Marianna
I wake with a start in a sun drenched room I find completely unfamiliar. My brain is a dead weight in my skull–heavy and hazy–like someone’s been sitting on it, pressing me deep into the paper thin, but incredibly stiff, mattress.
New scents erupt all around me, but they’re not as sharp as they normally are. In fact, my senses feel… all tangled. I can’t feel my wolf at all. Instead, I just feel… odd.
I try to lift my head off a thin pillow that smells sharply of laundry detergent but can’t. A dull ache grips my neck, forcing me to give up.
I grip sheets that don’t feel familiar. Starched and stiff, they crinkle between my fingers, and I have a sudden, blurry memory of Skye’s birth in that hospital in Crescent Falls.
After a wave of nausea passes, I grunt with the effort of sitting up, using my elbow to lift my upper body into position. Off-white walls and sparkling clean tile floors in a soft gray greet me along with the glare of the sun, where tremors of sound bleed into the room through the window screen. Music and revelry. It must be Saturday, the start of the mating festival just beyond the castle grounds.
I wince. It’s been… four days then, hasn’t it? Since… Dean…
“Oh, my Goddess.” I tilt to the side, my head pounding and body lulling back into submission against what I know are several potent healing drafts. It all comes back to me in a matter of seconds. The fight. Using myself as a shield against Dean’s drunken fury. The blurry memory of watching Blake stop Skye from killing herself while using her powers to their max.
And then pieces of that night, when my injuries were treated, but something felt terribly wrong with my mind and body. I was sick with despair over Dean’s death, which was unsettling. My body revolted against it, twisting me into painful, violent knots, and then… nothing. Pieces of memories, of murmured conversations taking place around me while I languished.
I remember talking to Blake, thankful that Skye and my mom wouldn’t be totally alone when I had to leave them.
Because I was going to die.
I open my eyes again, scanning the room, wondering if this is… it. Death. I thought the Goddess would have better taste when it came to designing Her Kingdom, however. This is all very sterile.
A young blonde woman in a pencil skirt sits in a plastic chair I hadn’t noticed when I first opened my eyes. She’s toying with a vase of bright red roses on the table beside her, adjusting the blooms, clicking her tongue as she removes their thorns.
“These are not nearly as nice as mine back home,” she says, smiling at me, her bright blue eyes flicking in my direction for a brief second before she goes back to her task. “You’ve seen the rose gardens at the castle in Crescent Falls, haven’t you?”
“Y-yeah.” My mouth is painfully dry. I watch her, lying on my side and unable to lift myself up again. I feel weak. Stupidly weak, like my body is balanced on a precipice, one side begging me to surrender and just… go, while the other is dead set on keeping me alive.
“I didn’t really get to know Blake,” she says softly. “Did he ever tell you about his mom?”
“Luna Sarah?”
She nods, her bright blonde hair falling over her shoulders in soft, delicate waves. “Sarah is a good friend of mine. We talk often. She keeps me updated on everything going on with her family, but she had a hard go of it. She was very powerful as a child, like Skye. She was hidden away by her only surviving family, a father now long dead, I’m afraid, but now I consider him a friend, too.”
She brushes the thorns into a little pile.
“Who are you?”
“I’m just here to watch over you for a bit.”
The room grows hazy. “Am I dead?”
She laughs–a light, musical sound that fills the room. “No. You’re not dead. You want to die, I think. This has been awfully painful for you. But your daughter is very insistent on the fact you stay alive. She told me you promised to buy her a bike this summer. She said she wants something with a basket, to carry… rocks?”
“To carry rocks back from the lake,” I say, my voice dreamlike as I smile around the memory of that conversation.
“Yeah, that’s what she said.” She smiles. “She’s adamant you get better, and I told her I’d keep an eye on you. I should be keeping an eye on whoever’s in charge of the greenhouse here, though. These roses are horrendous.” She winks, and I feel a sense of calm drifting through my body and settling in my bones.
I blink, and the light has shifted in the room, a warm midafternoon glow now replacing the bright streaks of golden morning sunlight. The chair by the table is empty, but the roses are still there, thornless.
I sit up, and it’s much easier than this morning. I glance around, taking stock of my surroundings with a clearer head, a less hazy mind bogged down by pain. I’m still in the clinic. The scents, while they remain muted, are familiar. Cold and clean, with a touch of herbs.
The door opens, and a trio of witch nurses shuffle in but stop abruptly when they see me sitting up. One of them turns and rushes away while the others pretend not to be totally surprised I’m upright, let alone, I believe, lucid… or alive. After a whirlwind exam and several prodding questions, the two nurses leave, and the third arrives back in the room with–
“Mommy!” Skye launches onto the bed, hugging me tightly. I grunt as her body collides with mine, but my emotions spill over in the form of hot, unyielding tears.
Mom follows her into the room but slower, trying to bite back her smile, and the nurse tells us that she’ll bring some food over if I feel like I’m up to eating something.
But it’s the two others who enter after a few minutes of telling Skye that I’m okay that make my blood still in my veins.
Maeve, dressed in a casual, flowy linen set, inspects me from head to toe before entering the room, and… her mom, Alpha Kenna, follows behind her, looking equally as unsure.
“I’m going to take Skye to the garden for a while,” Mom says against my temple before pressing a kiss to my skin. “We’ll be back.”
“You should stay–”
But Mom’s face as she pulls away tells me everything I need to know. I’m not out of the woods yet, and judging by Alpha Kenna and Maeve’s mirrored expression, it’s a miracle I’m even alive.
They seem confused about it, to be perfectly honest.
I watch Mom practically drag Skye out of the room against her protests, but when Skye asks, “Can Blake come?” I feel my chest convulse. The door shuts, closing me in with Maeve and the Alpha of Veiled Valley, and silence echoes through the snug room for several painful heartbeats.
