To heal a Rogue

EDELINA

That hair wouldn’t leave me alone.

I kept seeing it even after I’d turned away from the girl, that impossible, pale white sitting somewhere behind my eyes like an afterimage burned in by staring too long at the sun. Something about it had settled deep enough in my chest that my whole body had gone tight and strange, and my bladder, apparently, chose that exact moment to join the general mutiny of my nerves.

I found the head healer near the nurses’ station, her hands full of charts, her expression carefully composed into the kind of blankness people wear around royalty they don’t fully trust.

"Where’s the bathroom again?"

She pointed down a short corridor lit by pale, flickering overheads, and I was halfway there when a voice called out behind me from one of the beds.

"Fuck! Me too. I’m full of piss."

I glanced back. The witch, Willow, was already swinging her legs off the mattress, testing her weight on them like she wasn’t entirely certain her body still belonged to her after whatever had happened tonight. The head healer nodded permission without much thought, already distracted by something else.

"You can go too."

So the two of us walked there together, side by side, which I hadn’t asked for and didn’t particularly want. I said nothing about it. There seemed little point in making an issue of shared bladders in front of a woman with a clipboard.

I noticed the girl staring at me somewhere along the short walk. I ignored it at first. People stared at me constantly, for one reason or another, curiosity or fear or simple recognition, and I’d long since stopped granting most of them the satisfaction of a reaction.

I stepped into a stall once we reached the bathroom, latched it, and did my business, my mind still tangled around platinum hair and the particular shape of dread it had left sitting low in my stomach. It was only partway through that I noticed something odd through the gap beneath the door. The girl was there. Her feet was there at least. She was not moving in the slightest or using the bathroom like she had implied. She was simply just standing there, angled directly toward my stall, entirely still, entirely patient in a way that had nothing to do with waiting for a sink or stall to free up.

That was unsettling enough that I called out, my voice sharper than I meant it to be.

"Is there something wrong with you?"

But I got no answer back.

That was worse than an answer would have been.

"Can I help you with something?"

I expected an answer after putting some base in my voice. But sadly, I still got nothing. Then, finally, I saw her turn away and that was followed by the sound of her turning the sink. Soon enough I heard water running hard at the sink, and beneath the rush of it I caught a low mutter, that barely audible.

"Fucking ass weirdo." I retorted, not caring what this was even about.

I finished, wiped, flushed, straightened my dress with more force than the fabric required, and stepped out to find her still at the sink, lathering her hands as slow and unhurried as she could manage. The second I approached the basin beside her, her eyes cut sideways toward me in the mirror, and this time she didn’t bother pretending otherwise.

I turned my own tap on, watched the water run clear over my hands, and glanced up to find her staring directly at my reflection, no subtlety left in it whatsoever.

"I find that very uncomfortable," I said. "Or is there something you’d like to share with the class?"

"You’re as beautiful as ever, Edelina."

Something in the way she said my name, easy and familiar, without the title that should have preceded it from someone of her specie and rank, set every hair on my arms upright.

"Witch aside," I said, keeping my voice level, "I’m fairly certain you are supposed to know how to address me. With a little more respect."

She laughed. The sound had no business coming from a woman that young. It was too rich and too dark for the throat producing it, and it made something cold crawl slowly up my spine before I’d even understood why.

"You’re a bit frightening now."

She turned toward her own reflection, tilting her chin one way and then the other, examining the face staring back at her with the detached curiosity of someone cataloguing flaws in a garment they hadn’t chosen themselves.

"I suppose it’s this face," she said. "Or maybe it is this body. That’s likely why you don’t recognize your own husband."

I stopped washing entirely, my hands still frozen under the running water, droplets sliding cold down my wrists.

"What?"

She smiled at me through the mirror, wide and wrong, something moving behind her eyes that had never once belonged to a witch fresh out of an infirmary bed.

"It’s me, baby. It’s Lycaon."

The name went through me like ice water poured straight down my spine, and for one wild, desperate second I told myself this was theater. Some elaborate trick Lysander had arranged with Bradley’s help, meant to shake a confession loose from me before I’d had the chance to properly plan around it

Perhaps they has found out what I was. Perhaps Conny had sang like a canary after all.

"What the fuck is wrong with you," I said, my voice cracking sharper than I intended.

"Edelina." She said, patient now and almost fond, in a way that made my skin crawl worse than open hostility would have. "Drop the act. There are two Lycans standing in this bathroom right now. What exactly do you imagine there is to be afraid of?"

I shuddered hard enough that my hands slipped against the porcelain edge of the sink.

"I’m leaving," I said, already turning toward the door.

It didn’t open.

I pulled at the handle again, harder, my fingers scrabbling uselessly against smooth metal that refused to give. Then I felt something press outward from every wall around us instead, a faint shimmer of light stretching itself across the entire room like a membrane sealing us both inside a bubble no one outside would ever notice. I spun back to face her, my heart slamming hard enough now that I could feel it pulsing in my throat.

"What the fuck is this!" I demanded.

"I don’t want us disturbed," she said, calm and unbothered, "while we catch up. Edie."

That name.

Nobody had called me that in a very long time. Nobody currently living, at least, and my entire body went rigid at the sound of it, some buried part of myself I’d worked so hard to bury deeper still clawing its way back up through everything I’d built in the years since he’d abandoned me to a throne I never wanted alone.

"Lycaon?" I said, barely above a whisper, my voice failing me in a way it almost never did. "Is it really you?"

He smiled at me through a stranger’s mouth, and beneath the borrowed features, beneath the young witch’s face that had never once been his own, I saw it clearly now. The exact same smile that had made me a bride once, full of foolish hope, and then a widow in every way that actually mattered, while he still drew breath somewhere far away from the wreckage he’d left behind.

"Of course, baby," he said. "Did you really think something as small as death could keep me from you forever? Not that I died though. It’s hard to kill a god. You should know."

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