The Ugly Luna

CHAPTER 8

ELLIE

The clock on the nightstand says two forty in the morning. I have counted the beams in the ceiling four times.

Every time I close my eyes, I see the courtyard. The second attack came just after ten, close enough to the wall that I heard it through the glass. Adrian was gone within a minute. He came back near midnight with blood dried into the creases of his knuckles and told me it was handled.

Handled. Ten more of them carried through those doors, and Adrian stood in the middle of our room and told me it was handled.

I turn onto my side and look at him.

He's flat on his back with one arm thrown above his head, the sheet pushed down to his waist, and even asleep his jaw isn't loose. The firelight has burned itself down to embers, and what's left of it moves over the tattoos on his chest and the faint silver line of the scars along his ribs.

Why did he go so still, the moment I said I worked at the hospital with my mother?

I tried, after. I asked him twice while he was washing his hands and once more with the light off, and he gave me the same answer both times without moving an inch off it.

Nothing.

And he hasn't let me out of his sight since. He walked me to dinner and back. He sat with me while I ate. When I said I wanted air, he came out onto the balcony and stood behind me with his hand resting on the back of my neck.

He thinks I'll go the second he stops watching. He isn't wrong. If he had given me ten minutes of his back, I'd have taken them.

I roll over the other way and pull the blanket to my chin and try again, counting my own breathing the way my mother taught me when I was small and couldn't sleep through a storm. Four in. Hold. Six out.

It doesn't work. It was never going to work.

There are wolves in the hospital bleeding through their dressings while I lie here in black and bronze linens. My mother spent eleven years teaching me how to close a wound. She taught me which leaf brings a fever down, which one drops a heartbeat too far, and how to tell the difference in the dark by the smell of the crushed stem. I know how to do this. I am eight minutes' walk from people who need someone who knows how to do this.

"You're going to give yourself a headache," Queen says, and her voice comes in soft, half asleep herself. "You've been chewing on it for an hour."

"I can't just lie here."

"I know." A pause, and I feel her stretch somewhere behind my ribs. "Then don't."

I look back over my shoulder at Adrian. His breathing hasn't changed. His chest lifts and falls, slow and even. The arm above his head hasn't moved since I turned over.

What he doesn't know won't hurt him. I'll be back before the sky changes.

I slide out from under the blanket one inch at a time, keeping my weight on my hands, and the mattress barely registers it. My feet find the cold wood floor. I stand there for three full breaths with my heart going hard in my throat, watching him, waiting for the sound of my name.

Nothing.

I dress in the dark, blue dress from the chair, flats in my hand, and I ease the door open just wide enough to turn myself sideways through it. The latch catches with a small dry click behind me.

I don't breathe again until I'm at the end of the hallway.

The hospital doors are propped open the same way they were yesterday, and the smell reaches me before the light does. Copper and antiseptic, underneath both, the wet green smell of crushed herbs.

Something in my chest loosens at that last one, a reflex I can't do anything about. My mother's hands smelled like that every day of her life.

I step inside, and every head near the door turns.

A man with his arm strapped across his chest stops mid-sentence. A woman rolling gauze onto a tray sets the roll down and doesn't pick it back up. Two healers by the supply cabinet look at me, then at each other, and the whisper starts somewhere behind my left shoulder and travels the length of the room faster than I can walk it.

I keep my chin level and my eyes moving, looking for whoever is running this. There should be someone. A senior healer, an administrator, anyone with a clipboard and the authority to direct me where I am needed most.

There is no one. There are twelve beds crammed into a room built for eight, three of them doubled up, wolves on mats along the far wall where the beds ran out. Four healers that I can count, and every one of them has their hands inside somebody.

The only one not currently elbow-deep is a young woman by the second bed on the left, tying off a dressing. She's small and quick, dark hair scraped back off her face and pinned so hard it must hurt. Early twenties. Younger than the job she's doing.

She sees me coming before I reach her. Her eyes go over my dress, my face, the mark on my neck, and back up.

"Are you lost?" Flat.

Okay. Nice to meet you too. I steady my hands at my sides.

"I'm not lost," I say. "I'm here to help."

She ties the last knot on the dressing and straightens up.

"Water jug's by the sink. Refill it and hand it out." She's already turning away.

"I know medicine," I say to her back, and she stops. "I trained under my mother. She was a pack healer for eleven years, and I worked beside her for most of them. I'm not asking to hand out water."

She turns around.

"I don't know you." She says it like she's stating the weather. "Water's by the sink."

I'm about to answer when the whispering behind me sharpens enough to carry.

"That's her. That's the one."

A chair scrapes.

"I heard it started the night she got here."

"Keep your voice down."

Of course. She's heard it too.

"Rogues attack packs. That has nothing to do with me, and you not letting me work because of something people are whispering is ridiculous, it's, " I stop. "That isn't even the point. People are dying in this room while we stand here. I'm good at this. I can help. That's what should matter."

"Get out." The word lands somewhere under my ribs and knocks the air sideways.

"What?"

"Get out." She wipes her palms down her apron, leaving two streaks of red. "You think this is about a rumor. I don't care about the rumor. I've got a woman in bed with her femoral artery held together by my own two hands and prayer, and you want me to hand you a needle because you say you know medicine." Her jaw sets. "I've never seen you before in my life. I don't know where you trained. I don't know what you're good at, and I don't know what you're bad at. I don't know if you panic. Knowing medicine doesn't get you in here. Being Luna doesn't get you in here."

My mouth is open. Nothing comes out of it.

She's right, but I don't step back either.

"You're right," I say. "You don't know me."

Her eyes narrow slightly, like she was expecting something else.

"That doesn't change what's happening in this room."

Whatever she means to say next, she doesn't get to.

"Millie!" Someone is calling from bed four, both arms red past the elbow. "Millie, now, I need you now."

Millie.

She's already going. Three steps, then she turns her head back at me without breaking stride.

"Be gone before I have to call security," she says. "I will call them."

Then she's gone into the crush around bed four, and I can't see her anymore.

I stand exactly where I am.