Defensive Magic

WINTER BREAK - December 10th

So, Aries and I meet up for drinks now. Not every night, but almost every night. I know what Aisling would think, but these aren't dates. It's two friends at the tavern. We trade off who's buying.

The Midnight Court is a lonely place over the break. It makes sense Aries would try to get out for a few hours every day. And meeting me for a beer means he's got a reason to shave.

Last night we'd gotten on the topic of that fairytale—Aries's favorite— "Orendell and Luna." I'd read it a few times, most notably because it was particularly hard to tell what was literal and what was just fairytale nonsense. Orendell was real, obviously. So then, what about Luna? Luna is the moon, but in the story she takes mortal form for the one night she disappears from the night sky, the night of the new moon.

In the story, she heard Orendell's howls of pain as he turned himself from man to beast and that was how they'd met. They became lovers because that's how all these stories go. Luna could only meet him on the new moon but watched him from her place in the night sky the rest of the month. Turns out she was the jealous type. She watched him take other lovers, first hating the women he bedded, then as weeks passed forgiving them, and hating him instead. She'd been one of those girls first, hadn't she?

By the next new moon, when she returned to meet Orendell, long story short: she cursed him. A goddess's curse on a mortal mage. He'd never take another lover for the rest of his days.

He shifted into a wolf and groveled at her feet. Luna was angry but not heartless. She looked at the pathetic wolf and remembered why she'd loved him. So, she amended her curse— he would fall in love once and only once and in return for this gift, he would become a wolf and howl her praise under every full moon.

The rest of the fairytale is pretty standard romance. Orendell falls in love again. She dies suddenly and he marches into the depths of hell to find her. It's cheesy, but I already knew Aries was a sap for this kind of thing.

But I had real questions, the kinds the books on werewolves in the library failed to answer. The fact that Aries was the only person I knew who could help answer them was unfortunate. "Is it true that werewolves only fall in love once?"

We'd been talking about that fairytale, but the implications of it seemed to thicken the air around us.

"You mean, do they only have one mate?" Aries clarified. And there was that word again. The one I'd been avoiding - mate. It implied something as serious as spouse but was bandied around with the casualness of a fling. Or at least that was my impression reading the werewolf "memoir."