~ 5: Finally... hope!

~ 5

~ Mia ~

The bus to Red Moon territory took eleven hours.

I'd bought the ticket under Mara Belmar's name, paid in cash, and taken a window seat at the very back. No one looked twice at a pale woman in a plain coat. That was the strange mercy of being no one: it made disappearing easy.

The mercy ended there. Every curve in the mountain roads sent the nausea surging; three times I had to stumble down the aisle to be sick in the cramped washroom, gripping the walls while the floor pitched under me.

By the time we crossed the border marker — RED MOON TERRITORY, carved into a monolith of pale stone taller than a house… my hands wouldn't stop shaking.

But I pressed my forehead to the cold window and looked.

Red Moon's city rose out of the valley like something from another century of the future. Glass towers threaded between ancient pines. Training grounds vast enough to hold armies. And on the hill above it all, white stone and steel catching the afternoon light… the Red Moon Medical Academy.

There it is. The place I'd dreamed about at eighteen.

I got off at the foot of the Academy hill and climbed the long approach on foot, my suitcase wheels rattling on the stone. Students streamed past me in teal uniforms, laughing, carrying tablets and coffee, alive in the way only people with futures are alive.

I could have been one of you, I thought. In another life. I was supposed to be…

The world went white at the edges.

I heard my suitcase clatter over. Someone shouted. The great arched entrance of the Academy tilted sideways, beautiful and unreachable, and the floor rushed up to meet me.

…

Beeping. Antiseptic. White ceiling.

A hospital. Again. For one disoriented moment I thought I was back in East Lake, that the bus and the border stone had been a dream.

"Ah. There you are."

I turned my head. A man sat beside the bed. He looked in his fifties, a white coat over a frame that still carried the shape of an old warrior. His eyes were sharp and kind at once, the kind of eyes that missed nothing.

"How are you feeling?"

"Like I've been hit by a truck," I croaked.

"That's fair. You had a grand mal seizure at the Academy gates. Fortunately, you chose to collapse at the doorstep of the finest neurological hospital on the continent." He lifted a tablet, and his expression cooled into something graver. "Which brings me to my question, Miss… Belmar. Your scans show a mass near the brainstem and an untreated clot that is years old. How, exactly, did a woman in your condition travel here alone on a public bus?"

I said nothing.

"No medical file transferred. No pack physician's referral. A registration card that…" he tapped the tablet, unimpressed, "...frankly, wouldn't survive a second look." He set it down. "You crossed territory lines while critically ill, under a name I don't believe, to reach my Academy. I'd like to know why."

"Does it matter?" I pushed myself up on the pillows, ignoring how the room swung. "I'm here now. And I'm leaving. Thank you for your help, Doctor…"

"Jonathan. And no, you are not leaving."

"I'm discharging myself."

"You are dying, young woman." He didn't raise his voice; he didn't have to. "Without intervention, that mass will kill you within months. With another seizure like today's, possibly sooner. I have practiced medicine for thirty years and I do not release patients to go die on my doorstep."

"I can't pay." The words came out flat, defeated. "Not for treatment, not for scans, barely for this bed. So please. Just let me go before the bill gets any higher."

He opened his mouth to answer.

And that was when the clasp gave.

Maybe it was the fall at the gates, maybe eleven hours of a bus rattling it loose… my necklace slid from my throat and dropped to the blanket, and the little oval locket popped open.

Inside was the photo. Old, yellowed, creased soft at one corner. A baby, weeks old, wrapped in a pale blanket embroidered with a crescent moon.

I'd had it my whole remembered life. Since the hospital where they'd found me when I was ten years old with no memories. The nurses had said it was around my neck when I was brought in.

I reached for it.

Dr. Jonathan got to it first.

He lifted the locket the way a man lifts something holy, and every drop of color left his face.

"Where did you get this?"

"What? Give it…"

"Where did you get this photograph?" His voice shook. His hands shook. This composed silver-haired man who had been lecturing me about discharge policies thirty seconds ago looked, suddenly, like he'd seen a ghost. "Please. I need to know."

"I've always had it," I said, thrown. "Since I can remember. It was on me when… it's been mine my whole life. Why? What business…"

"How old are you?" The questions came rapid-fire. "What territory were you found in? When."

"I… twenty-eight years old. I was found in East Lake territory when I was ten, I don't… why does it matter…"

"Do you have a birthmark?" He was standing now, leaning over the bed rail. "A crescent-shaped mark. Your back, below the left shoulder blade."

The air went out of me.

I'd carried that mark my whole life. A little curve of darker skin, like a sliver of moon. No one knew about it.

"How do you know that?" My voice came out as a whisper.

Dr. Jonathan sank slowly back into the chair, the locket cradled in both hands, and when he looked up his eyes were bright with tears.

