Chapter 39

Thirty-Nine

FINN

The dream shifted in and out in waves. Vague memories of burying my family, then setting the forest ablaze. Darkness taking over for a time, the world only coming back into focus while I stood among the blowing wind and raging heat of the flames. The death of the trees and grass needed the ash to repopulate anyway. The screams of the dying plants bothered me more than the memories of the humans I’d slaughtered.

I retreated to apa’s cave to wait out the fire and watch it devour the countryside, occasionally stirred by the sound of human voices which would drive the dark side of me to awaken and stray from the confines of stone and shadow to rain blood over the flames. Their bodies would add life to the regrowth of the forest. Darker in some places where the trees would gnarl and crouch with the weight of my rage.

Winter approached twice, and I cast her out with flames, the sky smoldering with ash and heat rather than snow.

The smoke drifted away with the voices. Silence creating an unusual stillness over the land. Humans decided the forest was cursed, and I was fine with that. Sometimes I’d sit at apa’s stump, starving, exhausted, eyes burning with tears and ash, straining for sounds of life, a single bird or bee to remind me of joy, barely holding my human form, as much as I hated it. If I let the shift take over, I’d wake up to more destruction and no memory of what I’d done.

“Witchborn!” They screamed at me as they died. “Monster! Cursed!”

Heartbroken, grief-stricken, and alone, meant nothing to them.

I fell asleep there, and woke to snuffles, surprised to open my eyes and find Lena’s fawn tickling my face with its kisses. My heart thumped in joy and fear all at once. I’d forgotten the babe, and somehow it survived.

His legs had grown steady, and he tugged at my hair, playful, though as I gazed at him, I wondered not only how he’d survived, but if it were best to chase him away.

“I’m not safe,” I said, my voice rough from disuse in this form.

He made a tiny noise, and I got the vaguest image of me holding him before I’d gone mad with anger. His view of me as strong and safe coming through the delicate bond despite the monstrous form his baby gaze couldn’t define.

“I’m not safe,” I repeated, but reached out to pet him, heart slowing its race to finally let me breathe. Exhaustion warred with my need to stay resilient and keep the humans out of the woods. My stomach growled with hunger.

The fawn made another pleading noise and tiptoed to the forest’s edge beyond the cave. The smoke faded, leaving a trail of mushrooms and moss peppering the trees. It nibbled at the moss, then looked at me.

A startled laugh burst from me, and I blinked, surprised at the sound, and the sensation of emotions rising beyond the grief. “I don’t eat moss, little one.”

Creatures like the fawn were food as I was some sort of beast. The thought brought back the sadness. Mother had been beautiful, a true goddess. Perhaps I’d inherited more of my father than my mother. Her death had ripped the last traces of light from me.

I turned away from the fawn and headed into the cave. I’d emptied it of memories, setting flame to the trinkets in a fit of rage after I’d removed apa’s body to bury it in the soil with my mother and Lena, regrowth from the final death.

All that remained was a pile of straw for a bed, hard and musty, fit for a beast. I lay down, letting my resolve to stay alert go, and closed my eyes. The fawn hesitated at the entrance of the cave. I could sense him there, gaze peering through the dark at me, and willed him to run before I destroyed him too, as accidental as that might be.

But a few slow heartbeats later, he settled down beside me, little body curled up for added warmth.

“I’m not safe,” I whispered again. The babe, too young to understand, as he snuffled my hair again and lay down for a nap as if it were normal for the beast to rest with the prey. But his quiet breathing and gentle heartbeat lulled me to the first real sleep since the death of my mother and transition to the life of a monster.

W hen I opened my eyes, it was back to the wolf’s sanctuary, lying at my father’s feet. I stared out at the long path of memories. Not a sanctuary at all, but hell. A place of nightmares, horrors of the past, inescapable.

I curled into a ball, not wanting to see the rest, body aching with spreading numbness. A chill curled down my spine as something shifted in the atmosphere, though I knew instantly what it was this time.

“Weak,” the wolf growled from behind me.

I didn’t get up.

“Useless.”

I jolted to my feet and faced it. “Fuck you!”

“Weak,” it snarled.

