Viking's Moon (Children of the Moon Book 6)

by Lucy Monroe

  Viking's Moon

  Children of the Moon, Book 6

  By

  Lucy Monroe

  © 2018

  http://lucymonroe.com

  COPYRIGHT © 2018 LUCY MONROE

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

  No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without express, written permission from the author, Lucy Monroe, who can be contacted off her website http://lucymonroe.com.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  For my daughters, two of the most amazing women I know, personally powerful and strong, and wonderful inspiration for Neilina, champion of her people and protector of the Chrechte.

  Table of Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Epilogue

  CHAPTER ONE

  M

  ist swirled around Haakon's lower legs, the pre-dawn light casting the forest of this other place in shadow.

  The soft moss upon which he walked was hidden from his sight, but he knew from past visits it was a brilliant green, the trees so tall their tops could not be seen even in the full light of day and the flowers so vibrant with color, they had none of their like in Groenland.

  Would she come? His sacred mate, the one woman destined to be his above all others, the woman who had spent nearly a decade refusing to give him her name or a clue to where she lived. When they were together, they both spoke the ancient tongue of their people, so he could not tell if she was of the Norse or another land entirely.

  He did not even know what animal she shifted into as she had never allowed him the privilege to see.

  Her dress was as if she were as ancient as the language, her body covered in leathers and furs, her feet clad in boots that reached her knees, burned with old runes and symbols only their kind would recognize. His mystery woman wore her dark hair long, but with the braids of a warrior, and she carried a walking stick topped with the sharpened antlers of a powerful buck.

  His reminisces of her were interrupted as the woman herself, flesh and blood though he did not understand how it was possible in this other place, walked out of the mist, her beautiful face set in stern lines.

  "You call to me in my dreams when I have other things to concern myself with."

  "Are we dreaming then?" he asked, knowing the answer was both yes and no.

  They both slept, but this was no dream. This was Chrechte magic, a spirit realm which was as real as his sword, but which he understood less than his ability to shift into a giant cat of prey.

  "If you would tell me where you are, I would come to you in person and then we would not have to meet here," he told her, not for the first time.

  Fear flashed in her green gaze, gone so fast if he had not been watching her so closely, he would not have seen it. It was always thus when he mentioned anything about them meeting in person.

  She frowned, her green eyes now dark with annoyance. "I will never reveal my home to you."

  "You are mine." Not that he believed that mattered to her. Haakon did not doubt that his mate spoke the absolute truth when she said she would never tell him how to find her.

  Her grip on the staff tightened. "I belong to no man."

  "You belong to me, just as I belong to you." It was not about ownership as if either were a slave, but the trust and companionship that only a true mate could bring. "You are my sacred mate."

  "I will have no Norseman for a mate." The revulsion twisting her lovely features had long since stopped surprising him, but it still nicked his soul, drawing fresh blood.

  "And yet that is exactly what you do have." He was tired of the old refrain, had long since lost hope he would change her mind, but felt compelled to point out what she had to know as surely as he did.

  For her, there was no other, just as he could never give in to his uncle's urgings and take a mate from among their people.

  "Whatever fate has decreed, I will not be your mate in truth. No matter how many times your soul calls to mine in this place."

  "Have you ever considered it is your soul calling to mine?" he provoked her, knowing she would not like that explanation.

  "No."

  "And yet, as often as I am the first to arrive, I come, drawn by an unseen force. And you are already here. Our souls have been linked these past nine years." Interest in other women as bed partners had disappeared after his first time here, not long after his eighteenth summer and his first shift into the asmundr.

  Haakon had forced himself to try, he'd been a young man after all, his body rife with unfulfilled sexual desire, and he'd been angry. Angry and hurt, though he would not admit the last aloud to another living being.

  After the third time his green eyed warrior-woman had rejected him, Haakon had been seething with rage and the unfamiliar emotional pain, when a lovely young widow had invited him to share her furs. He'd accepted, hoping to erase the craving that tormented his sleep as well as his waking hours for a woman who wanted nothing to do with him.

  But he'd been unable to perform sexually with the widow, despite her well-versed efforts and attractiveness.

  Just as the Chrechte wisdom claimed would be the case. But it was supposed to happen that way after mates had claimed each other for the first time, not when they'd only met in the Chrechte spirit world.

  "It is not I that draws us both to this place, but you," his mate claimed, her expression saying she believed her own words, regardless of evidence to the contrary. "You, Viking, with your stubborn will and refusal to accept that I will not be your mate. You do this."

  "What are the other things that worry you so much you find your time here especially onerous?" he asked, rather than engage in an old argument with his mate.

  She never gave ground, never admitted her need was as great as his. Never acknowledged his claim on her, or the claim she had made on him simply by existing.

