Moonlit Mirage

Chapter Two

She didn't sleep well.

Xena lay awake long after she should have drifted off, staring at the ceiling of her apartment, replaying the strange vanishing act in the parking garage on a loop she couldn't shut off. By the time gray morning light crept through her blinds, she'd convinced herself it had been nothing. A trick of shadow. A reflection. Exhaustion playing games with a tired mind that had spent too many years learning to expect danger around every corner.

She believed it for almost six hours.

Then she came home from running errands to find her apartment door unlocked.

Xena stood frozen in the hallway, keys still in her hand, staring at the door that should have been locked because she always locked it, because growing up the way she had taught a person to never, ever leave anything to chance.

She pushed it open slowly, every nerve in her body screaming at her to call someone, call anyone, but curiosity and a stubborn refusal to be afraid in her own home won out.

Nothing looked disturbed. The couch was where she'd left it. Her television, her laptop, the cheap jewelry box on her dresser all untouched. She moved through the apartment room by room, heart hammering, until she reached her bedroom and found the one thing actually out of place.

Her bottom dresser drawer, the one she never opened, hung slightly ajar.

Inside was the small wooden box that held everything she had left of her parents. A handful of photographs. A birth certificate with too many blank spaces. And underneath it all, wrapped in a faded cloth, the one piece of jewelry she'd never worn because she didn't understand it and it made her uneasy in a way she couldn't explain.

She lifted the cloth with trembling fingers.

The pendant was still there. Untouched. Exactly where it always was.

So why did it feel like someone had been looking for it?

Xena sat on the edge of her bed for a long time, pendant resting in her open palm, the silver cool against her skin despite the desert heat outside. It was an old thing, older than she had any right to own intricate etchings circling its edge in a pattern that looked almost like claw marks, a deep blue stone set at its center that seemed to catch light even in the dim room.

Her mother had been wearing it in the one photograph Xena had of her, taken weeks before the accident that ended both her parents' lives and started Xena's long, lonely journey through a foster system that never once felt like family.

She'd never understood why she'd kept it. Never understood why some part of her refused to sell it, even during the years when money was tighter than air.

Now, sitting in an apartment that had clearly been searched by someone careful enough to leave almost no trace, she wondered for the first time if there was a reason beyond sentiment.

Her phone buzzed. Joss.

You good? Heard a B&E happened in your building today, you home??

Xena's fingers hovered over the screen.

I'm fine. Just got back. Nothing's missing.

Cops said door was forced??

Xena glanced back at her front door. It hadn't looked forced. It had looked like someone with skill had simply let themselves in and out without leaving evidence either way had happened.

Maybe I forgot to lock it. Long shift yesterday.

She didn't believe that, not even a little, but she didn't have a better explanation, and admitting the truth that she had a deep, bone level certainty someone had broken in specifically looking for this pendant sounded unhinged even inside her own head.

She tucked the pendant back into its cloth and slid the box deep into her closet instead, behind winter clothes she rarely needed in the desert.

That night, she dreamed of running.

Not the metaphorical kind she'd spent her whole life doing, running from group homes, from string of temporary families who never quite stuck, from a past that refused to stay buried. This was different. In the dream, she ran on four legs through endless dark desert, the moon enormous and close overhead, her senses sharper than anything she'd ever experienced waking. She could smell the sage and creosote for miles. She could hear her own heartbeat thundering like a drum.

And somewhere behind her, pacing just out of sight, ran something massive and golden eyed that felt less like a threat and more like an answer to a question she hadn't known she was asking.

She woke gasping, sheets tangled around her legs, sun barely up outside her window.

Her hands, when she held them up in the gray morning light, were shaking. Not from fear exactly. From something closer to recognition.

She made it through her shower, through coffee, through the mundane rituals of getting ready for another shift at the casino, telling herself the dream meant nothing, the break in meant nothing, the stranger with amber eyes meant absolutely nothing at all.

She almost believed it.

Then she stepped outside her apartment building and found him leaning against the building wall, waiting, like he'd known exactly when she'd walk out that door.

"Xena Silverfang," he said, voice low and rough, like gravel wrapped in silk. "We need to talk."

She didn't remember telling him her name.