Moon - New Moon Part 29

"I hope not." She looked around the room. "How long are we staying here?"

"Part of the night. After I get some rest, we can head back to my campsite."

They sat down, and he took a sip of soup. She nibbled on a piece of cheese.

He managed to take a couple more swallows before saying with studied casualness, "You'll feel better when you tell me about Falcone."

CHAPTER THIRTEEN.

LOGAN SAW RINNA almost choke on the piece of cheese in her mouth. Deliberately she chewed and swallowed, probably to give herself time to think of what to say.

He wondered where his last line had come from. It hadn't been what he'd planned. He'd wanted to tell her how much he cared. He wanted her to understand that they had bonded. But he'd never practiced in-depth man-woman communications. So he'd stuck to business, and the words he was thinking had popped out of his mouth. Probably from her point of view, he'd issued a challenge.

She folded her hands in her lap before asking, "Why will I feel better?"

He turned his spoon over and examined the back. "Because when you hold bad stuff inside, it eats at you. It affects your mind and your body."

She tipped her head to the side, watching him with unnerving intensity. "You know that from personal experience?"

"Yes." He wanted to look away, but he kept his gaze fixed on her. If he could show her he wasn't afraid to share his painful memories, maybe she would, too.

"From when I was a kid. My father was a hard man who expected that his sons would do what he ordered and not buck his authority. I had a lot of questions about what it meant to be a werewolf, since the only werewolves I knew of were in the Marshall family. And we hid that trait from the rest of the world. But I kept my feelings bottled up because..." He shrugged. "Dad never brought up that kind of stuff."

He shifted in his seat and went on. "You said you first changed to another form when you were a little girl. But in my heritage, we don't change to wolf form until we're s.e.xually mature. It's a big deal not just because it means we've turned from boy to man. Unfortunately, half of us died trying to make the change."

She gasped. "Why?"

"n.o.body knew. That's the way it was, through all the generations. My cousin Ross's wife, Megan, says it's hormonal. She thinks she can fix the problem for... the children. But when I was facing the change, I got more and more upset and angry because I was sure I wasn't going to make it. I thought I was going to die because three of my brothers before me had already bought the farm. It all came to a head one day when I was helping my father clean out the garage of all things. I threw down the armload of fireplace wood I was carrying and started screaming that I wasn't going to do it."

He saw that she was hanging on every word. In truth, he had always been ashamed of the way he'd taken out his fear on his parent. Dad hadn't set the rules. He'd just had to live by them the way all the Marshalls had.

But that outburst had truly wiped the slate clean in an odd sort of way. And now Logan seized on the confession as a way to deepen his relationship with Rinna. So he kept talking.

"My father understood why I exploded, and he calmed me down. He said he'd felt the same, way when he was facing the change. He told me how sad and angry he was that my brothers had died. For the first time in our lives, we had a really good talk. He explained about our heritage, and he gave me some ways to get through the transformation. Just having that conversation with him-man-to-man-made me feel a lot better. Maybe it even saved my life."

"You chant when you change?"

"Yes."

"What does it mean?"

"It's in an old language. Gaelic. It's asking the G.o.ds for special favors. My cousin, Ross, figures some long-ago Druid ancestor asked to become a shapeshifter, and he got his wish. The gift, or the curse, has been pa.s.sed down through the men in my family."

She nodded, then asked. "What about the girls?"

He hadn't planned to get into so much detail on the Marshall curse. But he answered the question. "For us, the werewolf trait is s.e.x linked. So all of the girl babies died at birth. It's different now. Megan and Ross have a daughter. That's a big milestone for our family."

"So the wives of your brothers and cousins don't have psychic powers?" she asked.

"Actually, a lot of them do. I think we've gravitated toward talented women."

She pushed back her chair and got up, and for a heart-stopping moment, he thought she was going to leave the room. But she only walked to the sink and began playing with the lever that turned on the water, making it run, then stopping it again.

With her back to him, she said, "A free man might take a slave as a concubine. But he would never marry one."

"You were a slave?"

Her shoulders tensed. "Yes."

"And you think I care about that?"

"Don't you?"

"I don't give a d.a.m.n about where you came from. I care about who you are now and what you've made of yourself. I come from a society where everyone is free to live up to his or her full potential-if they have the drive and the know-how. You obviously did."

"I was living in a cave!"

"Living free in a cave."

She ignored that and went on, "Falcone had no plans to marry me, but he wanted me to bear his children-children that would have powerful talents. He wants to found a dynasty that will rule Sun Acres for generations to come."

"Why is he so sure his children would be talented enough to stay in power?"

"It's not just my psychic abilities that would make the difference. He has great talents-more than most men and women."

He stared at her rigid back, grappling with his surprise. "You're saying Falcone has psychic power?"

"Yes. That's how I met him. At school." She turned back toward the table, leaning her hips against the sink cabinet. "In Sun Acres and in the other cities, they test children for psychic abilities. If you have them, they take you away to a special school, even if you are a slave."

"And when you graduate?"

"It depends. You could tell the future for a rich man. You could run the equipment in the kitchen, like what Haig did. Or you could be used for an a.s.sault on another city. It depends on your status and how gifted you are."

"Both men and women go into battle?"

"Usually only the boys."

"And not the highborn children?"

"They might be generals. And in school, they think they are better than the slaves, even when they have less talent. Or sometimes because they know they have less talent, so they do things to us when they think the teachers aren't looking. Probably the teachers know, but they don't interfere unless things get too bad, because they don't want to offend the highborn families."

He tried to imagine it. "Falcone was older than you?"

"Yes. He was a couple of years older." She swallowed. "I never knew how he was going to act. Sometimes he was the leader of the gang who teased me. And sometimes he made them let up on me."

"It sounds like a miserable childhood."