I woke up in a bed that was too soft, covered in too many blankets, and surrounded by velvet red curtains. Nearly throwing myself to sit up I had to take a few seconds to look around in confusion as I tried to figure out what was going on. I tried to call out for someone, and it came out as a croaking groan as I fumbled for a gap in the curtains and climbed out of bed onto unsteady feet. One moment nearly falling to my knees, and the next stumbling a few feet forward before rising to my full height.

  I wore a nightgown that wasn’t my own, a cream colored spaghetti strapped gown that came to my knees, something I wouldn’t have picked for myself in a hundred years. The sight providing a new wave of confusion before memory caught up with body on how I’d gotten here.

  My dad, getting shot, Samuel giving me a drug.

  Where the fuck was he anyway?

  I was in an ornate looking bedroom, like something from two hundred years ago topped off with modern amenities. A large four poster bed in the center, a large flat screen installed in the wall, a walk-in closet that stood open and filled with clothes, a wooden desk, and a piano in a corner. The wallpaper patterned with floral designs, and the hardwood floors were cold under my feet as I walked to one of the windows and looked out onto the sunny garden below. It all smelled vaguely musty, like it was dusted regularly but rarely cleaned and like no one had actually stayed here any period of time in a long while. My feet still stumbling, I tried the door and found it locked and, looking around, found only one other door which led to a bathroom I needed anyway. Breaking down the door would have been pretty easy, but might as well not get into a fight with a full bladder and foggy head.

  Washing my hands after, I was about to throw some water in my face when I finally saw my reflection; the right side of my face looking like one large bruise even with who knew how long healing. The top half of that side tightly bandaged, covering my right eye. The deep urge to throw up entering my chest and to rip off the bandages coming over me before I violently pushed those thoughts down. Better to let that stand, hear the damage from someone who could explain it better, not make shit worse on my own.

  Going back into the main room, I went to the closet and dug through for a moment looking for something to wear. Someone had put me in their nightgown, I had to assume they weren’t going to mind me borrowing actual clothes, as bad as the taste seemed to be.

  All of the clothes, dresses and skirts entirely, looked like they were straight from the 60s, most extremely short and relatively ugly by my (admittedly no room to talk) standards. It took me going through two racks of clothes to find a long skirt of a hundred colors and a very puffy looking blouse with a collar to my neck and sleeves to my wrist, which I changed into hastily.

  Dressed, I checked the door again and contemplated once more breaking it down before thinking I went to the trouble of getting dressed, might as well wait a bit longer. Trying to fill the time with a meander around the room, until I walked until in front of an old movie poster that had been framed with a letter below it, stopping on pure curiosity. Masque of Red Death, with a red face stylized on most of it, I noticed the scrawling writing of a matching signature below the lead’s name.

  The letter, short and written in an overly flowing hand, was hard to read at first, and with not much else to do I did my best all the same. Tracing each line to understand the cursive, I read aloud, “For my bloody Fangs, so you can always remember our first night together. These have been the best six months of my life, and I hope this may be only the beginning. With all my love, Eva.”

  I furrowed my brow, finding something almost funny about the idea of The Lady having a memento like this, and was trying to figure out why I’d never heard of this woman when the door opened finally.

  Nearly hopping a foot in the air at the noise, I spun around as Samuel came in carrying a small tray of supplies. Rather exhausted, he only seemed to gain some pep to his step as he saw me and asked, “up already?”

  “I wasn’t supposed to be?” I asked, yawning as I watched him tie back the curtains on the bed and gesture for me to sit. Following along as I took my place on the edge of the bed, I watched him open a mason jar of green paste from the tray as I asked, “this is The Lady’s home I take it?”

  “One of them at least, and it’s Saturday morning if you were wondering. I had Andrew bring us here so I could bring up some issues directly with her,” Samuel admitted, frowning as he looked at me with the look of a cornered animal, barley managing to contain a flinch before he returned to his work, “I…Elizabeth should be over again soon, she kept you under yesterday for the worst part of the healing, but The Lady does want you gone by tonight if you can manage that.”

  “I think so, I just…how bad was it?” I muttered, frowning as I reached up to touch the bandages covering my right eye. Barely able to feel anything through the thick bandages, and what I did feel feeling like it was barely in the right shape.

