Moonlit Mirage

Chapter Four

Xena didn't go to work that day.

She called in sick for the first time in over a year, sat on her bathroom floor for twenty minutes trying to convince her hands to stop shaking, and then did the only thing that made sense in a morning that had already stopped making sense entirely.

She let Ragnar follow her inside.

He stood in her small living room looking entirely too large for the space, glancing around with an expression she couldn't quite read assessment, maybe, the careful sweep of someone checking exits and entry points without making it obvious that's what he was doing.

"Sit," she said, more sharply than she meant to. "Or stand. I don't care. Just talk."

"Where do you want me to start?"

"With what you are. With what that man was. With why you said I belong to you, which, for the record, I do not appreciate."

Something flickered across his face, not quite amusement, despite the gravity of the morning. "I didn't say you belong to me. I said they want you, the same way I want you."

"That's not better."

"It's not meant to be comforting. It's meant to be honest."

Xena crossed her arms, putting the kitchen counter between them like it might offer some kind of protection, though against what, she genuinely couldn't say. "Fine. Honest. What are you?"

Ragnar was quiet for a long moment, studying her with an intensity that made her want to look away and refuse to all at once.

"I'm a werewolf," he said finally. "So was the man outside your building, though not from my pack. We're real, Xena. We've always been real, hiding in plain sight while humans built entire mythologies out of half glimpsed truths."

She should have laughed. Should have called this exactly what it sounded like delusional, dangerous, the kind of thing that ended with her calling a hospital instead of the police.

Instead, she thought about the dream. The desert. The moon. The sense of her own body moving in ways it shouldn't have been able to move.

"Prove it," she said before she could stop herself.

"Xena....."

"You said be honest. Prove it."

Something in his expression shifted, weighing a decision she couldn't see the shape of. Then he stepped back, giving himself room, and before she could ask what he was doing, his body began to change in a way that defied every law of physics she'd ever trusted.

Bones shifted with audible cracks that should have produced screaming agony but seemed to cost him nothing more than a low, controlled growl. His clothes strained and tore at the seams. Fur the color of dark iron spread across skin that elongated, reshaped, folded into something entirely other than human, until the man who had been standing in her living room was gone, replaced by a wolf the size of a small horse, golden eyes the only thing that remained unmistakably, terrifyingly familiar.

Xena's back hit the counter behind her, legs no longer entirely reliable.

The wolf, Ragnar, watched her with a patience that felt almost gentle, despite everything about his size and presence suggesting otherwise.

"Oh my god," she whispered. "Oh my god, this is real. This is actually real."

The wolf huffed, an almost laugh sound, and shifted back with the same horrifying, fascinating series of cracks and shifts, until Ragnar stood in her living room again, mostly dressed, watching her with quiet concern.

"Breathe," he said.

"I'm breathing."

"You're hyperventilating."

"I'm allowed to hyperventilate! You just turned into a wolf in my living room!"

"I did warn you."

"You did not warn me, you said be honest and then you became an animal..."

"I need you to listen to me." His voice cut through her spiraling panic with surprising gentleness, and despite everything, despite every alarm bell screaming in her head, Xena found herself listening. "What's happening to you isn't random. The dreams, the heightened senses, the way your body's been changing without your permission. That man who broke into your apartment wasn't looking for valuables. He was looking for the pendant, and he was looking for you, because you're not entirely human either."

The room tilted.

"That's not possible," Xena said, though even as the words left her mouth, she knew, with bone deep certainty, exactly how wrong she was.

"Your mother," Ragnar said carefully, "wasn't entirely human. And neither are you."

Xena's vision blurred, the room spinning slowly around her, decades of unanswered questions about who her parents really were and why they'd died the way they had suddenly rearranging themselves into a shape she'd never once considered.

"How do you know about my mother?"

Ragnar's expression turned grave, careful, like a man choosing his next words with the weight of consequence behind every syllable.

"Because the pendant in your closet," he said quietly, "belonged to the last guardian of something my pack has been searching for, for over twenty years. And the people who want it from you will burn this entire city down to get it."

Xena's phone rang, shattering the moment, Joss's name flashing across the screen with the kind of frantic urgency that made her stomach drop before she even answered.

"Xena," Joss said the instant the call connected, voice tight with barely controlled panic. "You need to get to the hospital right now."

"What? Why...."

"It's Sin. Someone attacked him outside the diner. They're saying he might not make it."