Hunger Moon Rising Read online

  “Then you'll be going into tomorrow's Mabon ceremony unprepared, and you will very likely die.” She said it quietly, as a statement of fact rather than a threat. I felt a shiver run down my spine—call it a premonition, but it definitely wasn't good.

  “I'm sorry,” I said, opening the door for her. “I shouldn't have acted that way. It's just…”

  “Just that this is a world you've been trying to avoid for years, and now you find yourself thrust into the middle of it,” she finished for me. She glided past me into the bedroom and chose a straight-backed wooden chair that had been painted periwinkle blue to sit on. “It's a frightening thing, confronting your second nature, isn't it, Benjamin?”

  “What would you know about it, Priestess?” I slumped on the bed and ran a hand through my hair. “You've never had to change. Never felt the moon contorting your flesh into some unnatural shape, bringing out the worst in you, the animal urges—the uncontrollable lusts…” I felt my stomach clench just talking about it.

  “Please, call me Molly, everyone else in the pack does.” She smiled at me. “And I've never changed, that's true. But I've been the priestess for this pack for almost as long as you've been alive, so I do know a little something about it.” She leaned forward and tapped me on the knee with one sensibly short nail. “It's time you claimed your birthright, Ben.”

  “I don't want to claim it,” I said. “I only came here to get Dani. Neither one of us wanted to get involved with the pack, or the Mabon ceremony, or the Hunger Moon ritual or whatever it is you have planned. We just want to leave.”

  “I'm afraid that will be quite impossible. Your friend, Dani, has been designated as our Mabon queen for this year.”

  “That's just great,” I said savagely. “Doesn't she have any say in that?”

  Molly shrugged. “She did. Theodore asked her if she was able to raise power, and she said she could, effectively agreeing to raise power with him during the full moon.”

  “I didn't mean it that way.” The bathroom door opened and Dani stepped out, wearing a fuzzy white bathrobe that must have been left there for guests. Her wet hair was slicked back from her forehead, and she looked very pale and fragile in the oversized robe.

  “I'm sorry, my dear,” Molly said, sounding anything but. “But ignorance of the law is no excuse for breaking it. You are committed to the ceremony one way or another. Whether you perform it with our Lead Wolf or someone else.” She gave me a significant look, which I met with a glare.

  “If he touches her again, I'll kill him,” I said. I could hear the possessive growl building in my throat, and I didn't even try to stop it. It didn't matter that Dani didn't belong to me—that she didn't even want to belong to me. The animal part of me, the wolf part, still insisted that she was mine, and I would fight and die if necessary to prove it.

  “You'll have to,” Molly said, not batting an eye. “Theodore is going to challenge you for the right to claim her, and it's going to be a duel to the death. It's kill or be killed—that's the law of the pack.”

  “What?” Dani came to sit beside me on the bed and put a hand on my arm protectively. “But Ben and I aren't…I mean he shouldn't have to…to fight for me when we're not even really a…a couple, and…”

  Molly leveled a stare at her that seemed to quell my usually unstoppable partner. “You're wasting both my time and your own with that kind of talk,” she said, pointing a finger at Dani. “No one that has felt the power the two of you can raise between you could doubt you have a connection—and a deep and powerful one at that.”

  Dani got a stubborn look on her face. “That's ridiculous. Look, you have the right to believe what you want—it's a free country—but you don't have a right to drag Ben and me into it.”

  “If you have no bond then how do you explain the way he healed you?” Molly's voice was quiet, but she was just about staring a hole through Dani.

  “I…well…I mean, I thought that was just a werewolf thing. Just something they, I mean Ben, could do,” my partner stuttered at last.

  Molly shook her head. “No. Ben would have been unable to heal you without a connection to you—without the love that he bears you.”

  “Of course he loves me—he's my best friend.” Dani frowned. It was clear she didn't want to hear what Molly had to say—didn't want to admit there could ever be anything but friendship between us. Suddenly I felt tired—no, more than tired. I was weary to the bone.

  “Dani's right,” I said, forcing myself to say the words. “We're writing partners and best friends. That's about it.”

  Molly shook her head. “That kind of foolishness will get you killed, Ben. You're going to need all the power you can get in order to defeat the reigning Lead Wolf, and that includes the support of the woman you love. Statistically, the wolf the Mabon queen wants is the one that usually wins the duel and gets to claim her as his lover.”

  “Excuse me, claim her as his what?” Dani had gone very pale, and her hands were shaking just a little bit. “What are you talking about?” she demanded.

  Molly frowned. “I'm talking about the culmination of the Mabon Ceremony—The Great Rite. Now, the pack celebrates it a little differently than your coven, I'm sure, but—”

  “Excuse me.” I held up a hand to stop her and looked at Dani. “Your coven?”

  Dani shrugged uneasily. “I had to pretend I belonged to one in order to get Savage to believe me. Otherwise he would have killed me right there at La Bella Luna—I had to make him think I was worth more to him alive than dead.”

  “So you lied about being a Wiccan? A Pagan?” Molly shook her head. “This gets worse and worse.”

  “Yes,” Dani said with sudden eagerness. “Yes, I lied. So I'm completely unworthy to be the, uh, Mabon queen. Of course, I'm perfectly willing to step down and let someone else have my place, and that way Ben won't have to fight a duel for me, and we can all just forget about all of this, and…” But she trailed off because Molly was shaking her head again.

  “As I said, my dear, ignorance of the law is no excuse for breaking it. Wiccan or not, you are committed to participating in the ceremony.”

  “But the only reason she's involved in the first place is because she had to lie in order to stay alive,” I pointed out, beginning to get mad. “Didn't you hear her? Thrash Savage was going to kill her otherwise.” I pointed a finger at Molly who still looked irritatingly calm and implacable. “I don't think this has anything to do with Dani and me, not really. It has to do with the power struggle going on between you and Thrash. Anybody else that happened to show up would have done just as well—you're just using us to get the upper hand in the pack.”

  Molly shrugged, apparently unperturbed by my accusation. “It is true that you are being used to a certain extent, but not only by my will.” She looked at both of us. “The Goddess is at work here, although I cannot see the reason why at the moment. It was she that brought the two of you to us, just at the time when the pack needed you both.”

  Dani stood shakily, using my shoulder for balance. “You don't need us and you can't keep us here.”

  “There is no way you can leave,” Molly told her. “Five and fifty wolves stand ready to rip you to pieces if you try. Besides, have you forgotten that Benjamin here swore an oath? He cannot break it unless he wishes to stand against the whole pack. And he cannot do that and live to see another moonrise.”

  “Ben's right. You're just using us to get rid of Savage,” Dani said. But she sank back down on the bed, and I took her hand between both of mine. Her skin was cold.

  Molly sighed. “There is a very delicate balance in any pack between male and female—most often represented by the Priestess and the Lead Wolf. I admit that it has always been an uneasy balance between Theodore and myself, but lately, the friction between us has been growing. I have long suspected that our Lead Wolf has something in the works, something special he was planning just for the Hunger Moon, although I can't imagine what.”

  Dani sat forward sudd