Luna Junction 2 Forbidden Mate (W)

FORBIDDEN MATE

~A Luna Junction Story
~

By Sage Domini

Copyright 2013

All Rights
Reserved

Smashwords
Edition

***

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Forbidden Mate
is the second novella about the strange and
passionate world of Luna Junction. If you want to check out
additional stories about Luna Junction’s sensual residents,
Feasts with Wolves
is
also available.

~At the intersection of legend and reality,
of human and beast, lies Luna Junction, Arizona.~

Chapter One

T
here are certain memories which imprint upon the soul and
wait, always, for the occasion to resurface. You could be hoisting
yourself up to reach the top shelf in a grocery store and flash
back to the feel of his strong hands pulling you the last few feet
up a steep hill during one of a thousand afternoon hiking
adventures. Or peer into a crowded parking lot in search of your
tired car and gasp as the lowering sun momentarily blinds you.
Because when you blink again it’s his devastating smile you
see.

There are other recollections you can’t
make sense of, no matter how many sleepless hours you spend
puzzling over them. Like your father’s grim insistence on endless
archery drills, even though he seems to take no joy in the sport.
Or the parade of cloaked figures who pass through the house you
share with your parents and engage in darkly intent conversations
which you could never quite overhear. And always, that peculiar
sense of otherness which nestles in your subconscious as part of
you understands, somehow, you are not like those around
you.

But I wasn’t thinking specifically of
these things as I urged the Toyota to keep struggling along the
highway which threads though the inky expanse of Death Valley. I
cursed as the driver’s side front tire bumped over an obstacle, a
small animal perhaps, causing the undercarriage of the vehicle to
shudder ominously. I estimated nearly two hundred miles remained in
this desperate journey. I wasn’t at all confident my transportation
would cooperate in sputtering to its conclusion.

Gingerly I reached up and touched my
swollen jaw, feeling a surge of rage. I should have known better
after the first time it happened. I had warned Dylan that the last
time would be the last time.

“
Shit, I’m so sorry Acie,”
he had sobbed and clung to my waist, begging me not to leave as he
issued promise after sniffling promise. He forgot them all when
that bottle of liquid paranoia beckoned and he attacked me for
stealing money he’d never even had. Luckily he was so drunk his
reflexes had gone to crap. He only managed one cheap shot in before
I picked up an Ikea end table and flung it at his head. The
o-shaped surprise of his mouth made me smile as I remembered the
satisfaction of toppling him to the ground. I didn’t wait around to
see how long it would take him to recover.

Instinct was propelling me to Luna
Junction. That and the fact I neither money nor friends to offer
additional choices. Luna Junction was a rural northern Arizona town
which in my mind represented an idyllic early childhood. The last
place, the only, place I had ever been carefree and
happy.

But those blissful times had come
before the dreams. Before my pulse began to race with an
inexplicable rush of fear when I found myself in the presence of
familiar faces. People who, to my knowledge, were as benign and
unthreatening as Mickey Mouse. Before I began to pick up the bow
without being forced and drill the backyard targets again and
again, feeling for the first time a grim joy in hitting the
curiously heart-shaped centers. Before the sweetness of a first
kiss which had never been matched since. And the ensuing rejection
which made its memory so painful.

As I emerged from the most forbidding
segment of California desert, I followed the exit signs to a truck
stop. The adrenaline had worn off, replaced by exhaustion. A
handful of eighteen wheelers were parked nearby in the bleak pool
of fluorescence, their occupants catching a few hours of rest
before resuming their eastward trek. The warmth of the June night
seeped quickly into the car but I didn’t mind. I curled into a ball
across the backseat and sighed. Feeling Dylan’s fist against my
face had summoned a nearly forgotten urge to hold a bow in my hands
again. It seemed the wisest answer to danger. Absurd given that far
better weapons existed for self-defense. Sleep found me, but
uneasily.

“
I won’t let her
stay.”

“
This is what we are,
Rachel. We have an obligation.”

“
Bullshit,” she hissed. “We
can walk away.”

A deep sigh. “She’s
reaching maturity. You know what comes with that. The Casteel boy
knows too. She’ll understand his reasons soon enough.”

Her voice was impossibly
sad. “We should never have allowed it.”

“
That was my fault. But how
do you explain to a child that her best friend may someday be her
nemesis?”

“
There’s no reason for her
to know now. It will only get worse for her. I’m getting her out of
here, Max.”

My father’s sob was
painful. “I know.”

My eyes flew open and I bolted upright.
The earliest threads of sunlight were tickling the eastern sky.
Wearily I brushed my sweaty hair out of my face. That conversation
had replayed a thousand times in my mind, a heated exchange between
my distressed parents when they assumed I was sleeping.

Six years had passed since I stood in a
dark hallway, not daring to breathe as I tried to make sense of
everything. My world had upended and I didn’t understand why. I was
thirteen and struggling with the usual angst as my body changed and
my emotions careened out of balance. But then I’d also been having
strange thoughts, irrational fears. The long simmering discord in
my house had finally reached a fevered pitch. My mother was taking
me away.

