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He looked up at me, shocked. “Why are you asking that?”
I sighed, reaching into my shirt and removing my own pendant. I handed it over to him and his mouth fell open.
“No,” he said as he collected it from me. He looked up at me, then back at the pendant. “That explains it,” he said finally before handing it back to me.
“Yes, it does,” I added.
“I knew I had to meet you to find you. I couldn’t get you out of my mind. It was like everywhere I turned, I could smell you. Clay and daylilies, and it was intoxicating. I wanted to hold you tight and not let you go. It was confusing and I couldn’t understand it.”
“I didn’t understand why I blurted those things out in the reservation too. It was unlike me. It was strange, scary even.”
“But you meant every word of it,” he said. It sounded like a question but was more of a statement. A testament to what he felt himself.
“Yes, I did.”
He held my hand, and I felt myself melt as our skin touched. We weren’t out in the woods fighting anymore. We weren’t hunting each other anymore because it would be pointless to do that. We were holding onto each other now because there was a bond between us that we couldn’t explain. We had chased each other, ran from each other, even fought each other, and it still ended here.
This moment, where nothing seemed to exist, not even the shelter we were in, not the bed he was sitting on, not the pendant on our necks—just the two of us, and our hands touching. Everything felt right with the world. It was like I had been navigating it with my head turned upside down and going about it the wrong way all the time, but now, that was over. I have found something I could use to make sense of the world.
Luke pulled me toward himself, and I surrendered myself to him.
“I had been lying to myself about this. I had been fighting this,” he said to me. “But there’s no fighting it anymore. It is what we want. What we need.”
He kissed me then, and I had been kissed a lot of times before, but this felt different. It felt right. The moment our lips touched, something aligned between the two of us. But there was hunger, too, and passion and a deep need. He pulled me closer to him until I had straddled him. We kissed for a very long time. It must have taken about ten minutes before we finally pulled apart fromeach other and took a breath. I sat with him and rested my head against his shoulder.
“I guess I’m not taking you back then,” he said.
“No, you’re not.”
“And are you ready to tell me what really happened with James?”
I felt I could tell him whatever he wanted. I could tell him everything about my life.
“Yes,” I said to him.
Chapter Seventeen (Luke)
After we had a breakfast of roasted rabbit, which was the best thing I’ve had in days, we headed out of the shelter. I was totally fine now, and we had to decide where to go next. We weren’t thinking as individuals now. That had gone out of the window when Hayley showed me her pendant. We were thinking as a pair, and any decision we make now has to favor the two of us.
I didn’t know how I missed the pendant. It had become such a part of me that I forgot I even had it. My mother gave it to me a long time ago. There was something about the night she gave me. The fear and pain in her eyes that I could never forget. She told me to find the other half, too but didn’t tell me to go all out like Hayley’s mother had. She told me the second half of it would find me. She told me to live my life, and when the time comes, it will find me.
After I left home, I found my own pack, and we hunted together. We made a life together, and then I lost my pack. I came to Nillport to pick up the broken pieces of my life and tried to get it all back together. I did that, but still, the second half of the pendant never found me, and the right time never came. I soon gave up on it and forgot all about it. I focused on just living instead. And yet, here it was, and it came with Hayley.
I held her hand as we walked through the meadow and came to the other side of the forest. We were heading back to Nillport. It was a risky decision, but we both agreed we had to make it. We have to understand what the pendant signifies. Two halves of amoon. It seemed important. If it weren’t, our parents wouldn’t have tasked us with finding the other halves, and from what Hayley told me, her parents died protecting the pendant.
If anyone had information about the pendant, then it would be Bonne. He knows and has books detailing histories and lore about werewolves. Our origin and old rituals that had died out because they were dangerous. Ancient and powerful tribes that had either died out or hidden away. He would have answers.
“Where were you going to go before?” I asked Hayley as we made it back into the woods. I had found a rabbit earlier, burnt our clothes, and mixed the ash together. Then I tied a vial of our ash on the rabbit and sent it in the opposite direction. If there were still any werewolves or even humans using dogs to track our scent, then they would go after the rabbit. Hopefully, they go after it for a long time before discovering it was a decoy. It wasn’t the most ingenious idea, but it was the best I could come up with.
“I was going to keep going west,” Hayley replied. “My godfather said he would have people waiting for me in Michigan. I could have gone there, but I didn’t want to. I was going to find a place in whatever town these woods lead to, lay low for a while, and then double back to Nillport.”
“I still can’t believe James was a child trafficker,” I said as I kicked a twig out of the way. It was midday, and we were making good time. By my calculations, we should get to Nillport by dark, which would be good. We enter under the guise of the night, and the hunters will still be scouring the woods for us. “I used to think he was one of the good ones. The ones you can trust. That was before he ordered us to be thrown out, but people said thatwas because of the Tarloux family, so I didn’t fault him for that. But child trafficking? That’s inexcusable.”
“The Tarloux family is implicated in this, too,” she told me. “I saw one of their representatives. I recognize him from seeing him around.”
“Of course they are.”
“How do we deal with the two of them? The Nillport council and the Tarloux family?” Hayley asked me. “Do you think the pendant will be any help?”
