The Forgotten Luna

The car was there when I arrived at four in the morning.

Black SUV, tinted windows, engine off. Parked directly across from my shop on a street that had no reason for a car like that at that hour. I noticed it the same way I noticed everything that didn't belong — without looking.

I unlocked the front door. Turned on the back room light. Put the kettle on.

I told myself it was nothing. I also made sure to use the front door for everything that morning instead of the back. I always liked having a clear sightline to the street.

Old habit. Five years old, to be exact.

* * *

My name is Aria Grey, and I sell flowers for a living.

Three years ago I walked past a wholesale market at five in the morning and saw a woman unloading garden roses in every shade of blush and peach and deep coral, and something in my chest did a thing it hadn't done in a long time. Something that felt almost like wanting. So I asked if she needed help. She said yes. I never left.

Now the shop on Clement Street is mine. Small, warm, the kind of place that smells like eucalyptus and wet stems and something green and growing. I open before sunrise because I like the hour before the city wakes up — the only time in the day when no part of me is watching the door.

Luna — my cat, not the goddess, though I appreciate the irony — was asleep on top of the cold storage unit when I came in. She opened one eye, decided I wasn't interesting enough, and went back to sleep. We have a very functional relationship.

* * *

Margaret Osei came down at half six with sliced mango and an expression that said she had already formed opinions. She was seventy-one, white-haired, and had lived in the flat above my shop since before I arrived. It had taken her three weeks to decide she liked me. After that, she behaved as though I had always been there.

'You've been here since four again,' she said.

'I had conditioning to do.'

'Aria.'

I took a piece of mango. It was so ripe it was almost overwhelming, and I made a sound before I could stop myself — the involuntary kind that happens when you've forgotten, again, to eat actual meals.

Mrs. Osei's expression shifted into satisfaction. We sat together in the kind of quiet that only exists between people who've shared a lot of it.

Later she laughed at something I said — a good laugh, deep and unhurried — and I smiled in a way that happened in my eyes first. Not the professional smile I kept ready for customers. The real one.

I didn't let it stay too long. Old reflex.

* * *

By early afternoon a young mother came in with a pram and asked for something bright, something alive. I put together apricot ranunculus in orange tissue — the cheerful kind, the kind that looks like it's trying. Then I tucked a single stem of sweet pea into the paper without ringing it up.

'For luck,' I said.

She looked at me like no one had given her anything extra in a long time. I knew that look. I had worn it myself.

I was wrapping another stem for the window display when a couple passed outside. Mid-twenties. The woman in a yellow coat, the man with his hand at the small of her back — not possessive, just present.

Five years ago, I would have caught his scent from across the street. Known his rank, his pack, his purpose here. Now I was just a woman watching strangers pass.

I set the sweet pea down. Picked up the next stem. Kept moving.

I had a life here. A real one. Mrs. Osei, the shop, Luna, the early mornings that belonged to me. I had built it carefully, out of nothing, in a city where no one knew what I was.

It was enough. I had made it enough, and I was not the kind of person who unpicked her own work.

* * *

The car was still there at six when I locked up. Seven hours. Engine never on.

I went through my closing routine with the particular precision I used when something was wrong and I needed my hands to keep doing normal things. Cooler. Worktable. Terminal. Luna fed. Coat on. Door locked.

I didn't sleep.

At midnight I moved to the window — one step to the side, not full in the frame — and looked down at the street.

The car was still there.

The driver's window caught the lamplight differently than it had before. Just for a second. Just long enough.

Two silver eyes looked back at me.

Not human silver. Something older than that. Something I recognised in the marrow of me before I had finished the thought.

My wolf — the wolf I had been told I didn't have, the wolf that had never woken on my eighteenth birthday, the wolf that had made me less than nothing in the world I came from — she stirred.

She had been waiting. And whoever was in that car... they already knew it.