To heal a Rogue

JOHANN

One night ago, I stood in some debilitated wing in a rundown ghetto street and watched my mother disappear into a hospital bed that seemed built for someone twice her size.

The tubes ran into the back of her hand and up into a bag hanging from a silver pole, and there was a monitor beside her chanting its slow, steady rhythm, and every part of it made my stomach turn in a way I hadn’t felt since I was young enough to be scared of things I couldn’t name.

”This is ridiculous,” I said, pacing the length of the room because standing still felt impossible. ”We have entire wing dedicated to guests, Diplomats, visiting Lunas and Alphas. And he put you here for some reason, in a corner out of town with a healer I’ve never even met, like you’re some Omega he should not waste his breath on.”

”Johann.”

”No, I want to understand this.” I stopped at the foot of her bed, and I could feel my jaw working, the anger sitting hot and close under my skin. ”Father has the finest healers in this entire territory on retainer. Top of their class, trained under the De’Lune house for eons most likely. And instead of putting you in the royal suite with all of them hovering over you, he ships you off to some healer house I’ve never heard of and tells me to keep it quiet.” I shook my head. ”Is he punishing you? Is this about something between the two of you? Because if he is doing something, if there is someone else—”

”Johann.”

”—because I will not stand here and let him treat you like an inconvenience while he goes off and does whatever he wants at some party. It is starting to feel like he has a mistress. Does he?”

”Johann.” My mother’s voice cracked through the room, not loud, but sharp enough to actually stop me. She looked exhausted, the kind of exhausted that sat behind the eyes and didn’t come from a single bad night. ”Sit down. Please.”

I sat, because I always did what she asked, even furious, even convinced I already understood everything that mattered.

”What your father did,” she said, ”is closer to kindness than anything else. Believe it or not.” Her mouth curved into something that wasn’t quite a smile. ”There is likely a political calculation buried somewhere in it too. There usually is, with him. But it is not punishment, and it is not another woman.”

”Then what is it? Because I have been sick with worry for a week, and every explanation I’ve been given makes less sense than the last one.”

She was quiet for a moment, her fingers picking at the edge of the blanket covering her legs.

”I deceived your father,” she said finally.

I blinked at her. ”I don’t understand.”

”Get up,” she said. ”Put the do-not-disturb notice on the door. Close it fully. Then sit back down.”

I did as she asked, my heart picking up speed with every step, because my mother did not ask for privacy like this. Not from healers, not from staff, and certainly not from me. I hung the small placard on the outer handle, shut the door until the latch clicked, and returned to the chair beside her bed.

”I was never a Luna,” she said, once I’d sat.

The words landed strangely, like she’d spoken them in a language I only half understood. ”What do you mean you were never a Luna. You’ve been Luna for over thirty years. You are the Luna.”

”I mean I was never born one. I was never made one through any bond your father believes in. What I am, Johann, is something else, and this illness I’ve been carrying, the one your father’s healers finally caught after I spent decades hiding it, is hereditary. Passed down. Handed to my line by the gods themselves, if you believe the old stories, as something between a gift and a curse.”

”I’m confused.” I actually laughed, though there was no humor in it, just the particular disbelief that comes from hearing something you cannot fit anywhere in your understanding of the world. ”You’re not making sense.”

”Do you remember that rhyme?” she asked. ”The one you learned as a boy. The first one your nurse used to sing you to sleep with.”

”What does a children’s rhyme have to do with any of this?”

”Everything, Johann.” Her eyes held mine, steady despite how tired she looked. ”Everything.”

Then she sang it, low and rough, her voice catching on notes it clearly used to hit clean when she was younger.

So Mother Moon took up the night,

and wrapped her children in silver light.

Moonlight for the faithful heart,

a blessing no foe can tear apart.

But for the ones who lied, who bled, who preyed,

she carved a darker, hungrier shade.

Beware, beware when daylight dies,

and silver burns in golden eyes.

For when the moon climbs high and white,

the Night children gather, and they bite.

I sat there staring at her, waiting for the punchline, for the moment she’d explain what any of that had to do with tubes in her arm and a hidden hospital stay and my father sending me away like a child who couldn’t handle the truth.

”Werewolves,” she said, ”are the children wrapped in silver light. The faithful ones. The Moon’s favored.” She paused, and something in her expression shifted into a kind of grim resolve I’d never seen on her before. ”The Night children are you and I.”

”What does that even mean?” My voice had gone thin. I hated how thin it sounded.

”Johann.” She reached for my hand, and I let her take it even though every instinct in me wanted to pull away from whatever she was about to say. ”I am this sick because of a curse. I have carried it since birth, hidden it as it festered, since I was old enough to understand what it meant if anyone found out, and I did a very good job of hiding it for a very long time. Your father discovered it three weeks ago. He forced me into the royal infirmary after I collapsed during a council dinner, and once his healers got their hands on me, they found what I had been keeping quiet for years since we got married.”

”What did they find?”

She was quiet for a long moment, choosing her words the way she chose everything, carefully, deliberately, like a woman laying stones across a river she didn’t fully trust.

”When I was young,” she said, ”before I ever met your father, I was taught a different rhyme. You should know it too. It belongs to you as much as it belongs to me.”

”Mother—”

”Listen.”

I closed my mouth and listened, because there was something in her voice that demanded it, something older and heavier than anything I’d heard from her before.

Before the Moon chose fang and fur,

The First Ones walked beside with her.

They raised no claw without a cause,

They kept the ancient, sacred laws.

But blood can blind the brightest eyes,

Even hearts that rule the skies.

She looked upon her favored brood,

And called their hunger pure and good.

The faithful knelt, the faithful stayed,

While all her warmth on wolves was laid.

The light she gave was ours before,

Until she closed the silver door.

Our gifts became a heavy chain,

Our strength was forged through grief and pain.

She named them blessed, she named us cursed,

Though we had walked beside her first.

So lift your head and bear the scar,

We know exactly who we are.

We need no moon to make us whole,

Our honor lives within the soul.

Let wolves cry loud beneath her light,

And boast her favor through the night.

A borrowed blessing fades with dawn,

But truth endures when gods have gone.

The words hung in the room after she finished, and something about them sat wrong in my chest, a wrongness I couldn’t name yet but could feel crawling under my skin all the same.

”Why does that sound like it’s vilifying the Moon Goddess,” I said slowly, ”and praising whatever these Night children are supposed to be?”

My mother didn’t answer right away.

Instead, she sighed, long and slow, the kind of exhale that seemed to come from somewhere far deeper than her lungs, and as she did it, her eyes changed.

The warm brown I had known my entire life bled into something else, a black so total it swallowed the white around it, midnight pouring in from the edges until there was nothing human left in her gaze at all. It held for two seconds, maybe three, long enough for me to feel every hair on my arms rise and my chair scrape back against the floor before I’d even decided to move.

Then it receded, just as quickly as it had come, and her eyes were her own again, tired and brown and watching me with something that looked almost like grief.

I had already put half the room between us, my back against the wall beside the door, my breath coming too fast and too shallow to be useful for anything.

”Mother,” I said, and the word came out cracked down the middle.

”I am a Lycan,” she said quietly. ”And so are you.”