  He didn’t answer at first, and I knew that was bad even as he finally spoke in the sort of trained and melodic tone I should have expected from a nurse, “the bullet grazed you, but it still took out most of your right eye. I’ve been applying a healing salve every three hours, trading out your bandages each time while allowing time to breathe every second change. It regenerated a lot of tissue, but…Elizabeth said it’d take a lot to restore sight, and she’s not sure she could do that.”

  I nodded, the words feeling like a stone slowly forming in my chest as I said the only word that I could, with all its meanings behind it: “why.”

  “The healing salve regenerated the eye, but it’s almost all scar tissue and what’s not scar tissue’s probably damaged beyond repair. She’d need to make you an eye ex nihilo or from a corpse, put it in magically, and that sort of thing has a lot of risk and rarely looks…well, perfectly the same. Complications behind it aside, she doesn’t know how it’d interact with being a werewolf outside of her spending months trying to come up with spells that might not work,” Samuel said, his nurses voice trembling only a little towards the end as he finally looked away from me. “I need to change your bandage and apply the salve.”

  “I want to see it.”

  “It won’t do any good yet, you should let it-”

  “I want to see it.”

  Samuel froze, refuses meet my gaze as he nodded, and slowly reached out and unwound the bandages from my head. I stayed perfectly still, too scared to do anything else, and let myself be a statue as he sat the blood-tinged bandages aside and pulled out his phone. Fumbling with it, he passed the device over to me and let me finally look at myself in its camera.

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  My right eye was pink, with some milky splotching in the middle and a swelling around the edges with the eyelid held half open and half closed. My brief attempt to open it any farther or closing it more being met with barely even a twitch from the flesh, no matter how much I reached for those familiar muscles. The temple of that eye, much worse off, still had bone showing and muscle and flesh growing once more over it. Even if that happened though, as much as I doubted anything good could happen, it looked as though a canal had been dug in the bone and the side of my eye bulged out farther than it should have where the socket did not envelop it as wholly as before.

  “It should look better when it’s done healing, at the very least come up farther on the side,” Samuel said hesitantly, sighing as he took a generous scoop of the salve on his left hand, “do you mind?”

  “Go ahead,” I muttered, bracing myself for it, closing my good eye to him waiting for it to be done. A few seconds going by where nothing happened until I peeked out, Samuel’s arm clearly in my vision as he worked. Not even the phantom of a sensation following it as I felt like throwing up and in a shaking voice asked, “why can’t I feel it?”

  “The salve numbs the flesh, lasts a little longer than it sticks around,” he said quickly, frowning as he pulled his hand away and held the hand up in demonstration, “the reason I’m not using my dominant hand. I used gloves the first time, but still numbed me through the latex. If you don’t believe me, there’s a letter opener on the desk there you can cut it with if you want to see how I react..”

  “You should have let me use wolf runes,” I muttered, disgusted by the idea of healing like this. I was too young for this sort of wound, in the Purists it would have made me look like a child who bit off more than I could chew, “it would have been better, sped up the healing, it would have-”

  “I did use wolf runes, I’m trained in them, and you would have ended up with an empty eye socket and half your temple missing if they were all I’d used. I didn’t call Elizabeth in because I felt like running up my tab with her and The Lady,” Samuel interrupted, wrapping the gauze around my eye once more as he told me, “trust me, if I could have saved your eye I would have, you look more like your mother like this.”

  I nodded, the words striking me out of my anger only for a moment as I asked with an almost humored laugh, “my mom’s missing an eye?”

  Finally getting some information about my mom from someone, and all it took was my dad trying to fucking kill me.

  “Good chunk of Purists are, I’d point out, they get shot at by hunters a lot and the eye is kinda near the brain,” Samuel said, making sure the bandage was secured in place as he finished it off. “A good, four or five years before you were born? Your dad shot out her eye, bullshit shot with a revolver while she was about to rip out your grandma’s throat, a few hundred feet away and through a bunch of trees. Trust me, I was there, and even beat half to death — long story — I was shocked he’d managed the hit. She got obsessed with him after that, never shut up about the bastard again — sorry, no offense. She had a game of trying to kill him for a while there, would fight anyone else in the pack who tried going after him on their own.”

