Moon Child (The Year of the Wolf #2) - Serena Akeroyd Page 0,1
for him, for all her sons, and out of a desire to seek forgiveness.
“Do you think you can remember that, Daniel?”
He was back to biting his bottom lip. “I think I can, Mother.”
“Good.” I smiled, and instantly, the temperature in the clearing where he stood, a sea of mist around him, shadowed trees that loomed high overhead, surged so that he was no longer shivering. “Go, with my blessing, Daniel, son of Kingsley Rainford, adopted son of Eli, Ethan, Austin, and Sabina Highbanks and child of their heart.”
And with that, I sent him back, leaving him gawping at what I officially recognized far earlier than anyone else would.
He was a child of the Highbanks. That was as much his destiny as the other tasks I’d set him.
Now, I just had to pray that he’d live up to the potential I saw in him.
One
Sabina
I sighed when the moonlight slipped over my body, recharging me with its healing rays.
I wasn’t sure why, when I’d once been a sun baby, spending every minute I could with my face tilted toward the sky to ease the nagging ache in my bones, but now? I loved the moon.
The sun drained, it didn’t recharge.
The moon soothed, even as it energized.
Maybe it was my lifestyle from before that hadn’t helped. Up at the asscrack of dawn, down toward midnight on dates when the carnival was open. I’d always been dog tired by the time the sun set, and had been dragging through my job as a tarot card reader-slash-faux psychic in my booth.
Thankfully, my clients weren’t annoyed by the sound of me slurring from tiredness. They just thought I was in the zone, and because I was pretty good with my predictions, thanks to my abilities with auras, I’d never had any complaints about sounding zombie-esque.
During those dark days, if I could have, I’d have spent every moment the sun was down in bed, snoring away.
Now? It was the opposite. I wanted to be awake through the moonlit hours, wanted to be here, at the circle, with the totem looming over me, the totem that was the… Hell, I didn’t even know what it was.
What I did know was that a kind of conduit, a voice, for the Mother embodied the totem, and she called herself Lidai.
The notion didn’t disturb me. Not when, in my previous life, in my family’s religion, we had a ‘channel’ to god too. Kali Sara was our saint. She whispered our prayers in His ears, or so we believed in the Romany culture.
The totem was an impressive obelisk that had loomed over the pack for centuries, a silent sentinel overseeing all generations, playing witness to our weaknesses, our strengths, our downfalls, and our successes. Through it all, it was there.
She was there.
Which was probably why it was weird that I enjoyed fucking my men here.
If Lidai was a dirty bitch like me, she probably got off on seeing us doing the nasty—well, if anything I did with Ethan, Eli, and Austin could ever be considered nasty, that is.
Of course, that was when Austin decided to bring my attention back to where it needed to be.
I bit back a moan as he nibbled my ear, his dick running through the folds of my sex.
The move had me arching my back, the crown of my head digging deep into the soil beneath me as I used it as a fulcrum to arch even further. I didn’t want him to go anywhere, loved him exactly where he was, but my body was hyper-sensitized.
Had been ever since I’d gotten pregnant.
I shuddered as he let his lips drift down over the curve of my throat and whispered, “Austin, baby, please.”
If there was a plea in those words, then so be it. I wasn’t ashamed to beg for what I wanted from him, what I needed.
His chuckle set a wave of reaction whispering through me, down my nerve endings, until it felt like each one was on fire.
Once upon a time, I’d had fibromyalgia, so I knew what it felt like for my nerves to be backfiring on me, but that was an acute kind of torture that was nowhere near pleasurable.
His lips curved down over the ripe swell of my breasts—they’d always been the first ‘asset’ a guy noticed, but since I’d gotten pregnant, they were getting bigger and the guys loved them.
I swear, I could just sit there, jiggle my tits a little, and Austin would get a boner.