Kenna turns to the roses, her brows pinching as she notices the thornless stems, but Maeve steps toward the bed.
“How are you feeling?”
“Fine,” I say, and it’s somewhat close to the truth. “My head hurts and I feel a little… overall unwell.”
“That’s expected.” Alpha Kenna turns from the roses to face me. “I wanted to check in on you before you’re moved upstairs. The mark was cut successfully, but the damage was… extensive.”
“Do you remember taking a potion of any kind or being put under some type of spell?” Maeve cuts in.
“No. I don’t.”
“It’s likely you were dosed slowly over the course of a year, based on what the healers noted during the procedure. There may not have been a spell, but I find that hard to believe.” Kenna moves to the window, her hands tucked behind her back. “How old were you when he marked you?”
“T-twenty. I’d just turned twenty.” I barely knew Dean at the time. Dating him had been… fun. I felt somewhat free again for the first time since Skye’s birth and the unraveling of my relationship with Blake, but my relationship with Dean hadn’t been remotely serious, at least I didn’t think it was. He marked me in a moment of passion that caught me off guard. I was furious, but things… escalated at that point.
I was a single mom. I was struggling mentally and emotionally. He love bombed me, said the right things, did the right things for a little while. Once he had me in his clutches, that’s when things began to change.
“You’re not in the clear yet,” Alpha Kenna says, tearing me out of my memories. “I’m worried about this immensely. Dark magic is incredibly, if not impossibly, hard to rectify. Even the idea that something like this could have happened to you is hard to believe, honestly.”
“Am I going to die?” I ask.
Maeve takes a breath, looking at her mother.
“It’s too early to say. For now, you’re stable, and with a daily dose of healing drafts, I believe we’ll see slow progress, but for now, your wolf is gone, which is… which in an event like this means you’re going to be substantially weaker than before. Healing is going to be hard and slow,” Kenna explains.
My eyes catch on the roses. I vaguely remember Blake mentioning Misty’s name several times in my haze. She’s supposedly a gifted healer, isn’t she? I know a lot about her since she lives in Crescent Falls. She’s a writer and historian now, but she went through the Great War of Tarsian, the hero, they say, of the war that took the lives of her grandparents. I’ve read her books. I’ve seen her picture on the back. I’ve seen her golden blonde hair and bright blue eyes.
“Will you thank Princess Misty for me?”
Kenna and Maeve stare at me, confused.
“Um, she was here, in the room with me earlier.”
Alpha Kenna looks at the roses again and swallows hard, then nods. She quietly excuses herself and leaves the room in what seems like a rush, but Maeve approaches the bed. “How are you feeling, really?”
“Fine. I feel fine.” I smooth my hands over the thin blanket.
Maeve arches a brow, glances at the roses, then back at me. “Misty isn’t here. She hasn’t been in Eastonia for several weeks, actually. You saw Isla.”
“Isla?”
“My great-grandmother,” she says with a shrug. “She pops in from time to time.”
“The–” I taper off, suddenly realizing who she means. “Oh.”
“Consider yourself blessed. Only a few of us have seen her spirit. She must have been worried about you.” She clicks her tongue, glancing around the room. “Um–”
“Is Blake here? Is he all right?”
“Blake? Yeah, he’s–he’s fine. He freaked out a bit, understandably so, but Soren and Skye have been keeping him busy. I think Blake and Soren are actually friends now, even though neither will admit it. Blake is a rather secretive person.”
“Yeah, I know.”
She looks at me, tilting her head while she scans my face. “Can I ask you something?”
I nod but find it hard to swallow past the knot in my throat. I’m under the impression everyone knows about me and Skye at this point. How could they not?
“Why did you end things with Blake? And before you say anything, we know some of what happened. Blake told us bits and pieces–at least that Skye is his daughter. His parents don’t know yet, but I believe he’s planning on taking his grandma, Maddy, back to Maatua and then going to Crescent Falls right after. I wanted him to go as soon as everything happened, but he refused to leave your side.”
“How long have I been out?”
“Four days,” she answers solemnly. “Skye has been just fine, though. She’s been having a lot of fun. It’s been a while since we’ve had a kid her age at the castle.”
I grip the sheets, trying to push past the fog of the healing drafts weighing down my system to answer her original question.
“Blake and I were never really… we weren’t boyfriend and girlfriend. We never had that talk before everything happened, but he… I loved him. I had for a long time–an unrequited crush, I guess, but one night, things changed, and we… we realized we had very deep feelings for each other and acted on them, but he suddenly pulled away.”
Maeve purses her lips. “Did he ever explain why?”
“I didn’t know what he was until shortly after that. I asked him if he’d changed his mind, and we got into an argument, and he was so… so icy and withdrawn. I pushed him, pressed him until I got under his skin, and he just… his eyes lit up, and it scared me to death. He looked horrified that he’d scared me and ended things then and there, with no explanation. I suppose my reaction was enough for him to know I couldn’t handle it–”
“That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard!”
I smile despite myself, shaking my head. “We were both young and dumb.”
“I’ve known Blake my entire life, and yet I feel like I don’t know him at all. None of us had any idea about you and Skye; that’s how well he hid it.”
“We had an agreement about Skye when we found out I was pregnant.”
“You wanted her to have a normal life?”
“Yes, and so did he.”
“And what now? What happens now?”
“What do you mean?”
“The reason you’re alive, that the treatment worked, is because your real mate is out there, close by, considering what I was told by the healers who cut out your mark. Is it Blake?”
“He would have told me.” I realize how untrue my words are when they leave my lips. I blink, looking into Maeve’s eyes. “He would have told me, right, if it were him?”