Moonbound

Prologue Part 2

Terror and joy arrived in the same breath, tangled so tightly she couldn't tell where one ended and the other began. Garrett wept actual tears, big rough hands scrubbing at his face when she told him and pulled her against his chest so hard she laughed despite everything. He wanted this. He wanted her, fully, forever, baby and all.

She had one week of school left. She told him she needed that week to gather her things properly, to leave without arousing suspicion, to walk away from her old life with her head high instead of fleeing it in the dark like something hunted.

She should have fled that night. She would spend years wondering what might have been different if she had.

Her parents were overjoyed when she completed her schooling, proving, in their eyes, that their daughter had been successfully steered back onto the path they'd chosen for her. Aled had already begun murmuring about her as Agatha's eventual successor. Miriam let them have their pride for exactly one evening before she sat them down in the same lounge where this had all started.

"Mother. Father." Her voice was gentle, but there was iron underneath it now. "I love you both, and I'm grateful for everything you've given me. But I can't stay at the coven."

Raven's eyes went wide. Aled went very still, the way he did right before his temper broke loose.

"I won't be welcome here anymore," Miriam continued, before either of them could speak. "Because I'm pregnant."

The silence afterward had a texture to it, thick and dangerous.

"Did someone at that school force themselves on you?" Aled's voice had dropped to something low and lethal.

"What? No ... of course not." She pressed a hand flat over her stomach, as though she could already shield the small life inside it. "It's Garrett's baby."

What came after was ugly. Aled's fury, sharp and biblical "how could you be so stupid " and Raven's cold, clinical calculation, already speaking of the child as though it were a problem to be solved rather than a grandchild to be loved. We will see that it is a witch. Regardless, we will see to it.

"What does that mean?" Miriam's hands curled protectively over her belly. "What are you going to do to my baby?"

They locked her in the house. Told her they were going to the coven to discuss the matter with Agatha, as though Miriam's body and her child were community property up for a vote. The second the front door shut behind them, she was on her feet, throwing whatever she could carry into a bag, out the window and running for Garrett's pack before her mother's footsteps had even faded down the lane.

Back at the coven, three of the most powerful witches and wizards left in the world sat down to decide the fate of a baby that hadn't yet drawn breath.

"An abomination," Agatha said, hands lifted as though warding off the very idea. "How did you let this happen?"

"I didn't let anything," Aled snapped. "My daughter fell in love with a wolf. I can't exactly forbid biology."

"She's having the child," Raven said quietly. "There will be no hybrid. We don't know what it will become. It could be stronger than us. We must place a spell on it. Suppress whatever the wolf half might be."

"If it works," Agatha mused, "he may lose interest once he learns there's no heir in it for him. No wolf. Just a witch. Surely he isn't fool enough to stay for love alone."

"She can't know we've done this," Aled said.

"She'll feel it," Agatha admitted. "A spell of this magnitude restricting a bloodline for generations will take everything the three of us have. She won't know exactly what's happened. But she'll know something has."

"Will it hurt the baby?" Raven's voice cracked, just slightly, on the question. Whatever else she was, she loved children, hybrid or not.

Aled touched her shoulder. "It will be fine, dear."

They gathered in the incantation room. Agatha drifted between shelves gathering crystals, dried herbs, a rabbit's foot, a vial of dark goat's blood, and mixed them slowly into a shallow silver bowl until the room filled with a smell like burnt copper and old rain. A single white crystal meant to stand in for the unborn child was set into the center of the mixture.

"Repeat after me. Five times, and it will take hold." Agatha's eyes flicked at Raven. "Something of hers, in the bowl. So the spell knows where to find her."

Raven reached into her cloak and drew out a small necklace, a child's trinket, long outgrown, that Miriam had carried in a drawer for years without ever quite explaining why. She set it gently against the crystal and took Agatha's hand again.

The chant rose low at first, then higher, words in a tongue older than any of them:

"Non receptus non eris. Veram a nobis formam absconde, lupo numquam ostendes."

Objects on the shelves began to lift and drift. The air thickened, went warm and wet like the moment before a storm breaks. Five times through, their voices climbing, until the room went suddenly, completely silent.

"It is done," Agatha said.

Miles away, in a barn loft that smelled of hay and woodsmoke, Miriam doubled over as a cry tore out of her that she didn't recognize as her own. Something had happened to her to the baby. She didn't know what, only that it hurt, deep and wrong, and that she needed to run now, before whatever they'd done finished happening.

She never looked back.

Years later, once the baby was born and safely hers, Miriam finally had the strength and the stillness to cast a looking spell over her own child to find out, at last, exactly what her parents had done that night.

A cloaking spell. And a powerful one powerful enough that it would only have taken hold at all if the child growing inside her had, in fact, been a hybrid. There was no more room for doubt. Her baby was both a wolf and witch, and someone had buried half of that truth so deep it might never surface again.

She was not strong enough to break it alone. No one was.

Generation after generation, the knowledge of what had been done and why thinned and frayed and finally snapped, lost the way all inconvenient histories are lost: quietly, and on purpose. No pack wanted a wolf less child; no coven wanted a fanged one. So, the descendants of Miriam and Garrett grew up knowing only half of what ran in their blood, were raised in wolf packs, taught wolf ways, the witch half of them sleeping silently beneath the surface like a language no one remembered how to speak.

The key to waking it had yet to be found.