What the Healer Knew

Elara's POV 

Kael left not long after, pulled away by Ronan's insistence that the council business couldn't wait any longer, but not before he found my eyes one more time and said, quietly, 

"Eleven days. I'll come back before then, whatever happens with the council." I believed him, which surprised me more than it should have, given I'd known the man for less than twenty-four hours.

I didn't go find Damon like I meant to.

Halfway there, my feet took a different turn entirely down the old path toward the healer's cottage at the edge of the pack lands  and I didn't understand why until I was already standing in front of it.

I hadn't been here in years. Healer Voss no relation, as far as I knew, to whatever  Ronan had just spent ten minutes not fully explaining  had retired sometime when I was small, replaced by a younger healer from the eastern packs. The cottage still stood, though, windows dark, door boarded.

I stood there a long time before it hit me.

Not gently. All at once, like a door blown open by wind I hadn't felt coming.

I was small. Four, maybe five. Awake past when I should have been, sneaking down the hall the way I always did on nights I couldn't sleep, stepping over the third floorboard from my door because I knew it creaked. My mother was in the kitchen I barely remember her face anymore, just an impression of warmth and dark hair, the same shade as mine  and Healer Voss was there too, older even then, her hands moving over something on the table between them.

My mother was crying. Not the soft kind.

The scared kind, the kind adults try to hide from children and never quite manage.

"It has to be tonight," she said. "Before she's old enough to remember any of it."

"She may remember pieces regardless," the healer said. "Work like this leaves marks on more than just the body."

"Then we live with pieces. Better pieces than the whole truth finding her before she's ready."

I remember the healer's hands, glowing faintly gold at the fingertips. I remember my mother holding something small and dark over a bowl of water that didn't catch the candlelight the way water should have. I remember a smell, sharp and strange, and then no smell at all, like it had never been there.

I remember waking up in my own bed the next morning with no memory of leaving it.

I sat down hard on the healer's front step, heart going too fast, palms flat against the wood like I needed something solid to hold on to. I hadn't thought about that memory in over a decade. I hadn't been sure, until just now, that it was even real a night I'd actually lived, and not some dream fragment I'd absorbed as a kid and mistaken for something that happened.

Rituals like this leave marks on more than just the body.

Better pieces than the whole truth finding her before she's ready.

I thought about Damon in the long hall. I know it's the reason you have no scent, and I know it's not a flaw. I thought about Thorne, careful and old: the kind who watch, first. I thought about a healer with glowing hands and a mother crying while she did something to her own four-year-old daughter, something urgent enough to need doing "before she's old enough to remember"  something that hadn't worked all the way, apparently, because here I was, twenty years later, remembering it anyway.

I didn't have the whole truth. I understood that much, sitting on that cold step with my pulse hammering in my ears. I had one piece a piece the healer herself had warned might survive whatever they were trying to erase and it terrified me precisely because of how small it was. 

If this single fragment had made it through, what did that say about the rest of it, still buried somewhere I couldn't reach on my own?

Better pieces than the whole truth.

Someone had decided, when I was four years old, that the whole truth was dangerous enough to erase from a child's own mind.

And whatever it was, I was starting to think it might already be finding its way back to the surface with or without anyone's permission.