: the lecture, the ultimatum, the announcement that she would be sent to finishing school to be reshaped into something more presentable, more proper, more in line with the daughter they'd always intended to raise. Her family spoke as though Garrett were a stain to be laundered out of her, a phase, an embarrassment with a heartbeat. They did not know and could not have imagined that Garrett had already offered to mark her as his chosen. That he'd have released any fated mate the moon goddess might one day hand him, just for the chance to keep her. The weeks crawled by. Miriam attended her classes because it was easier to let them believe she'd been tamed than to fight a war, she couldn't win from inside her parents' house. The witch academy sat two villages closer, as it happened, to Garrett's pack than anyone in her family realized. By day, she sat through the dull, exacting work of herbal elixirs, spell theory, and the etiquette drilled into every young witch meant for polite society. By night, once the dormitory quieted and the other girls' candles guttered out, she slipped through a servant's door and ran the long way through the trees to him. Garrett was tall, sun-browned, built like something carved rather than born, with dark blond hair that always looked windblown and eyes the deep, drowning blue of a lake at dusk. She was hopelessly, helplessly in love with him, and it was on one of those stolen nights, wrapped in a blanket in the loft above his family's barn with the smell of hay and woodsmoke all around them, that everything changed. She was pregnant.