Chapter 378: Alive n Awake

Chapter 378: Chapter 112: Alive n Awake

Aurora woke to the sound of voices.

At first she could not understand what they were saying. The words reached her from somewhere beyond the edge of her own body, blurred together beneath the pounding in her head. Her limbs felt heavy, as though she had been asleep for days, and when she tried to move her fingers, even that small effort drained what little strength she had.

She opened her eyes. A pale stone ceiling hung above her, and for several seconds she simply stared at it, waiting for the room to explain itself. It did not. The last thing she remembered was pain, so much of it that one moment had bled into the next until she could no longer tell them apart. Darkness came after that, and something inside her fighting to get out, and her own voice screaming. Then nothing at all.

A face moved into the space above her.

“Aurora?”

She blinked slowly, and the shape sharpened into her father.

“Father?”

Vance leaned closer at once. Relief crossed his features so quickly that she almost missed it. “I’m here.”

She tried to take in the rest of the room. The priestess stood beside the cot with her eyes fixed on Aurora’s face, and Dane waited a little behind her with Destiny at his shoulder. Marcus had stopped a short distance from the others, his attention just as steady. All of them looked as though they had been holding their breath for a long time.

Aurora swallowed. Her throat felt scraped raw. “Where am I?”

“BloodMoon,” the priestess said. “In the temple.”

“Why?”

No one answered right away. Aurora tried to push herself upright, and her arms shook so badly beneath her that she nearly folded. Vance caught her elbow, and the priestess moved in on the other side.

“Slowly.”

Once she was propped against the pillows, Aurora looked down at herself. Her hands were her own, the nails ordinary, the skin pale but clean. No dark lines crawled beneath it. She pressed her palm flat against her chest, as if the answer might be sitting just under the bone.

“Something happened to me.”

Vance’s expression shifted. “You were cursed.”

“A curse?”

The word stirred something loose. A memory broke over her without warning: fevorous heat, her own body twisting under her, the sickening feel of something moving through her veins. She sucked in a breath, and the priestess laid a steadying hand on her shoulder.

“Don’t force yourself to remember everything at once. This kind of curse when it takes hold of you like it did can cause permanent memory loss.”

“Then tell me what I should remember,” Aurora said. “I don’t even know where to start.”

“Start with the last thing you recall clearly.”

Aurora closed her eyes. “I was…” The sentence went nowhere. She reached for the next piece and found a gap where it should have been. “I don’t know.”

“That’s all right,” the priestess said.

It did not feel all right. Aurora opened her eyes and turned back to her father. “How long have I been here?”

Vance glanced at the priestess before he answered. “Long enough for us to worry.”

“How worried?”

His silence answered before he did. “We weren’t certain you would wake up.”

“You thought I was going to die?”

He looked down at her hand, small inside both of his. “Yes.”

The word unsettled her more than she expected. She had never heard that fear in her father’s voice, and hearing it now made the whole room feel less solid.

The priestess filled in what she could. Aurora had been carried to the temple after the curse took hold of her during Dane’s birthday. Her condition had worsened over the following days, and at one point she had slipped away from them altogether until they found her again. By then her body was fighting itself, and there had been hours when the healers believed the curse would keep her for good.

Aurora listened, but the explanation slid past the empty places in her memory without filling any of them. “So what happened to the curse?”

“It’s still there,” the priestess said. “But it has stopped spreading.”

“How?”

The priestess’s gaze dropped to Aurora’s chest. Aurora followed it and found a pale stone resting against her sternum, warm from her skin. She had not noticed it until now.

“What is that?”

“The Heart Stone.”

Something about it felt strangely familiar, though she could not say where she might have seen it.

“It saved you,” the priestess went on. “Destiny’s blood awakened it, and when the stone was placed against your chest, it pushed the curse back by absorbing it.”

Aurora’s eyes moved to Destiny, who stood with her hands folded and said nothing. “So she saved me?”

“She helped keep you alive. We still don’t understand everything that happened. The curse is still in you and Dane both even as we speak.”

Aurora’s mind was too tired to chase the answer. She looked at Destiny again. “Thank you.”

Destiny gave a small nod. “You don’t have to thank me.”

Aurora wanted to say more, but dizziness rolled through her and forced her eyes shut. Vance’s grip tightened around her hand.

“That’s enough for now.”

“I’m not going to sleep.”

“No one said you had to.”

She squinted up at him. “You look like you’re about to order me to.”

For the first time since she had woken, the corner of his mouth moved. “I’ve been accused of worse.”

The small joke eased something in the room, and Aurora used the loosened moment to ask what had been nagging at her. “Who cursed me?”

Nobody spoke. She looked at her father. “You don’t know?”

“We know a group is responsible,” Vance said. “They want to sacrifice Destiny for a permanent cure or curse powerful Alphas like you and I to control it.”

Aurora lowered her eyes, and more fragments came: trees pressing close, pain, a voice speaking low near her ear. She could not hold on to the words. Her fingers twisted into the blanket.

“I remember being afraid.”

Vance leaned in. “Of what?”

“I don’t know.” She shut her eyes and pushed at the dark until her head throbbed, but it gave her nothing. “I can’t remember.”

“Don’t force it,” the priestess said again.

“Then how am I supposed to know what happened to me?”

“You’ll remember if you are meant to remember.”

Aurora almost laughed. It sounded far too simple for what her body had been through. Before she could say so, Marcus stepped forward.

“Vance.”

The king looked up. Marcus tipped his head toward the doorway. “We need to speak.”

Vance studied him for a moment, then nodded and rose. Marcus was already crossing to the door, and Vance followed, though he stopped at the threshold to look back.

“I’ll be back.”

Aurora nodded, and the door closed behind them. She wondered when her father and Marcus got on talking terms. The curse incident must have made strange bed fellows.