“They all died! We would really have to be a monster not to grieve!” I clenched my fists, but with the blackening of my hands to the blight I couldn’t feel more than a tingle in them. “If you hate me so much, and believe I’m so weak, why bring me back? Why drag me through this nightmare? I had a good life. My moms were good to me. I have friends. More than this madness.” I waved at the path realizing what was missing from it.

Hope.

“You took Wesley from me. Hurt him. If anyone is weak, it’s you! Afraid of light and love and goodness.” I met its gaze unflinching, angry and filled with grief from returning memories of my previous existence. One chunk of many thousands still unfilled. “If all of this is to turn me into you, into a monster without a soul, I refuse.”

Wesley cursed fate as unchangeable. Everything? No. I wouldn’t become the heartless beast standing before me. “You let everyone die, I saw what kind of monster we could become. It’s not the blight. It’s part of what we are, still you let them die, and I’m the weak one?”

It snarled, jaws gaping wide as if to swallow me whole. I folded my arms across my chest. “You kill me and we both die. Right?”

It glared at me, eyes a swirl of black with hints of red. Rage. My beast, a gift from my sire, perhaps, touched with my mother, as the memories had been filled with a dozen shifts of form, a wolf, a bear, a dragon, and something much darker. This thing I stared at was part of me. A nightmare I’d unleashed a thousand times and this place was a graveyard of those memories.

Was I supposed to defeat the wolf or become it?

I dropped down to sit at the base of my father’s statue, refusing to advance through the gauntlet of blood and pain. “You offer me no hope, what is the point of continuing?”

“Grow strong.”

“Speech not your strong point, eh? Grow strong how? By remembering all the terrible things in our past? Where are the good things? It can’t be all bad.” I wrapped my arms around my knees and stared out at the path, the only hint of light glowing around the Summer king’s statue, but his memory had been pain, too. “What’s the point if all you offer is pain?”

The wolf crouched over me, looming and shifting into the dragon, shadows dripping dark ooze which sizzled and destroyed the growing plants. Each drop that touched my skin turned my nerves to needles of pain, but I wasn’t backing down. “Give me a reason.”

It huffed and a wave of wind swept through the sanctuary with an icy blast I feared would lead to some movie-quality arrival of the ice queen to end us. But the blast slammed into the end of the path and blew away a curtain of ivy, revealing a statue of Wesley. I gasped and got to my feet. An aura of shielding pulsed in visible waves of rippling magic around him locking him behind a barrier a dozen meters deep. Mushrooms and moss curling around the base of his statue. His expression serene as I’d never seen it while he was awake, but he stared down, not at me, and the foliage overhead gave way, illuminating him in sunlight.

“Is this some sort of game to you?” I asked the wolf. “A gauntlet of horrors to reach the princess in the castle?” Wesley would snap at me for calling him a princess, but I figured him for a high maintenance sort of guy. If I ever got out of this nightmare, I’d show him how good I could be at taking care of him.

“Mate,” the wolf growled.

“Yeah, yeah. Why did you send him away then?”

“Safe.”

“From what? Who? Us?” I glared at the beast and realized that was exactly it. The ground around us sizzled, dying beneath our feet. My mother’s and father’s statues expressions had changed to one of fear and horror, as the ooze began to coat the bases of their carving. “Fuck! Stop it! You’re hurting them!”

The wolf vanished in a plume of smoke and ash, leaving me standing in the silent grove, watching the ground to see if it would regrow. I was some sort of fae king, right? Shouldn’t I have power?

Nothing happened. The sizzling stopped, but the ground at the base of the first two carvings remained dry and cracked, dead earth. Needles of numb pain ran up and down my body adding a Gumby-like sensation of unstable mobility to my movement. The fawn had lived. Had that been Wesley? He never mentioned us meeting before. Would he have known?

I took a hesitant step away from my parents, gaze focused on the vague wriggle of magic shielding. The next statue open was down a path to the left, a stag.

“Fuck,” I cursed, dreading whatever nightmare it would bring. “Wait for me, Wesley,” I told the statue at the end and wondered if he could hear me at all. “Pray that I don’t come out of this some batshit crazy human version of the wolf.” I could almost hear Wesley commenting that I was already there, and since I was imagining his voice and talking to myself, maybe I was.