  "Other Chrechte are in danger, not that a Viking like you would care about that."

  "I am not a Viking." But he'd said as much many time before.

  His countrymen had stopped pillaging the lands they visited decades before he'd even been born. Not that she seemed to accept that fact. To her, all Norsemen were Vikings and all Vikings were evil. Though he had no idea why. In nearly a decade, she had not told him the source of her antipathy for his people.

  Just as all the times before when he'd reminded her he was not the thing she seemed to loathe most, she ignored him now.

  Glaring into the distance, as if she could see what he did not, she shook her head. "They seek to save our race, but if they are not cautious, they will destroy their own packs."

  "Packs? So, they are uffe?"

  Her head snapped back around so her gaze, as brilliant and hard as emeralds fell on him. "I know you would not stir yourself to save a wolf."

  "You are wrong. I want no Chrechte to perish."

  "You would have me believe you are so different from your brethren?"

  If he could trust the evidence of his ears, she wanted to believe that, but he was past making up fairytales about them. This woman would never trust him to be the honorable asmundr that he was.

  Still he told her the truth because not to would be to deny i
t. "My pride values all life, but the Chrechte most of all." He sighed at the expression of doubt on her beautiful features. "We find it difficult enough to bring children into the world."

  Their numbers had been dwindling for generations, or so his father had always claimed. All Haakon knew was that the old stories told of a thriving and well-peopled race, but his pride was small, numbering less than a dozen in Groenland and only about five times that number in all lands where Danes might dwell.

  The old legends spoke of paindeal who had left for the Land of the Sun, seeking a more hospitable place to dwell, searching for a connection to ancient history even the oldest stories could shed little light on.

  His father said the wolves had much higher numbers as had the Éan at one time, but they could not know how the flying shifters fared as he had not come across any in his travels as the Viking warrior she had accused Haakon of being. The wolves Bjorn had seen, many of whom the older asmundr had killed before realizing the error of his ways.

  Her expression said she did not believe Haakon's claim of valuing all life, but then when had she ever believed a single word he had spoken? Though he was fairly sure they could not lie here in this place of other, that their souls spoke to one another as surely as their mouths.

  Which was how he knew she meant it when she said she would never be his mate.

  For nine years, he had tried to change her mind, tried to get her to see him as a man, a warrior who protected all Chrechte, though he'd never told her he was asmundr. How could he share his most deeply held secret if she would not even tell him her name? Besides, she had not shifted her view of him. Not even a little.

  "Will you help them?" he asked her, having gleaned from their time together over the years that she kept from all society, human and Chrechte alike.

  "I have no choice. My dreams tell me I must live up to my nature."

  "Your nature as a Chrechte?" he asked, not sure what one woman could do, no matter if she dressed like a man and was trained in combat as this one so clearly had been.

  She turned away rather than answer and he knew it was because she could not lie, but there was something she did not want him to know.

  "I have been dreaming of other Chrechte as well," he said to hide pain-inspired anger at yet more proof his mate would never trust in, or rely on him.

  "You dream of your murdering brethren?"

  His people, the Norse, were known for their brutality in battle, for their lack of reverence for those most would never think to attack, even after their leaders had accepted the new religion brought by Rome in the centuries past. But that did not make them murderers.

  And he said so. Again.

  Eyes the color of emeralds scorched him with heated antipathy. "Tell that to the pack of my birth, destroyed by your asmundr."

  Her claim did not shock him. He'd long since surmised that his mate had a strong and personal reason for hating Norsemen. But the fact she made it, exposing her own Chrechte nature in the same sentence, left him speechless with disbelief.

  Finally, after so many years, she revealed something important about herself. Something he found difficult to believe. Not that she was a wolf shifter, of the uffe, but that her pack had been destroyed by the asmundr. His father. For he knew she could not be talking about him.

  She'd used the word for their protector in his language. And that gave him pause. She knew Norse. Was she a Dane then, even if she was a wolf? He had never quite convinced himself of that possibility and thought it more likely she had been exposed to his brethren in an outreach settlement. Groenland was one of many places the Danes had established themselves since the beginning of the Viking's travels nearly three centuries before.

  "I am asmundr to my people and I have destroyed no uffe." Haakon had never even met a wolf shifter before her, much less battled with an entire pack.

  She blanched, the cold light of pre-dawn making her skin take on a ghostly cast. "You are asmundr?" she demanded, the revulsion so strong in her voice, it washed over him like acid, burning his skin with her revilement.

  "I am." And despite her reaction to that truth, it was a great honor he would never be ashamed of.

  He had been chosen by fate to protect all Chrechte with strength greater than even that of kotrondmenskr like his cousin who shifted into the large white tigers known more commonly to the Ruske peoples.

  "And the other asmundr? The one who did murder my family and friends. What became of him?"

