Moonlit Mirage

Chapter Six

The fluorescent lights of the hospital corridor buzzed overhead while Xena waited for Ragnar to answer the question hanging between them. Joss had stepped away to call her mother, leaving the two of them alone near a vending machine that hummed louder than it should have.

"Tell me," Xena said again, lower this time. "What do they want from me?"

Ragnar's eyes flicked toward the surgery wing doors before settling back on her, weighing how much truth she could absorb standing in a hospital hallway with her best friend's boyfriend fighting for his life one floor away.

"There's a relic," he said finally. "Something old, tied to a bloodline that predates every pack currently standing in this territory. Your mother carried it. Now you do."

"The pendant."

"The pendant." He nodded once. "It's not just jewelry, Xena. It's a key. A vessel. Whatever you want to call it, it holds power that very few people understand and even fewer can control. Your family was chosen, generations back, to guard it. Keep it sealed. Keep it safe."

"Chosen by who?"

"That part I don't know yet. But I know who's hunting it now." His jaw tightened. "A pack led by a man named Damon Blackthorn. He's wanted this relic for over twenty years, ever since your mother disappeared with it."

Xena's stomach twisted. "She didn't disappear. She died in a car accident when I was two."

"Did you ever see a body?"

The question landed like a slap. Xena opened her mouth to argue, to insist that of course there had been a body, a funeral, a small gravestone she'd visited exactly once as a teenager before the foster system moved her three states away. But the truth, when she actually examined it, was that she'd never seen any of that herself. She'd been told. She'd believed what she was told because believing anything else had felt unbearable.

"What are you saying?" she whispered.

"I'm saying I don't think your parents' deaths were what you were told they were." Ragnar's voice gentled, though nothing about his expression softened. "And I think Blackthorn has spent two decades trying to finish what he started that night."

Before Xena could respond, the surgery doors swung open and Joss came rushing back toward them, phone still clutched in her hand, face pale beneath smudged makeup.

"They're letting us see him," she said. "Just for a minute. He's awake."

Sin looked smaller in the hospital bed than he had any right to look, given how broad shouldered and solid he'd always seemed behind the diner counter. Bandages wrapped his torso and one arm, and an IV line snaked into the back of his hand, but his eyes were open, alert, scanning the room the moment Xena and Joss walked in.

"Hey," Xena said softly, taking the chair beside his bed while Joss hovered close on his other side. "You scared us."

"Scared myself," Sin rasped, voice rough from whatever they'd done to keep him alive during surgery. "Whatever hit me wasn't a person, Xena. I need you to believe me on that. It came out of nowhere, moved faster than anything I've ever seen, and its eyes...." He stopped, shuddering despite the medication clearly working through his system. "Its eyes weren't human."

Joss made a small, broken sound, gripping his hand tighter.

"I believe you," Xena said quietly, and meant it more than she ever could have a day earlier.

Sin's gaze shifted past her, landing on Ragnar standing near the doorway with the careful stillness of someone trying not to draw attention to himself. Something flickered across Sin's expression, recognition, maybe, or wariness that ran deeper than simple suspicion of a stranger.

"Who's that?" Sin asked, voice sharpening despite his obvious exhaustion.

"Someone trying to help," Xena said.

"Does he know what attacked me?"

The room went very quiet. Ragnar's expression remained unreadable, but Xena caught the slight tension in his shoulders, the way his hand curled at his side like he was bracing for a fight that hadn't started yet.

"I have a guess," Ragnar said carefully.

Sin's eyes narrowed, and for one suspended moment, Xena wondered if her friend somehow knew more than he was letting on, if the attack had revealed something he hadn't shared yet.

A nurse appeared in the doorway, ending the moment before it could fully unfold. "I'm sorry, but he needs to rest. You'll need to step out."

Xena squeezed Sin's hand once before standing, promising to return as soon as visiting hours allowed. As she turned to leave, Sin's fingers tightened briefly around hers, and he pulled her down close enough to whisper something only she could hear.

"It said your name," he breathed. "Before it attacked me. It said your name like it was looking for you."

Xena's blood turned to ice in her veins.

She straightened slowly, meeting Ragnar's gaze across the room, watching the color drain from his face as he registered exactly what that meant.

Whatever was hunting her hadn't simply stumbled onto Sin by accident.

It had gone looking for him specifically, because it already knew exactly who mattered most to her.