Chapter Eight: The Silver Thing

I woke Sera at two in the morning. She was awake before I finished knocking, which told me she had not been asleep. ‘My eyes,’ I said. In the mirror. They were glowing.

She sat up. She did not look surprised. She looked like someone who had been waiting for a specific thing to be confirmed and was now deciding what to do with the confirmation.

‘Tell me exactly what it looked like.’

I told her. Silver light, steady, not flickering. The same warmth that came with the moonlight on my skin but concentrated in my eyes. Not frightening, which was perhaps the strangest part. It had felt, looking at my own reflection, like recognition.

Sera was quiet for a moment. Then: ‘I need to tell you what I found in my father’s books.’ I sat on the edge of her bed. ‘Tell me.’

She had been piecing it together since the river, she said, since the morning she had watched the silver light change my eyes in the water’s reflection. The books her father kept in his study old pack records, histories from before the Ashcroft borders were redrawn contained references to a specific bloodline.

Not common knowledge. Not the kind of thing discussed at pack meetings or taught to young wolves. The kind of thing recorded because it had happened and record-keeping was its own form of respect for what had been.

The moon born bloodline.

Healers. Wolves born with silver eyes, marked from birth by the moon rather than the pack. Immune to silver burns the metal that weakened and burned every other wolf left no mark on Moon born skin.

They could draw sickness from other wolves’ bodies through touch. The moonlight responded to them. They could not be turned by dark magic. They were, the records said, the first wolves or the closest living descendants of them.

The last confirmed Moon born healer had died two generations ago. Or was believed to have died,’ Sera said carefully. We sat with that in the dark for a moment. My mother, I said.

‘Her family. The side she never talked about. We don’t know anything about her grandmother on her mother’s side.’ Sera’s voice was careful and precise. She had been thinking through the logic for days. ‘The bloodline doesn’t always pass cleanly. It can skip generations.

It can appear diluted someone with silver-tinted eyes that the pack dismisses as an oddity. Someone whose skin doesn’t burn quite as easily as it should. Someone the moonlight behaves strangely around.’

I thought about twelve years of the pack calling my eyes wrong. Grey, they had said. Watery. One more thing that marked me as less than. I thought about how the moonlight at the river had always felt warmer to me than it should. How I had never in my life been burned by silver the way pack wolves were. I had attributed it to not being a particularly strong wolf. I had attributed everything about myself to deficiency for so long that it had not occurred to me to consider that some of what I had been told was wrong.

‘If I’m Moon born,’ I said slowly. Even partially,’ Sera said. ‘Even diluted. It means the pack was wrong about what you are from the beginning. It means the curse-born story was never true. It means—’ She stopped.

‘It means he rejected his fated mate without knowing what he was rejecting,’ I finished.

Silence.

Rowan had a library old and well-maintained, the kind of library that belonged to a pack that took its history seriously. In the morning Sera asked Rowan if she could access it. He granted it without question and without asking why. She spent four hours in there while I walked the pack grounds slowly, letting my hip work itself loose, watching the Ashdale wolves go about their day.

They watched me back. Not with hostility exactly. With the careful attention of people who understood that something had shifted in their pack’s situation and were waiting to understand what it meant for them. I respected that. I would have done the same.

Sera came to find me in the late afternoon. She had a page from a record book photographed on her phone.

‘One reference,’ she said. ‘One page. But it’s specific.’

I read it. The moon born Healer. Born once per generation to the bloodline of the first wolves. Marked by silver eyes. Called by moonlight. Unable to be destroyed by silver. Purpose: to heal what pack bonds cannot. To restore what is broken in the blood.

I read it twice. I set the phone down. I need some air,’ I said.

Outside, alone on the eastern side of the pack house where the trees were close and the light came through them in long silver-green bars, I pressed my palms flat to the earth. The mid-morning sun was high and bright. No moon visible.

But the warmth was there anyway constant now, underneath everything, like a pilot light I had not known was burning for twenty-one years. I was the moon born Healer.

Or I might be. Or I was the closest thing to one that was left. I did not fully understand the shape of it yet. But I felt the truth of it the way you feel certain things in the body before the mind, in the bone before the thought.

I was still sitting there when Cole found me with an expression that told me something had arrived that was going to complicate the day further.

‘A wolf from the Vael Kingdom,’ he said. ‘With a message.’ A pause. ‘It is addressed to the silver-eyed female of Ashcroft blood. I looked at the trees for a moment longer. Then I stood up.

Jasper Vael knew exactly who I was. And he was not done.

I stood up slowly. My hip was better today, stiff but functional, the kind of pain that informed rather than incapacitated. I had always been good at that distinction pain that told you to stop versus pain that told you to be careful. Twelve years in my aunt’s house had taught me to read that difference accurately.

I walked back through the pack house with Cole’s footsteps behind me, thinking about what the Vael Kingdom’s knowledge of my location meant. Someone had been watching since the ceremony. Probably since before.

 A silver-eyed Omega in a pack that had been calling her defective for twelve years if someone in the Vael Kingdom understood what silver eyes meant, they would have been watching for exactly that.

Which meant Jasper Vael had known, or suspected, what I was, even before the Mating Ceremony.

Which meant the rejection was not ignorance. It was something more complicated than ignorance.

I was still working through what that meant when Cole handed me the sealed message and I read J. Vael’s precise handwriting and understood that whatever he knew or didn’t know, he was done staying away.

Three days. I had three days to become fully ready for whatever that meant.

I thought I might actually be. And that, after everything, was not nothing.