The Ivy's Blood

CHAPTER 2

Lyra – POV

The strong odor of antiseptic bit my nose and jostled me out of the velvet blackness of unconsciousness. I recoiled, and shrank into my head, and made a feeble effort to escape the odor, but it embraced me, sickish and heavy.

My eyelids fluttered open. This wasn’t my ceiling. The lighting fixtures used to be too harsh, the partitions too white, and the whole lot reeked of sterilized misery.

“Where am I?” I croaked, throat uncooked and dry.

A slow, rhythmic beeping crammed the silence. I grew to become my head, slow and dizzy, to locate myself hooked up to video display units and a drip. A coronary heart fee screen blinked beside me. My pores and skin used to be pale. My arm was once bruised.

Hospital, I realized.

Just as I tried to sit down, the door creaked open and an acquainted determined entered.

“Oh, Luna, you’re awake!” stated the female in a relieved breath. “How are you feeling?”

My eyes focused. “Doctor Nicole…”

She stepped closer, brushing my hair back gently with the back of her hand. Her kind face was the same I remembered from the pack infirmary. She was the one who’d delivered the news, news that had changed everything.

“You had a bad fall, Lyra,” she said softly. “We had to bring you here immediately. You lost a good deal of blood.”

I didn’t hear the rest. My hand shot to my belly. The spot where that quiet weight had lived inside me… was now still. Cold.

I looked up at her with panic rising. “My baby…?”

Doctor Nicole’s gaze dropped. Her silence used to be louder than any scream.

“I’m… I’m so sorry, Luna,” she whispered, voice cracking. “We tried, but… the fall brought on a extreme trauma. The infant didn’t make it.”

I stared at her, now not understanding. “What?”

She explained, her phrases barely audible thru the ringing in my ears. Miscarriage. Immediate. No chance.

“I know this is unbearable,” she said, placing a gentle hand on my shoulder. “Even your husband, Alpha Kaelen, he… he was shaken. He left not long ago.”

Shaken? I remembered his expression at the top of the stairs. That cruel smile. That indifference.

Grief crushed my chest like a weight. I curled in on myself, pressing a hand over the empty space that once held life.

That was my child. My gift. My one ray of hope. Gone, long gone due to the fact of them.

Tears welled in my eyes, and this time, I didn’t maintain them back. It came fast, quick and hot, and I wept till my throat was damaged and my imagination and prescience blurred.

Doctor Nicole held me for a while, murmuring reassurances I couldn’t hear.

“You need rest,” she told me at last, helping me lie back against the pillows. “Try to sleep for a couple hours. Alpha Kaelen has asked for you to return home after that… He said he wants to take care of you.”

I said nothing. The door clicked shut in the back of her, and I was once left on my own with the whole discomfort inside me.

---

When I opened my eyes again, it was dusk.

One of Kaelen’s guards arrived to escort me back to the mansion. I stated nothing about the experience at home. My limbs felt like lead, my throat dry from crying, my coronary heart bruised.

As I stepped through the threshold of the estate, I noticed them waiting.

Kaelen and Estelle. Standing at the top of the stairs. United.

“Welcome home,”Estelle said with mock cheer. “How’s the baby?” she asked with a smile that didn’t reach her eyes.

I kept walking. I had nothing to say to her.

But she wasn’t done.

“Oh wait…” she said, voice bubbling with cruelty. “There is no baby.” She burst out laughing, clapping her arms like a baby at a puppet show.

“That bastard acquired what it deserved,” she added, her voice dripping venom.

I stopped, pain pulsing in my chest like a second heartbeat. I didn’t speak, I couldn’t. The words would’ve choked me.

Kaelen stepped forward, expression cold and unreadable. Without warning, he tossed a folded stack of papers at my feet.

“Your divorce,” he said simply. “Sign it within twenty-four hours. My lawyer will collect it tomorrow.”

I looked up at him, stunned.

His eyes were empty. Behind him, Estelle leaned into his shoulder, smug and glowing.

“I’ve already signed,” Kaelen added. “Just your name that’s missing”

I slowly got down, I picked up the papers, held them close to my chest. Then I turned and walked out.

I went up the stairs to my bedroom. Entering, I locked the door and then tumbled to the floor, weeping into the wood.

“This is what I get?” I whispered to the Moon Goddess. “After everything?”

I curled up, drowning in heartbreak, in betrayal, in silence.

Time passed, I couldn’t say how much. Eventually, I sat up. My hands moved without thinking. I reached for a pen. If this was what Kaelen wanted, then so be it. I would give him what he asked for.

But just as my pen touched the page, a voice rang out, feminine, fierce, and otherworldly.

“Do not sign those papers, Lyra.”

I froze. My blood turned to ice. “Who’s there?” I asked aloud, turning in place. My voice trembled. “Show yourself!”

Then I saw it, my mirror. But it didn’t show just me. The two reddish-green eyes that looked back at me were not mine.

I screamed, but then fell down stumbling back as I hit the nightstand. Then the electricity started to flow in my body.

My belly turned. I felt as though I had awakened something primitive inside me.I collapsed upon the floor and gulped in the air, clinging to my stomach.

Then it happened. A beam of green light burst from my chest, soft, spiraling, and otherworldly.

The light twisted and shifted before me, and then took form. And standing there in the center of my room… was a creature of myth and power.

A massive black wolf with emerald eyes. Its fur shimmered with silver threads, like stardust caught in moonlight. It stared at me, not with rage, but recognition.

A grin curled along its snout..“Do not sign it, Lyra,” the wolf said, her voice melodic yet commanding. “That is not the way of the Ivys.”

I couldn’t move, couldn’t breathe. The air was thick with energy and fear and awe.

“The… Ivys?” I whispered, barely able to form the word.

The wolf’s eyes gleamed brighter. “Your bloodline is not forgotten. Your time has come.”