Chapter 147: Do I look like you? 1

LYCAON

"I have heard those words so many times," I said, lowering myself onto a flat stone at the edge of the meadow as though I had all the time in the world, "that they no longer move me mother. Perhaps try something original. I feel like a telepath."

"I bet." My mother did not uncross her arms. The silver in her eyes had not dimmed since she arrived, and it made the grass around her look faintly bleached. "I fucking bet."

Hearing her curse was a rare thing. She saved it for moments when composure had become too expensive to keep paying for, and I noted it the way a gambler notes a tell.

"You did not have to kill that innocent witch."

"Of course I did." I plucked a blade of grass and rolled it between two fingers, giving it the attention I refused to give her. The grass in this place was always slightly too green, too soft, a comfort my mind had stitched together over the years to stand in for the real thing. "Her family helped seal me, did they not? I will admit it was a waste of good flesh. She was a pleasant vessel, all things considered, pliable, well fed and trusted by everyone who mattered at the time. But it was necessary, and I have never lost sleep over necessary things."

"Necessary." She said it flatly, like a word in a language she had once loved and no longer spoke. "Like every sin you ever committed?"

I ignored that question entirely. Because of course she would take it back to that. My original sin.

"Why are you here, Mother? Now, of all moments?" I said instead, tilting my head and letting curiosity show, because curiosity was easier to weaponize than anger. "Is Hecate furious with you? Did she care for the girl? I would truly love to know whose favor you are burning to stand in my dreams once again. Because the last time I committed a grave sin, you said you would leave me to my devices."

She did not answer that. She walked a slow half circle around me, and the grass bent away from her hem in a way it had never once bent for me. Her face folded inward, as though something behind it had given way.

"I do not know where I went wrong with you," she said quietly. "All of this, every century of it, because you would not say two words."

"Actually... it is all of this because I am not wrong."

I stood, and the meadow leaned toward my temper the way it always did, the wind picking up, the tall grass hissing against my boots. "Why should I bend my knee to a god every bit as proud as I am? When I am proud, it is a sin. When the sun god is proud, it is dignity. It is ruinous on me and perfectly acceptable on him. Tell me, Mother. Am I lesser because there is a drop of human blood in me?"

The slap landed before I finished the last word.

It cracked across the meadow like a branch snapping in winter, and somewhere off in the false distance a flock of birds that had never existed lifted out of the grass and scattered. My imagination was on fire. So was my cheek. Because they burned. I turned my face back to her slowly, and I laughed, because the sting was the most honest thing anyone had handed me in years.

"There she is," I said. "There is the mother I remember."

"Do not mock me."

"I am burning in pure wolfsbane, Mother." I spread my arms, and for a heartbeat the meadow flickered at its edges, the blue sky peeling back like wet paper to show the green murk of the tank beneath it, the wires, the current, the slow dissolving ache that never fully left me even here. "Suspended in it. Shocked at intervals like a lab animal. I am not afforded even the dignity the cruelest farmer gives a dying beast. So forgive me if my patience for your disappointment has worn thin."

She drew a breath, steadying herself, and I recognized the change in her posture before she spoke. Softness. She always reached for it when force failed, as if gentleness were a key she still believed might fit.

"What about your comrades?" she asked. "The ones who followed you. For generations they stood by you, and for generations they begged you to reconsider."

"Then they stand by me still." I shrugged, easy about it. "If they stood with me then, I expect their loyalty has not expired."

She laughed. It was a small, cracked sound with no joy in it at all.

"Then why, in all that time, have you spread your lies about how the curse might be broken?" She stepped closer. "Your own wife is out there committing atrocities in your people’s name, Lycaon. She wants to free her people, and that is a noble wish, truly, but the road you pointed her down is the wrong one. The very man who should be steering her toward the truth is feeding her falsehoods and fucking propaganda because of his unfortunate pride."

"Is that not exactly why you wrapped them in the curse beside me?" I closed the distance until we stood almost nose to nose. "To soften my heart. To make me watch them suffer until I broke and knelt to that tyrant." I smiled. "It did not work. I am sorry to be the one to tell you again and again."

I began to circle her then, slow, unhurried, the way she had circled me, and a thought occurred to me that was far too delicious to keep to myself.

"Is this not against your arrangement?" I asked. "You swore not to interfere. Does standing in my dreams, working on me with a mother’s tears, not count as interference?"

Her jaw tightened. "If the others believed in my presence here, they would have called me to order long ago."

"Ah."