Chapter 148: Do I look like you? 2

LYCAON

"But they do not," she said, and her voice thinned until it was barely there. "It does not work. All I have ever been able to do is pine, foolishly, that the future would one day look different."

"Today is not that future."

"I know." She turned to face me fully, and the look on her was something I liked far less than her fury. "But I also know that you are not heartless. That Omega. You cared for her. I saw it."

I kept my voice level. I kept my face level too, which was harder. "She was interesting for a time. She allowed me a different face, a different life, a season of not being what I am. I did not love her."

Confusion crossed my mother’s features, and I watched it dawn with a slow, cold pleasure that felt almost like warmth.

"Oh," I said. "Is that why you made the exception? Is that why you allowed a child? You believed I loved her."

"Are you telling me I saw wrong?"

I held her gaze, and behind my eyes, uninvited, another moment surfaced. Ingrid, standing in a doorway with the afternoon behind her, her hands folded low across her stomach, telling me she was with child. The way her voice had shaken on the last word. The light catching the loose hair at her temple. And the horror that had curled through my chest like a fist closing around something soft.

I shook it off. It did not belong in this conversation. It did not belong anywhere.

"Of course you did," I said after. "You never did see me clearly. I suppose that was your whole gamble. If my allies could not move me, then when my daughter finally succumbs to the curse, which will come for her soon enough, I would be forced to choose. Between my pride and my blood." I laughed. "How wonderfully naive."

"The future changes with every breath," she said, unshaken. "Every second of it. But this gamble will hold. Your heart will soften. I know it."

"Or I turn her."

The words came out smooth, and I watched them land on her like stones dropped into a still pond.

"I know very well how the people you fought for abandon someone over a single mistake," I continued. "Give them one terrible night and they will believe every terrible thing about her, forever. And I will be waiting in the dream, playing the father she needs, patient and kind and always there. Your gamble will end in ruin, Mother. I will make her exactly like me."

"Have you looked at that girl?" Her voice cracked. She did not seem to notice. "Truly looked at her? She is nothing like you. She cannot become the monster you have forced yourself to be."

"You really think that of me."

"You kill without a thought."

"Gods do it constantly."

"Not indiscriminately."

I laughed again, and this time the laugh had an edge on it. Because a question had occurred to me, one I had turned over in the dark for longer than she would want to know, and I found I could not hold it back any longer.

"If I am such a monster," I said slowly, "and a daughter was the only way to be sure of catching me, why did you not choose the other safe route? Hand my immortal heart to the sun god, roasted or raw, and free every innocent from the curse. That was always that option. The gods know it would be cleaner, faster and at least certain."

She said nothing.

I walked around until I stood in front of her, close enough to read her face, and there it was. Guilt, naked and unguarded, written across features that had watched empires rise and burn without ever flinching. She could not meet my eyes. My mother, who had cursed me without her voice ever rising, could not look me in the face.

"This explains a great deal," I said softly.

She flinched.

"Even now," I went on, "after everything I have done, your love still covers me like a blanket. How pathetic. It is no wonder you gambled on Bonnie. You believe I will be like you." I shook my head, and I let the contempt show, because she deserved to see it. "I am not, Mother. Now get out of my dream."

I did not raise a hand. I did not need to. I simply willed it, with the whole of my stubborn, ancient weight, and the meadow shuddered around us like a struck bell. The sky rippled. The grass laid itself flat. She looked at me once, her silver eyes bright and wet, and I thought for one suspended second that she might speak.

Then she was gone, pushed out like breath from a lung.

The silence afterward was enormous.

I stood alone in the swaying grass, the wind moving through it in long gold waves, and waited to feel something I could name. Triumph, perhaps. Satisfaction. But there was only the quiet, and the faint, familiar ache of the wolfsbane beneath it all, patient as ever.

Then a shape moved at the edge of the meadow.

A younger version of myself, dark haired and laughing, ran through the tall grass toward a woman who stayed always a little too far ahead of him. Ingrid, her blue dress snapping around her knees, her braid coming loose, her laughter carrying back across the field the way it always did. The apparition of a memory I had never quite managed to bury, no matter how many centuries I threw over it.

They rushed past me, close enough that I could have reached out and touched the hem of that dress, and I turned my head to follow them, watching the two figures chase one another toward a horizon that never arrived.

My thoughts drifted, unbidden, to the girl I had pinned against a wall of my own manufacture not long ago. Blood on her teeth. Defiance in every line of her. My daughter.

She did look a little like Ingrid.

A little.