Free Bound by Fate (Moon Bound Series Book 1) by Mandy Lou Dowson Page A

should be in your blood after all this time, child!” her thin, wrinkled lips worked fast, her words tumbling as if she’d already had this answer lined up.
    “ It used to be,” Beth grumbled.  The flows of her wolf dance were coming slowly to her and she had to wonder if they would come at all.
    “ You train for this night for your entire young life, child.  You should have it mastered long ago.”  Patina sighed, a tortured sound of patience stretched thin.  Beth didn’t blame her – they’d been out here since dusk, and two hours later they hadn’t even started on the drums yet.
    “ Begin again.”
    Beth took a loose stance, hands linked above her head, hip cocked to the right, her foot slightly facing outward.  Patina bid her begin once more, and she slowly undulated her stomach, rippling her belly hypnotically, while her hands un-linked and floated down ward in graceful arcs.  It was supposed to firstly draw attention to the womb, that she could bear strong sons and fertile daughters, then to her arms, that she could gather her family together and protect them.
    Beth sighed as she once again fell over her own feet on the hip roll/foot shuffle move that was supposed to draw the attention to her loins, that she could satisfy a mate sufficiently.  “Tsk,” Patina scolded.  “Graceless thing!  Have you no passion hiding under those clothes?” she winked.  “Let us find out.  Strip!”
    “ But, Patina…”  She found she could not argue with this woman.  It was pointless.  She would listen patiently and make the same demand of her again.  Beth stripped, folding her clothes and leaving them on the branch of a tree, so that at least one set of clothes she wore today would stay clean.
    “ Again!”
    So Beth began again, finding it a little easier to move once the distracting material had been removed from her body.  She would dance this naked in any case.  No point in drawing attention to loins that were hidden by clothes, after all.
    Even though she found it easier to move, the grace – or passion, as Patina called it – did not stir in her body and she found herself fast losing rhythm and tripping over herself again.  “Tsk, tsk,” Patina uttered again.  “I fear you are hopeless, graceless and passionless, child.”
    Somewhere in the near distance she could hear a bark of male laughter.  Several of them.  But one in particular.  He was out there, laughing, having fun, while she was here trying to perfect the very dance that would send her into the arms of another man.  If she was passionless, he was heartless.
    “Yes, child, yes…keep going!”
    Beth hadn’t even noticed the drums begin to beat, nor the rhythm taking over her body.  She’d just moved as she was supposed to, lost in thoughts of the heartless wolf who’d thrust her away so cruelly that morning.
    “Perhaps there is passion in you yet,” Patina laughed, winking at her when the dance was completed.  “But it is not for your impending ceremony.”  The old she-wolf packed up her little drums and parked her switch by a tree, while Beth pulled her clothes from the branch and got dressed.
    “ Sometimes, girl,” the old woman threw over her shoulder as she strolled from the clearing.  “Life is not fair.  We must give up that which we would have, for that which we must do for the greater good.  Know that the Great Mother is ever loving and wise, and she will not see you without that which you need.”
    The Great Mother, the Eternal She-wolf, the Spirit of the Wood.  Nobody spoke of her much these days.  In the shadow of law and tradition, she lay forgotten by most, Beth included.  But the older generation still remembered her, and evoked her name on occasion.  “The Great Mother’s eye is blind to me, Patina,” Beth whispered to the retreating form.
    “I would not be so sure, little one.  She sees all, you know.  Even foolish young juveniles who should know better.”
    Now, why do I get the feeling