The Last Pureblood Healer

Chapter 4 Rebirth in the Slums

The Freedom City slums smelled of open drains and gutter fires. I had lived there for three months.

My healing core was gone, but I still knew every herb, poultice, and surgical stitch I had studied.

No one here called me Luna. They called me the “Ash-Witch” because I set bones with rags and sticks and brewed fever-balm over a gutter fire.

I ran a clinic from a crumbling hovel and took payment in stale bread, leather scraps, or a promise that no one would rob me that night. My patients survived because of what I could do with my hands.

One evening, a deal went bad in the black market. Shouts outside became screams. I reached for the bar across my door just as a heavy body fell against it.

I opened the door before I could talk myself out of it.

I dragged the old wolf inside. Black blood leaked from a poisoned gash across his abdomen, and the edges already smelled of gangrene.

He was powerfully built and too heavy for me to lift cleanly. His boots dragged through the dirt as I pulled him onto the table.

With no magic to numb him, I had to clean it while he was awake.

“Hold still.” My voice scraped on the words.

He watched my hands while I cleaned the wound with boiled water and moon-thistle. His claws cut grooves into the table, but he did not fight me.

As I closed the wound with a sterilized bone needle, he said, “You are the traitor from the North. The Ash-Witch. Seraphina.”

The needle stopped halfway through the next stitch.

“There's a bounty on my head.” I finished the stitch without looking up. “You could be a rich man.”

He let the silence stretch. “I am Lord Valerius.”

I looked up. He was one of the neutral Elders on the Freedom City's High Council.

“You ran toward the wounded while everyone else ran for cover,” he said. “That tells me enough.”

He recovered in my hovel for three days. On the fourth, his personal guard searched the slum until they found us. They escorted me out with him.

Lord Valerius took me to an obsidian tower in the city center. Behind one steel door stood a medical laboratory stocked with rare ingredients and equipment I had only seen in catalogues.

There were enough clean instruments to use a new one for every stitch. Locked cabinets held ingredients I had spent years requesting from the Shadow Pack quartermaster.

“This is yours. The city needs your knowledge, so prove what it's worth here.”

He placed a diamond-edged card on the steel table. “This is an invitation to the next High Council summit. They are looking for a new Head Healer.”

I ran my thumb over the Council seal on the card.

One of Valerius's aides entered with a scroll. “My Lord, urgent news from the North.”

Valerius motioned for him to speak.

“Plague has hit the Shadow Pack. Their potions failed, and Alpha Kaelen's curse returned. He is coughing black blood and leading a delegation here to ask the Council for a cure.”

In the glass overlooking the city, the scars where my mate-mark had been showed above my collar.

Kaelen was coming here for a cure.

I set the Council invitation beside the aide's scroll. He would find me at the summit.