  "The only other guardian of the Paindeal that I know of was my father." There could be others in the land of the Danes, but his father had claimed those who remained on the continent had no asmundr. "He died five years ago, after only a few years training me to be asmundr with him."

  His uncle had succeeded his father as jarl and his cousin would come after. Though Bjorn had been war chief more than a century, Chrechte wisdom dictated that the asmundr should not be pride alpha. Pride alpha was always jarl of his area. It was the way of things.

  His father had broken with Chrechte teachings on that and many other things, but come back to appreciate the ancient ways in the twilight of his many hundred year life.

  Finding his sacred mate in his seventh century of life, had humbled him. Or so he had always said. Haakon had never noticed Bjorn, the Firebrand, to be anything near humble. However, there was no denying that he had espoused the ancient ways and denounced his own actions over the centuries that did not abide by them.

  "No, it cannot be possible. How could fate be so cruel?" she demanded, sounding more vulnerable than any time in the past nine years, her voice husky with broken pain that was too real for him to mistake it for anything else, her eyes haunted with memories only she could see. "Your father murdered my pack? My family and friends and all I held dear?"

  "Impossible." Haakon knew Bjorn had done things like that in centuries past, but not since she had been born. Haakon would not believe it. "My father had not gone on a raid since decades before my birth. He stopped when he found my mother."

  Haakon's mother had demanded his father stay in Groenland and make a life with her, one not marred by violence and bloodshed. Because she was his true mate, Bjorn listened. And yet, despite being sacred mates, they had not been able to conceive a child until Haakon, who was only twenty-seven.

  "You believe I am young, like you?" Haakon's mate demanded with a harsh laugh. "I am older than the settlement in which you live."

  She knew he lived in Groenland because he'd told her, when he'd still been free with information about himself, before he realized she was never going to reveal anything about herself. Not even her name.

  But she had just told him something even more important. If she had been alive for centuries, she was a guardian as well, capable of shifting in a half-wolf, half-human form. If his father's stories were true, she would also increase in size until she was taller than any Norseman.

  "Your father was a betrayer of his own kind," she said with pure loathing. "No doubt you are just like him, willing to murder innocent Chrechte to further your own ambitions. You are not my mate."

  "You do not mean those words. You know I am not that Chrechte."

  Hatred imbued every line of her being. "You are everything I despise."

  Pain sliced through him. And that pain sparked a rage unlike anything he'd allowed himself to feel since the hotheaded days of his youth. It welled up in Haakon, nearly choking him.

  How dare she make those accusations against him? Part of him understood that her hatred for his father was well-deserved. She carried a burden of grief too heavy for most, but Haakon had not placed it there.

  The other half of his soul believed that soul was black. After nine years meeting, talking, arguing…in this place, she must know by now how important honor was to Haakon. How much he revered their people and the ancient ways, even if he had never before revealed his asmundr nature to her.

  Haakon drew himself to his full six and a half feet, his big muscles bulging with the effort of holding h
is anger in check, his jaw so taut it hurt. "I have never murdered. I have killed in battle and to protect my people, but I have never taken the life of an innocent. I have never taken any life for my own gain," he gritted out from between clenched teeth, space between each word.

  His words came out tense and strained with his effort to hold back the shout he wanted to give. He wanted to swing his fist at one of the giant trees of this place, but even that outlet, he would not give himself. An asmundr had to control his temper at all times. The Berzerkers of legend had not been asmundr, but most had been kotrondmenskr. Norsemen who shared their nature with the largest cats of prey.

  "I don't believe you." She said it so starkly, so certainly.

  Suddenly Haakon was tired. Tired of the strife, the hatred, of fighting against an absolute certainty that he was not worthy of her time, not even her name. They had been mates for nine years and for every one of those years, she had refused every claim he had on her.

  Now she denigrated the very core of his being. His honesty and integrity as asmundr. He did not care if she realized the impact of her words. How they flayed him like a whip tipped in iron. She meant them and that was what mattered.

  Fury born of the knowledge he would never know his mate as such, burned through Haakon, leaving nothing but the ashes of cold certainty behind.

  This woman would never claim him, never allow herself to be claimed by him. She would never give him her name, much less the most important and longed for benefits of finding the other half of a kotrondmenskr's soul. He would never know the joy of fatherhood. He would never know the pleasure of sex again, had not known the release of even his own right hand in nine long years.

  And she did not care. Nay, she probably reveled in the fact she denied him these things. She refused to believe his words, even in this place where nothing but truth could be spoken between Chrechte, mates even more so.

  His soul would always be hungry, but he would be damned to the hell the priests claimed was such an inferno of pain and suffering if it remained that way in the presence of one who he now saw as enemy, as certainly as she had always seen him.