Chapter 111: Memory 3

BONNIE

The darkness behind my eyelids didn’t stay dark for long.

I pushed through it the same way I’d pushed through everything else in my life. Through the fear. Through the doubt. Through that constant gnawing voice that whispered I wasn’t enough, would never be enough, had never been meant to exist in the first place. I shoved all of it aside and kept reaching.

My feet found solid ground sooner than I expected. Cold tile pressed against my bare soles, the kind of institutional flooring that existed in hospitals and government buildings and places where people waited for bad news. I opened my eyes.

The room was small. Smaller than small. A closet with delusions of grandeur. It had white walls that had yellowed somewhere around the edges, a single bed with a metal frame pushed against the right wall, and a sink mounted in the corner that looked like it had been installed in the 1950s and never updated. A mirror hung above the sink, but it was angled wrong, or I was standing wrong, because all I could see in it was the ceiling.

I knew this room. I’d never been here before, but I knew it anyway. It existed in that part of my memory that held things I’d tried to bury so deep they’d never see sunlight again.

Lily of the Valley’s Omega quarters.

"Interesting choice." A voice said.

The voice came from everywhere and nowhere, sliding up my spine like a finger drawn through water. I spun around, my heart hammering against my ribs hard enough to hurt.

He was forming in front of me. Like someone had spilled a bag of puzzle pieces made of smoke and light and decided to put them together in the shape of a man. First came the shoulders, broad and angled under a shirt I couldn’t quite focus on. Then the chest, the legs, the arms hanging loose at his sides. Last came the face, and when it finished sharpening into focus, I stopped breathing.

He had white hair. It was not the white of age, but the white of winter. Of fresh snow. Of moonlight on marble. It fell around his face in a cut that stopped just above his jawline, messy in a way that looked intentional, styled to suggest he didn’t care how it looked even though he clearly did. His eyebrows matched. White as bone. His lashes too, casting pale shadows on cheeks that held no color whatsoever. He could have been carved from ice.

He... looked like me.

The thought hit before I could stop it, before I could strangle it dead the way I needed to. The pale hair. The lack of pigment. The sharp angles of cheekbones that could cut glass. I saw my own reflection in mirrors when the light hit wrong, when I looked sick or tired or terrified. I saw it staring back at me now from a stranger’s face, and I wanted to scream.

He clapped. Slow. Three times. The sound echoed in the tiny room, bouncing off those yellowed walls and coming back distorted.

"Good job." He smiled, and his teeth were too white, too even. Like a predator’s teeth in a predator’s mouth. "Truly. I mean that sincerely. Do you have any idea how many people have tried to force me into a dreamscape over the centuries? How many witches and warlocks and desperate little magic users thought they could summon my great self and make him dance?"

He took a step closer. I didn’t step back. I refused to step back. My hands curled into fists at my sides, nails digging crescents into my palms.

"None of them succeeded," he continued. "Not one. And yet here you are, barely more than a child, dragging me into this..." He glanced around, nostrils flaring like he smelled something rotten. "...charming little space you’ve constructed. This is your doing, I assume? The place where you feel the strongest in your head and your dreams. Your safe place?"

I didn’t answer. My throat had closed up, seized by muscles that wouldn’t relax.

He walked to the bed and ran one finger along the metal frame. Dust came away on his skin, gray and powdery. "It is sad if this is where you feel safest. In a room barely big enough to turn around in? With a sink that probably drips and a bed with springs that stab you in the back?" He laughed, but there was no humor in it. Just observation. Just cold assessment. "What a shame. What an absolute tragedy. To have access to the kind of power that could reshape reality, and this is what your subconscious builds as your fortress."

"Shut up." My voice sounded strange. Thick. Like I’d been crying, though I hadn’t. Not yet.

He turned to face me fully, and his eyes caught the light. They were steel and dark.

"Make me," he invited.

I didn’t think. I’d spent too long thinking. Too long hesitating. Fia’s voice echoed in my head, telling me to believe, to take charge, telling me the power was mine if I would just accept it.

I reached for the gift of small miracles. For that pulsing thing beneath my sternum that I’d spent my whole life trying to ignore. It came faster this time, eager, and hungry. It remembered what we’d done to the dresser , and it wanted more.

The pressure built behind my eyes, hot and alive. I pushed it outward, not with my hands but with my will, with my anger, with every scream I’d ever swallowed because screaming wasn’t practical and crying wouldn’t fix anything.

He flew backward. His body left the ground completely, legs kicking out for purchase that didn’t exist, and he slammed into the wall above the sink with a crack that sounded like thunder trapped in a jar. I held him there, pinned against those yellowed tiles, my hands raised in front of me like I was conducting an orchestra only I could hear.

"Listen to me, you bastard." My voice shook, but I didn’t care. I stepped closer, close enough to see the surprise register in his eyes, close enough to watch his chest struggle to expand against the pressure crushing it. "You have been hunting me. Hurting me. Making me bleed in my sleep like some kind of coward who can only attack when I’m unconscious and can’t fight back."

I pushed harder. Something in his ribs made a wet, sharp sound. He winced, but that smile stayed plastered across his face like it was painted there.

"Those days are over," I warned him. "You will never touch me again. You will never crawl inside my head again. You will never make me bleed again. Because if you do, I will find you just like I did now, and I will do worse than this. I will crush you until you’re nothing but paste on the floor. Do you understand me?"

He hung there, suspended by my will, by the power that shimmered in the air between us like a bubble of heat rising from summer asphalt. For a moment, neither of us moved. The only sound was his breathing, labored and wet, and the drip of the faucet I’d somehow summoned into existence, falling into the sink with a rhythm that matched my pulse.

Then he laughed.

It started as a chuckle, low in his throat, and built into something that shook his whole body despite the invisible vise I’d locked around his chest. He laughed until blood appeared at the corner of his mouth, bright red against white skin, and still he laughed.

"Oh," he gasped out, wheezing slightly. "Oh, that’s perfect. That’s absolutely perfect. Look at you. Look at what you can do when you stop being afraid."

"Stop talking."

"As I said before, make me," he said again, but softer now. Intimate. Like we were sharing a secret. "But you can’t, can you? You can hold me here. You can hurt me. You could probably kill me if you decided to commit to it. Though I will not let you. But you can’t make me stop speaking. Because part of you wants to hear what I have to say. Part of you is dying to know why you’re still alive even though I had the chance."

I pushed harder. His ribs creaked. A real sound, organic and awful. He should have been screaming. Any normal person would have been screaming. But he just kept smiling, blood trailing down his chin now, dripping onto his shirt.

"Do you ever wonder?" he asked, his voice strained but steady. "Do you ever lie awake at night—well, awake in the mornings, since you clearly don’t sleep through nights anymore because of me—and ask yourself why? Why you survived that second time? Why did I let you live when I was so very, very keen on killing you for your impertinence? For daring to walk through my memories uninvited?"

"I don’t care why."

"Liar." He coughed, and more blood came. "You care. You care desperately. It’s written all over your face. The question haunts you. Eats at you. Because you know, don’t you? You know that I could have snuffed you out like a candle. I could have crushed your mind like an eggshell. And yet here you are. Healthy. Whole. Getting stronger by the day."