Chapter 113: Lycaon the good

BONNIE

Once more, I reached for the power within me. This time it crawled, sluggish and bruised by the clash, but it answered. I drew it tight in my chest, forging it into a weapon.

He felt it. His eyes widened, just slightly, just enough to tell me I’d surprised him.

"Fascinating," he observed as he stepped back, released my chin, and lowered his hand.

The invisible force pinning me to the wall vanished. I crashed to my feet, knees threatening to give but refusing to surrender. The gift of small miracles surged around me, now visible, crackling in the air like the static before a storm.

I hurled it at him with everything I had, but he brushed it aside as if batting away a fly. The unleashed power crashed into the yellowed wall, making the whole room shudder to its bones.

"You’re fighting back," he noted. "Good. That’s better than I expected. Perhaps you got that from me. Your mother never had that fire. She was all softness... and gentleness... and that disgusting desire to help everyone regardless of whether they deserved it."

"Don’t talk about her." The words came out as a snarl. "You don’t get to talk about my mother. You don’t know anything about her."

"I know she died in pain," he replied casually. "I know she tried to protect you. I was in your head. Remember?" He spread his hands. "She failed you, daughter."

Rage blinded me, and I lunged.

The red followed, coiling around my fist like a gauntlet of living light. I aimed for his smirk, ready to erase it forever, but he snatched my wrist mid-swing. His grip locked around my bones, and for a heartbeat we stood, two storms colliding, impossible energy crackling between us.

He was stronger. I could feel it in his effortless grip, the way he didn’t even flinch. Yet beneath that strength, I sensed hesitation. He wasn’t fighting back. He could have crushed my wrist, ended this in a heartbeat, but he didn’t.

To my surprise, he released my wrist, stepping back again, raising his hands in surrender. "I want to show you something. Something that might help you understand. That might help us both understand why the universe has decided to play this particular joke on us."

"I don’t want to see anything you have to show me."

"Yes, you do." He smiled, but it was different now. Less predatory. More tired. More old. "You want to see her. Don’t you? You want to remember what she looked like. What she sounded like. What she smelled like. You were so young when she died. The trauma stole your memories. But I can give them back. I can show you."

My breath snagged in my throat. Why was I even tempted? The red light in my hands wavered, flickering and uncertain.

"I took her form once, remember?" he continued. "The first time you invaded my dreamscape. I got in your head, and I tried to appear as your mother, to comfort you, to guide you. But you didn’t recognize her anymore. You didn’t remember her face well enough to allow me to make it. Will this jog your memory, perhaps?"

He reached out, faster than I could react, and touched two fingers to my forehead.

The room dissolved.

The yellowed walls dripped away like melting wax. The bed, the sink, the mirror—all of it blurred into nameless colors, then reshaped into something new. Something vast. Something open.

Grass. Tall blades, green and gold, swaying in a wind scented with honeysuckle and far-off rain. A meadow. The sky above was impossibly blue, the sort of blue that belonged only to memories or paintings. The sun hung low, drenching everything in honeyed light.

I stood at the heart of it, turning slowly, my heart pounding against my ribs. He lingered nearby, watching with an unreadable gaze.

"Where are we?" I demanded.

"A memory," he answered. "One of mine. One of the few I still cherish. Look behind you."

I resisted. Every instinct screamed to keep my gaze locked on the predator. But something deeper tugged at me, something stronger than fear.

I turned.

They ran through the grass, chasing and laughing, playing like children though they were grown. The man’s hair was dark and thick, nothing like the white that crowned the monster now. He was broad-shouldered, face lifted to the sun, radiating happiness. He looked human.

And the woman—

I stopped breathing.

She was beautiful—not like a goddess or a movie star, but in a way that made my chest ache. Her dark hair matched his, pulled back in a messy braid. Kindness shaped every line of her face. She wore a simple blue cotton dress, barefoot, her feet tossing up grass as she fled from the man chasing her.

Her laughter rang out, light and musical, carrying across the meadow, brimming with joy.

I knew that laugh. I’d heard it in dreams that vanished with the dawn, in lullabies whispered in the dark, in the memory of arms that once made the world safe and me loved.

"Mom," I whispered.

The word barely escaped my lips. My vision blurred. I blinked, and tears traced hot paths down my cheeks. I was crying, and I couldn’t stop.

She turned—the woman who gave me life, who cradled me as a baby, who died to shield me from monsters. She looked straight at me, though she couldn’t see me, couldn’t know I watched from across the gulf of time and death and memory. She smiled, the same smile I’d glimpsed in my own reflection when happiness slipped past my defenses, and I felt safe.

She looked like me. Or maybe I looked like her. The same eyes, the same curve to the mouth, the same tilt of the head, as if she was listening to a secret only she could hear.

Behind her, the dark-haired man caught up, sweeping her into his arms and spinning her in a dizzy circle. She shrieked with laughter, playfully pounding his shoulders. He set her down with care, turned her in his embrace, and kissed her with such tenderness I had to look away, feeling like an intruder on something sacred.

"She loved him," the monster said from beside me. His voice was soft now, stripped of its earlier cruelty. "She loved him despite what he was. Despite what he’d done. She saw something in him that no one else had ever seen. Something worth saving."

I scrubbed at my eyes, but the tears kept flowing, hot and unstoppable, until the meadow blurred into a watercolor—beautiful, but slipping out of focus.

"That man," I choked out. "That is you?"

I had to confirm.

"Yes. It is me."