“Really advanced stuff,” I tell her quickly. “Not like anything I’ve ever seen before.”
“So you couldn’t do that to me?”
“No. Hell no. Not that I would if I could. But even if I wanted to, I don’t have anything like that kind of power.” I look up at the sky. I can see the moon, just barely, the white daytime ghost of it. “Do you remember me telling you that moon magic is most powerful under the full moon?”
“Sure. Of course. I kind of knew that even before you told me.” She scoops up another handful of water and splashes it on her face.
“Well, right now, we’re under a waning moon in the middle of the day,” I tell her. “This is when magic should be theleastpowerful. No one should be able to do what we just witnessed.”
“Did you see the sigils on their faces?” she asks.
I nod. “I’ve seen other Moon Casters mark their bodies with sigils,” I say. “It’s usually ceremonial. If you specialize in a certain type of magic, you’ll indicate that with a mark like they had. Usually not on the face. That’s different.”
“And you don’t have any idea what that particular mark means?”
I shake my head. “None,” I say. “I’ve never seen that before—before you showed it to me, I mean.”
She shudders. “They were creepy,” she says. “Even if they’d just walked up and asked us how our day was going and been perfectly polite, I would have been creeped the fuck out by them.”
“I think the one who was leading them was probably the leader of a coven,” I say. “He had that demeanor about him.”
“He seemed like an alpha,” she says.
“Yeah, it’s similar,” I say. “Coven leaders can’t compel obedience just by speaking the way an alpha can, but they rule by fear. You saw how the others bent to whatever he told them.”
“What did he mean when he said we needed to make tribute?” she asks.
“I’ve never heard of that before,” I admit. “I have no idea what it means. Probably just that he wanted us to do something for him, to prove our loyalty in some way.”
“We’re not loyal to them,” she said. “Why would we be?”
“We were outnumbered,” I say. “Two wolves against three Moon Casters. And with the strength of the magic they were using…” I shiver. “Emlyn, they could have killed us if they had wanted to. We got away because they were toying with us, not because we were stronger or smarter than they were.”
“No,” she says. “You broke through their magic—”“I did,” I say. “And I don’t think they were expecting that from me. I think I did take them by surprise. But the fact that they didn’t kill us can only mean they didn’t want us dead.”
“They said they wanted us dead.”
“I mean they didn’t want us deadtoday.”
She takes a deep, shuddering breath.
“Do you think they’re going to hunt us down?” she asks. “They really didn’t like that we were hybrids.”
“No, they didn’t. I have no idea what they’ll do.”
“All the wolf packs already want us dead because we’re part Moon Caster,” she said. “Even Nate was going to turn us in. Now the Moon Casters are after us too?”
“Hybrids are rare,” I say. “It makes sense that everyone would be completely freaked out by the nature of what we are. Think about it. The wolves and the Moon Casters are at war with each other, and we’ve got all the powers of both of them. We can pass as belonging to either group, and then we can use the other group’s strengths to take them down from the inside.”
“The way my pack thought I would use magic against them,” she says.
“And the way my coven was afraid of me learning to shift while I was with them. Exactly.”
“Isn’t there anyone in the world we can trust besides each other?”
“At least we have each other,” I say. “You can’t imagine how lonely these last ten years have been, thinking I was the only person like me in the world.”
She looks up at the daylight shadow of the moon too.