Page 93 of Rejecting his Mate

I raise my eyebrows. “So you… Did what?”

“I used our combined power to release the binding holding her.”

I stare at her in shock, barely able to contemplate what she is saying. What she did was incredibly dangerous, and judging from the look on her face, she knows that. “You could have killed her. All that power coming free in one hit… It could have been too much.”

Hester runs her fingers through her hair, a hint of frustration in the gesture. “We couldn’t hold that protection any longer. Bullets were getting through.”

“So you risked shredding her mind?” My voice is shrill as I ask this question. We don’t know Halle or whether that was something she wanted us to test. She might not have wanted to regain her powers that way, and Hester took that out of her control.

I’m grateful for everything she’s done for me since I came to the sanctuary, but this ruthless side of her scares me sometimes. There are no lines she will not cross, consequences be damned.

“It wouldn’t have shredded her mind,” Hester argues. “And I did what I had to do to keep us all alive. It worked, didn’t it? They’re dead, and we’re not.”

I glance at Abel again, feeling anguished at her admission. This isn’t how things should be done, and it isn’t what I signed up for. I want to help those like me, those who are part witch and part wolf. Hybrids are hunted and killed all the time, but there’s an unmatched hatred for our kind.

“How exactly did you release the binding?” Apryle asks the question that is sitting on the tip of my tongue too.

“Does it matter?” Hester asks. “She’s free to be who she is now.”

“How?”

Hester blows out a breath as if these questions are beneath her. “We were all joined with our powers, so I harnessed both of yours to remove it.”

Apryle grits her teeth. “That should have been discussed between the three of us. You had no idea what it might do to us.”

Power swells through the car, coming from Hester. “Do you think I am some conjurer of cheap tricks? I have learned and I have adapted my powers into what they are today. I knew exactly what I was doing, and what effect it would have. She couldn’t stay bound. When I touched her mind, I felt her strength, and we would have died out there. So I decided in a split second to save our lives by using the gift she had hidden away. I’m not going to apologize for that, and if you reallydoubt my intentions that much, why the hell are you coming back to the sanctuary with me?”

The air crackles as her power recedes, leaving anger and guilt behind. Hester is right—we shouldn’t doubt her, but the way she handled things is going to make it hard for Halle to trust us.

I glance at the side-view mirror, making sure the truck is still following us. It is, and I wonder if I should have gone with them. Halle has to be scared and freaking out. Despite what Hester says, she can’t possibly know the effects of unleashing her magic like that.

I reach out in my mind, searching for Halle until I scrape over her consciousness.“Halle?”I speak her name in my thoughts, half expecting her to ignore me.

To my surprise, she answers immediately.“Hey.”

Relief floods me—we haven’t damaged the relationship between us before it even got started. “Are you alright?”

Her awareness flickers out for a moment before returning.“I don’t know.”

“What’s wrong?”

“When my magic was freed, it also released all my memories. When they bound me, I guess they were worried I might tell people what I was and what I’d been through. All I’m seeing are flashes of my past. It’s so confusing. Things that were lost to me are coming back faster than I can compute.”

Sympathy wars with the anger I feel toward Hester for how she’s handled this. It should have been done back at the sanctuary, under controlled conditions where we could talk Halle through what she is experiencing.

“I know it’s overwhelming, but just let your brain do what itneeds to. You can decipher what it all means afterward. We are still a couple of hours from the sanctuary. If you need to stop, let me know. I don’t know what we can do to help, but there might be something.”

“No, we need to keep moving. We need to get somewhere safe. You say the sanctuary can offer that?”

She winks out for a moment, our connection briefly lost.

“Yes, Halle. The sanctuary has wards in place that protect us from the outside world, including hunters. Hester is a very powerful tau wolf. Her witch part is much stronger than any of ours.”Except maybe Halle’s. The power she unleashed is like nothing I have ever seen before, even with all the practice and progress we have made as a coven. I don’t want to blindside her any further, so I give her as much truth as I can.“There is another of us, called Roux. We had to leave her behind because the sanctuary cannot be empty for the wards to work. You’ll meet her when we get there. She can conjure, and like me, she is moon touched.”

I feel her confusion.“What is moon touched?”

“The white in our hair. I don’t know if it actually comes from the moon, but that is what people say.”

“I need to sleep. My brain feels so overwhelmed.”

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