To heal a Rogue

BONNIE

I should have known life would hit me hard, like a sack of bones hurled at me, the moment that nightmare dragged me back into that cell.

It came the way it always did. Sharp and unyielding, as if my sleeping mind had called last orders on rest and queued up the worst night of my life without asking permission. I was small again. Nine, maybe ten, standing in a stone cell beneath Lily of the Valley with my mother beside me, and the air tasted like cold and old water and something underneath that I couldn’t name.

Well... that would be a lie. I knew what it was now. It was fear. I had been afraid.

The Beta sat across from us like a man at the tail end of a long day.

”I’m going to ask you once,” he said, and he sounded almost sympathetic. ”Was it you? Was what they saw true? Are you a healer?”

The accusation was that I had healed a man.

It was true. There had been a man at the bonfire celebration. Some of the other wolves thought it was sport, shoving Omegas they thought they could bully close enough to the fire to scare them. In doing so, one Omega had been particularly unlucky and had been thrown directly into the flames. It took him immediately, his clothes first, then his hair, and the smell came rolling out thick and greasy and wrong in a way that sat at the back of my throat and wouldn’t leave. He clawed out of the pit on instinct, dragging himself across the dirt, and the skin on his arms was coming away in long charred strips. Something rose in me without asking, a hum low in my belly traveling up through my chest and down into my hands, and my palms went blue, and then the man was healed.

I had looked up expecting something kind. Perhaps gratitude had been a lofty dream but still... I had not expected that every face around me would be pale, pinched and frightened.

We ran that same night. My mother took my hand and we moved through Lily of the Valley in the dark, quiet and fast, and we almost made it.

Almost.

The Beta of the pack caught us.

In the cell, I told the Beta it wasn’t me.

He looked at me for a moment, unhurried, and then he said, ”Your hair, sweetheart.” The way he said it sort of implied it was obvious he wasn’t going to buy a word I was saying. My hair was platinum silver. It had been the color I came into the world in, and no one had really cared but it. Not until now. Because apparently that color could not belong to ordinary wolves. My birth defect, which most believed was partial albinism, was now a mark of... divinity.

He had the man I’d healed brought in, and the man stood there and told him everything. Every detail. He didn’t look at me once.

His flesh was all that mattered to him in that moment.

The Beta listened with his hands folded, his expression patient, and when the man finished, he turned back to me.

”Confess,” he said, ”and we can all move on with our evening.”

I said nothing. My mother’s hand was in mine, giving me strength.

The Beta wasted no time. He had the man’s throat cut.

”Fix it,” he said, watching me watch the man bleed. ”You can. We both know you can. This doesn’t have to go any further than this room.”

The hum didn’t come. I don’t know if fear shut it down or if my body knew better, knew what giving him that would mean. The man’s blood spread dark across the floor as my mother’s grip tightened around my fingers, and I held on.

I did not move an inch as the man bled out and died.

”I do hate this,” the Beta said, and he sounded like he meant it in the mildest possible way, the way a man-child would when his soup arrived cold. ”Being made to go in circles by a child.”

He stood, and he moved behind my mother, and the patience in it was the worst part. He wasn’t angry. If he was, he did not let it show. He wasn’t hurrying. His fingers stretched as he walked, his nails going dark and long, and he opened her throat in one motion, clean and almost casual.

She was speaking when he did it.

”My daughter is nothing but a powerless Omega.”

She said it clearly. Loudly enough for the room.

Then blood poured out of her in rivulets.

I caught her before she hit the floor. I got both hands over the wound, and her blood ran hot through my fingers while I forced myself to talk to her.

I did not stop either. I kept talking, because if I stopped talking, it meant something I wasn’t ready to mean. The Beta stood over us and said I could still save her. That an Omega’s natural healing was useless for a wound like this, but that I wasn’t ordinary, and we both knew it, and all I had to do was stop being foolish and show him what he wanted to see.

The hum came back. Faint, tentative, moving up through my palms until they glimmered at the edges.

My mother turned her face to mine.

”No,” she said.

I hated that it was not a plea or a question. She said it the way she said every true thing, low and certain, her eyes holding mine so I would know she wasn’t confused, wasn’t delirious, was choosing. Her fingers closed around my wrist and the glow faded beneath her grip.

Then she looked at the Beta.

She spoke with her throat open, in a voice thick and wrong and ruined, and she told him he had already lost. That her daughter was powerless and had always been powerless. That he had killed a man and spilled her blood for nothing, and she intended to die making sure of it.

She died.

I remembered calling at her until I had no breath left to say it with. ”Mama. Mama. No. Mama.” My voice came apart somewhere in the middle, and I couldn’t put it back together.

The Beta crouched down in front of me when I’d gone quiet. He studied me as though I were a strange insect or a small, curious problem.

”Maybe you will make it work if it is your life on the line,” he said. ”These things vary.” He said the next part as if he were sharing good news. ”You see... The Alpha. He’s been looking for someone like you for a very long time. Giving you to him will be the finest thing I’ve done in years.”

He sighed.

”Wenzel... Wenzel will be grateful to me.”