"This photograph," he said quietly, "was taken years ago, in the birthing suite two floors above us. I know, because I have seen it a hundred times… framed on the desk of my closest friend, in the Alpha house of this pack." He drew a breath that shook. "The baby in this picture is the only child of the Alpha of the Red Moon Pack. She was taken when she was ten years old. The whole world of wolves searched for her. They never found so much as a scent trail."

The room had gone very far away.

"No," I said. "You're mistaken. I'm no one. I'm a wolfless omega from…"

"Wolfless." He said it like the last piece of something sliding into place, his gaze going to the tablet, to my scans, to the mass sitting on the place where a wolf should live. "Moon goddess. Oh, moon goddess."

"It's a coincidence. A photo. Babies look alike…"

"Then let it be disproven." He leaned forward, and the desperation in this dignified man was terrible and tender at once. "But I am begging you… do not walk out of this hospital. Stay. A few days. Let me treat you. Let me make one phone call."

Everything in me that had been trained for years in the Alpha house said run.

But I was so tired. And he was looking at me the way no one had looked at me in decades — like I was precious. Like I mattered.

"…Okay," I whispered. "I'll stay. For a while."

Relief broke over his face. "Thank you. Thank you. Rest… I'll be back soon." He stopped at the door, gently setting the locket back in my palm, closing my fingers over it. "Don't leave. Please."

The door shut behind him.

I lay in the quiet and pulled out my phone with unsteady hands… bracing for a screen full of missed calls, angry texts, where are you.

Nothing. Two days gone, and not one soul from East Lake had reached out.

They hadn't noticed. Or they didn't care. Perhaps, in their eyes, I’m just throwing a tantrum to get attention.

Something in my chest closed like a door. I popped the back of the phone, worked the SIM card free, and dropped it into the waste bin beside the bed.

I wasn't going back.

…

About forty minutes later, the door burst open.

An elderly woman rushed in looking very elegant even in disarray, in the way that power breeds. Behind her came a young man about my age, tall, dark-haired, breathing hard like they'd run the whole way.

The woman stopped dead at the foot of my bed. Her hand flew to her mouth.

"Oh, Goddess," she whispered. "Oh, Goddess. Liliana."

And then she was across the room, gathering me into her arms before I could speak, and she was sobbing into my hair. "My baby. My baby girl. Eighteen years… Eighteen years…"

I sat frozen in her embrace. She smelled like cedar and flowers, and some traitorous thing deep in my chest, deeper than memory, stirred like an animal in its sleep.

"I… ma'am, I'm not… my name is Mia," I managed, trying to be gentle. "I don't remember… I'm not who you think…"

She pulled back just enough to cup my face in both hands, her thumbs tracing my cheekbones like she was reading them. "You have his eyes," she said, wonder and grief tangled together. "You've had his eyes since the day you were born. Liliana Hawthorne. My daughter."

"Luna Hawthorne." The young man's voice was low, careful — steadying her, though his own eyes were wet. He looked at me with an intensity I couldn't name. "Forgive us. I'm Ryker. The Alpha pair took me in as an orphan pup, years ago, after…" He caught himself. "I grew up on stories of you. On her grief for you."

After. After I was taken. Do they really think I am their daughter?

"There's a way to be certain," Ryker said quietly. "A DNA test. Dr. Jonathan can run it tonight. Results in days."

"No," I said.

They both stared.

"No?" the Luna repeated, stricken. "But… why?"

"Because I'm dying." The words came out matter-of-fact, scraped empty of feeling. "There's a tumor in my brain. I have six months to live, likely less. So no… no test. Because if it comes back and I am actually your daughter, then you get your daughter back for six months before you lose her all over again. And that…" my voice cracked at last, "...that is crueler than never finding me at all."

The Luna made a sound like she'd been struck.

"You came to the right gates, then," Dr. Jonathan said from the doorway. He came forward, and the old warrior in his frame stood at attention. "I didn't finish introducing myself earlier. I hold the chair of neurological surgery at this Academy. I can help you. I have done this kind of surgery before. That mass has been suppressing your wolf since childhood can be removed and she may finally rise. You wouldn't only be surviving, child. You'd be waking up."

"The risks…"

"Are severe. Near the brain stem, they always are. I won't lie to you about the odds." He didn't blink. "But the alternative is certainty."

"Liliana… Mia," the Luna corrected herself, taking my hand in both of hers, and the humility of it undid me more than anything else had. "I lost you once and it broke everything in me. I am asking you to not give up, please. Let us try."

I looked between them. The Luna's desperate, gentle grip. Ryker by the window, fists shut tight. Dr. Jonathan, steady as stone.

In East Lake I had begged, for weeks, for one person to take my dying seriously. Here, three strangers were ready to go to war with death on my behalf within an hour.

"Okay," I whispered. "Let’s do the surgery."