  I nodded, too tired and depressed to really care how disappointing the story was. Years of thinking my mother was at least fucking normal, and this was the first fucking story I heard about her I could be sure was real?

  “I thought you didn’t like talking about her?”

  “I don’t,” he agreed, gathering up his supplies on the tray again and started towards the door, “but, you obviously do and it made you stay quiet and stay still while I worked.”

  “Well, I grew up thinking she was normal, and now that I find people who will tell me the truth everyone acts like I’ll die if I know anything real about her,” I muttered annoyed, not sure how else to respond to the obfuscation breaking down.

  Samuel nodded, and after a long pause sat the tray of supplies on the desk and moved to once more sit beside me as he sighed out, “your mother was…extreme, even by the standards of Purists. You know about werewolf nobility? Old histories, all the things we had before everything collapsed in on itself?”

  “Hasn’t mattered since the 1800s, supposedly the leader of werewolves had the memories of all his ancestors, the rest just ruled random portions of the world?” I asked, knowing the Purist legends well.

  “Your mother was descended from one of the old families, and she was rather proud of it,” Samuel snorted with a small laugh, “I thought it was impressive at the time, but I wasn’t yet at two hundred and fifty full moons and liked anything an older woman told me about. She was obsessed with her blood though, and followed the laws of the wolves closer than any I knew. She made sacrifices to the Wolf Gods regularly, she still fucking did human sacrifice when she was able, she challenged you to a duel for a minor insult. She also was a perfectionist, who would have killed you if you did the slightest thing against her. She made you love her with some kind words, and the moment she didn’t need you she tried to kill you and made sure she left nothing behind.”

  I shook my head, not sure what I could even say in response except try prodding for more, “what happened to her?”

  “She got exiled even by the Purists, moved to France to be closer to her noble ancestors,” Samuel answered curtly, eyes digging straight into the wallpaper across from us, “you might not realize this, but a good chunk of supernaturals Misha’s age or older in the area either knew your dad, knew your mom, or both. Good chunk of them worked with, tried to kill, tried to …date, or did all three, with one of them.”

  “You’re lying to me aren’t you.”

  “I’m exaggerating, but it’s all mostly there,” he agreed, sighing as he shook his head, “I loved your mother, once at least, and I mean it when I say letting her name rest in ash is all she deserves.”

  “I understand,” I lied, the words still feeling like a twisting of the knife in my gut, a bit of disgust bubbling within me. Wanting to change the subject, I said the main worry burrowing into me head, “everyone’s mad at me aren’t they?”

  “Andrew’s rightfully upset, but I think he'll hold off on acting it for your sake,” Samuel comforted, smiling almost sadly as he added on, “I think your Sigyn friend wants to talk to you though. I…as I gathered it she called up Misha and talked to him, and he told her to talk to me.”

  “Why did he go through all that trouble?”

  “She asked me about the Purists, how they train you, what they do,” he explained, his jaw clenching tight, shoulders suddenly pulling back ready for a threat not there, “I told her about how they introduce you, the two weeks without sleep or food, the beatings. I told her how they only feed you once you can spout what they want on command, and don’t tell you what you ate until you’re full. I told her about the isolation in the packs, the mate bracelets, the threats, everything I could. She…I think she better understood how you could have joined a group like that.”

  “You didn’t need to do that,” I told him, even as I knew I should have thanked him.

  “You were a fucking idiot,” the man replied, finally looking at me with a glare as he pulled a slip of paper from his pocket and passed it over. “Our kind figures out from word of mouth who you and I were, humans don’t need to figure that out. If you know a pretty girl who's into you, you don’t insure they can’t watch you tear into a turkey leg again without throwing up. Put that fucking life behind you, and you know what? While you’re at it, tell Elizabeth to remove those tattoos of yours, or at least cut them back. Now, Misha did call me too, and he said to have you call him when you woke up. Apparently he wanted to tell you about something, and didn’t know you were out.”

  He didn’t wait for me to answer, rising to his feet as he took up the tray once more and left the room, leaving the door open behind him. I watched after him and, shaking my head, laid back and gently rested my fingers against the bandages on my eyes. For a moment completely still and then the next letting out a croaking noise as I began to cry, clutching the blankets and curling into myself as I tried to have a little hope for the future.

  There had to be some hope that things would be better soon.