The Forgotten

LIA

Death isn’t quiet.

Not when it takes everything at once. Not when it rips away the only two people who ever made the world feel like a place I belonged.

I realize that while standing alone at my parents’ funeral, cold wind curling around my ankles as two caskets lower into the earth like the final punctuation mark to a sentence I never wanted to finish. The sky hangs gray and swollen, threatening rain it never quite delivers, as if even the clouds can’t be bothered to commit today.

There are no mourners crowding around me. No pack members offering comfort. Not even a distant acquaintance pretending to care.

Just me. Just the sound of dirt hitting wood. Just the awful awareness that the world doesn’t pause for nobodies.

My parents weren’t alphas or betas or anyone with rank. They weren’t powerful. They weren’t political. They weren’t… important.

They were just ours—just mine—and apparently that wasn’t enough for the Shadow Pack to show up.

The officiant did his best, I guess. He spoke about unity and community, about the way wolves support wolves, about bonds forged in loyalty and packhood. It was a nice speech. Warm words. Pretty promises.

Funny, considering I’m the only one standing here. Funny, considering not a single wolf from my pack thought my parents were worth the short trip to the cemetery.

When the service ends, the officiant gives me a sympathetic tilt of his head and asks if I have somewhere safe to go tonight. I tell him yes, because what else do you say when your parents have been buried and your entire pack has chosen to pretend you don’t exist?

Home is quieter than the cemetery.

I walk inside and the stillness hits me like a physical thing, thick and suffocating. The decorations I put up this morning—cheap white flowers, mismatched candles, a table of food no one will eat—look pathetic now. Like a child’s attempt at pretending everything is fine.

It feels like I tried to throw a party for ghosts.

I sink into a chair at the dining table, surrounded by a scatter of paperwork I haven’t finished sorting. Their wills leave everything to me. Their letters apologize for leaving me alone.

As if they had a choice.

Humans were drunk. Reckless. Speeding. The kind of accident even wolves can’t always shake off. The kind that makes you replay imaginary versions of the night over and over—ones where you WERE with them, where things happened just a little differently, where maybe you could have changed something.

I shove the thought aside because if I look at it too long, it’ll swallow me whole.

Dad’s jacket is still hanging on the back of the couch like he just tossed it there after a long shift. Mom’s mug is on the counter, lipstick smudge frozen mid-sip. Their scents cling to the air, soft but fading, like the house itself is holding its breath, unsure what to do without them.

I stand and wander the rooms because sitting still feels impossible. Every step echoes too loudly. Every shadow feels like it’s watching me. My chest aches with a quiet, crushing pressure, one that makes it hard to breathe.

Grief makes everything sharper and duller at the same time.

It makes the world feel too loud, too bright, too close. And yet so distant, like I’m walking through glass. Like I could scream and no one would hear it.

Under all that? There’s something else. Something I’ve been trying not to notice.

A tension. A humming in my bones. A familiar ache that threatens to unravel everything I’ve spent years hiding.

Not yet, I tell myself. Not tonight. Not while the dirt above their caskets is still fresh.

Night settles over the house slowly, swallowing the rooms one by one. I turn on lights as I go—not because I’m scared of the dark, but because I refuse to let their home fall silent and cold so easily.

It takes me a minute to realize I’ve wandered into their bedroom.

Mom’s unfinished knitting project lies on the chair, half-complete, a few loose yarn loops dangling like abandoned thoughts. Dad’s favorite flannel is folded neatly at the foot of their bed. The air smells faintly of pine and jasmine—my dad’s cologne, my mom’s lotion. Both scents are thinning, and the realization hurts more than I expect.

I sit on the edge of the bed, fingers curling into the comforter. The silence stretches, growing heavier, thicker, until it feels like a second skin.

I’ll be eighteen in three days.

Eighteen. Technically an adult. Practically… lost. Utterly, devastatingly lost.

The pack won’t help. They didn’t even attend the funeral. Wolves like us—quiet, rankless, unremarkable—don’t get support. We get overlooked. Forgotten. Swept away like dust in the corners of the pack’s priorities.

But I’m used to being invisible. Used to slipping through life unnoticed. Used to blending into the background so thoroughly that even Evan, the alpha’s son—someone my parents had cooked for, trained with, fought beside—never once looked my way.

I built my whole world around being unnoticeable.

It’s safer that way.

Or… it was.

Because as I sit there with grief pressed against my ribs, something stirs underneath my skin. Something old. Something burning. Something that refuses to be ignored.

A reminder. A truth. A secret I’ve kept buried deeper than anything else.

I’m not just another nobody in the Shadow Pack.

I’m not forgettable. Not ordinary. Not safely invisible.

I’m a healer.

A real one.

A magical one.

The kind that belongs in myths. The kind that kings fear. The kind that disappears the second the wrong person finds out.

Healers are rare—so rare that most packs haven’t seen one in generations. Wolves whisper about them like bedtime stories, like cautionary tales. Wolves blessed with old magic, with abilities the moon once gave freely but now guards jealously.

Wolves like me.

The Alpha King hunts healers. Claims them. Controls them.

People say healers are taken to his palace and never come back.

Some say the king treats them like royalty—plush rooms, luxurious lives—pampered prisoners in gilded cages. Others insist healers are shackled in iron cells, dragged out only to heal warriors bleeding from battles the king refuses to lose.

No one knows the truth.

Because no one ever sees a healer again.

Only my parents knew about me. And now they’re gone. And the secret sits heavy on my tongue like a loaded weapon.

I used to think hiding made me safe. I used to think being invisible was enough.

But as I stare at the empty doorway and the shadows spilling across the bedroom floor, I realize something far more terrifying:

I’m not hiding because I’m weak. I’m hiding because I’m dangerous. Because what I am would put a target on my back faster than grief could fade.

And now, without my parents… there’s nothing left between me and the world that would take me the second it finds out what I can do.

A soft creak echoes through the house. Just wood settling, but my heart still lurches. Every sound feels sharper tonight. Every shift of the walls, every sigh of the pipes, every distant rustle of wind pressing against the windows.

I feel unmoored. Suspended in a moment that keeps stretching, stretching, stretching…

I don’t know how to be alone in a house built for three.

I don’t know how to breathe without feeling like the silence is wrapping around my throat.

I don’t know how to move forward when everything inside me is trapped between grief and fear and a magic I can’t control.

In three days, I’ll be eighteen. Another year older. Closer to adulthood. Closer to whatever fate has planned for me now that my parents aren’t here to shield me.

But tonight?

Tonight I just have to survive the silence.

The kind that settles into my bones and whispers all the ways my life is about to change. The kind that makes my magic pace beneath my skin like a caged animal. The kind that feels like a warning.

I draw in a slow, steadying breath. I stand. And I walk out of the bedroom before the shadows can swallow me whole.