Max Jaeger was never affectionate but
the morning I left Luna Junction forever he gripped me in an
intense embrace and placed a lingering kiss on my forehead.
“Forget, honey,” was all he said as I stiffly followed my mother to
the packed car. My eyes were dry. I was as wooden as the looming
ponderosa trees. I had already cried more hours than I cared to
remember. For I had already learned the hard lesson that no pain
surpassed a broken heart.

Gideon Casteel.

I fumbled with the car keys, shaking my
head. Even the thought of his name still pierced me like a knife so
I tried not to remember it often. Thousands of moments were wrapped
up in that name. Endless walks in the pine wilderness outside town.
Long, lazy summer afternoons spent in wild adventure of something
imaginary, whether it was lost treasure or a fantastic fairy tale
mission. Shared ice cream cones from the Luna Junction Café,
purchased with carefully pocketed loose change. Winter wonderland
afternoons of tunnels and igloos as he laughingly shrugged off the
cold and swept the snow out of his dark blonde hair with a bare
hand. Gideon Casteel had been my best friend since before I really
understood what a friend was. When I started to feel something more
it seemed like a completely natural development. The discovery that
he felt the same was spectacularly, almost mythically, right. Six
years later I still didn’t understand his abrupt rejection. It had
been cruel, and I had never known Gideon to be cruel.

I turned the ignition and the car
sighed into reluctant life. None of that old pain mattered. I
wasn’t returning to Luna Junction for Gideon Casteel. My
relationship with my father had long been strained. He made his way
dutifully out to California several times a year for awkward visits
which usually ended on a sour note. When he’d called to ask what
date he should plan on coming out for my high school graduation it
was with near glee that I informed him I would not be graduating. I
could hear the sad pause on the other end. As he unhappily uttered
my name I hung up the phone. A year had passed since then. A year
of scummy waitress jobs and various homes in tiny apartments in the
worst San Bernardino neighborhoods. My mother was grappling with
her own shadowy grief and our relationship had more or less fallen
off the radar in recent months. I knew I should call her and let
her know I was returning to Luna Junction but I couldn’t bear the
bewildered hurt in her voice. And her refusal to answer questions
infuriated me. I wasn’t a thirteen year old child any longer. I
needed to know why we had left Luna Junction in such a rush of
despair. What was the cause of the palpable tension hovering over
that small town? And the restlessness which began to plague me six
years earlier in Luna Junction had followed me since, to a lesser
degree, and no amount of Zoloft banished those sudden surges. It
would always be when I least expected. I would be rushing down a
thickly crowded street or serving drinks to a quartet of smartly
dressed businessmen when my heart would quicken and an electric
pulse of alarm would shoot up my spine. Sometimes I would catch
strangers watching me warily, almost fearfully. I didn’t
understand.

“
It’s your imagination,
Acie,” my mother always insisted, but her tone was careful,
guarded, and she would never look me in the eye when I
asked.

“
It’s not!” I had screamed
more than once, though some doubtful part of my mind wondered.
Maybe there was nothing to any of it. Maybe Luna Junction was just
a town like ten thousand others and my broken family was just
another casualty of modern sorrow.

But I remembered what
Gideon had said to me in the moments before an inexplicable act of
betrayal.
“We’re not friends. We never
were. Come after us, Artemis, and we’ll rip you to
pieces.”

It wasn’t just his odd
words which terrified me. It was the look in his eyes, as if he
wasn’t even seeing me. My best friend had grown taller and broader
during or last summer together. As he towered there, stoic and icy,
I felt invisible.
We’re not friends. We
never were.
As if I didn’t know his face
better than my own, as if the events of our lives weren’t
hopelessly intertwined every day. As if he had never kissed me
under a dark and moonless sky.

I grimly set my jaw and watched the
mile markers pass. My father wasn’t expecting me and I was unsure
how he would react. However, I wouldn’t tolerate being turned away.
The mess inside of my head, the aimless of tumult of my life, was
all linked to whatever mysteries lived in that town. I would get
the answers I needed. He owed me that.

People tend think of Arizona in terms
of sand and saguaros. But north of the Sonoran desert and east of
the Mojave lies the evergreen beauty of Coconino County. Flagstaff
was the only city of any appreciable size. Mostly the region was
dotted with small towns. Luna Junction was just one of them,
smaller than most. The town was almost exclusively populated by
five extended families whose children cliqued together when they
attended school in nearby Williams. I was the only one on the
yellow school bus who was not a Casteel, a Bellini, a Landon, an
Ivanov or a Hoffman. It had never occurred to me to question the
oddity of this arrangement because for all those years Gideon stuck
stubbornly by my side, ensuring my acceptance amongst the town
children.

My hands gripped the steering wheel, my
palms sweating. I didn’t need to relive memories of Gideon. Yet
with every mile I drew closer to the old joys and pains. And it was
all bound up with him. Last fall I had Googled his name on impulse
and found he was on the football roster at UCLA. I stared at the
few lines of basic information accompanied by a tiny headshot. The
tousle-haired boy I had known had grown into an insufferably
handsome man. His head was tilted backwards and defiant eyes gazed
into the camera as if he were daring a challenge. I didn’t know him
anymore. But then had stopped knowing him the night he threw me
away. I stared at the page for a moment and then hurriedly closed
the window. I had not searched for him since. I could only hope his
new life was keeping him out of Luna Junction.