Chapter 45

Forty-Five

FINN

I paced for a while, then laid down beneath a tree without a statue and tried to sleep, hoping to reach Wesley in a dream. While I dozed for a time, I didn’t dream at all. When I woke I stretched, the ache having vanished, and my clothes were restored. I tugged on the hoodie, sniffing it for any lingering scent of Wesley, sad to find none.

Was this glamour? It felt real.

The kitten, back to its small and fluffy pocket-size, prowled the path like a silent guard. “You should go,” I told it. “Before the wolf hurts you.”

The kitten glanced my way and gave me a half-hearted breathy meow.

“I appreciate your help.” Even if eating the cookies hadn’t released me from the realm. My heart raced with the new knowledge that the Summer king couldn’t help me. I was supposed to be king of this realm, insanely powerful with magic to build an entire world. “I guess it makes sense why I was drawn to the paranormal ghost stuff.” A couple dozen more statues littered the path to Wesley at the end. Each time I completed one, the barrier around the next dropped. How many nightmares did I have to survive to get through this gauntlet?

Wesley mentioned the boy, and that he still lived. I got up and wandered the path, studying the statues for a sign of him. How could all these memories exist, and yet that one wasn’t featured? Because he lived? Were these unfamiliar faces all deaths I had to recall? Horrors I’d visited upon the world?

I stopped to gaze at Hector’s statue, the wolf half hidden in shadows behind it. Hector hadn’t died. The wolf carving wasn’t the boy, rather one of the attackers. Perhaps the one who had poisoned my blood and turned me into a werewolf.

“I’m a werewolf now, right? That’s what that dream was?” I asked my little fluffy friend. “A transition, which is a type of death, even if not a true death.”

The kitten gave me another meow. Was that a yes?

The pain had been my body trying to shift, but the wolf had broken free from me, so did that mean I couldn’t change? “Fuck.”

I glanced back to my parent’s statues. Both looked at peace, sleeping, as if my experience with their memory had stripped away any last discomfort they might have had. I’d never really been human, that’s what their memory taught me. Perhaps my father and mother had been part human, and a thousand questions trickled through my mind, unanswered, the memories not yet returned to fill out the puzzle.

“I think she loved me,” I said. “I wish I remembered more of my father.”

Hector’s thread unraveled in my mind and I could recall he had mated, and had a handful of fawns, whom I’d watched grow. Always from a distance as I feared I’d hurt them. From time-to-time Hector and I would meet, his sadness over our separation fading over the years, while mine grew. I convinced myself it was for the best. Not only was I a beast from birth, now a curse tainted my blood, forcing me to shift when the moon glowed full overhead.

Keeping those I loved at arm’s length was safer. Both from me and the world that seemed to hate what I was.

I stared down at my hands, the dark blotch of bruise-like coloring and tingle of needles reminding me of the blight. “Do you know what this is? Is it from the wolf? How do I stop it?”

The kitten’s ears drooped. I scooped him up and held him, his fur a fluffy touch-stone that triggered a handful of memories of other wolves I’d met in my life, and a quick flash of a small red fox.

“I think I remember more of Sebastian,” I told the kitten as I wandered the path and petted him, cradling him like a baby. “I hope I didn’t really fuck him up. I always thought I’d be a good dad, but I guess the other part of me is sort of crazy.”

I set the kitten on the path near the Summer king’s tree.

“Can you get back?” I asked him. “I want you to be safe.” From me, I added, but didn’t speak the words. Wesley cursed fate, and all of this sanctuary stood as a gauntlet of fate’s attempts to control my life. Did they want me to become a raving beast?

The kitten wandered up to the statue of Sebastian, walking through the barrier as though it weren’t there at all. I gaped at it, and knew I couldn’t do the same as the rippling oil-spill half rainbow color told me it sizzled with magical energy.

“Can you get to Wesley’s statue, too?” I asked.

The kitten peered down the path, but sat down at the base of the Summer king’s carving.

“Right, this nightmare is meant for me and me alone.” I sighed. “If I survive all this, mentally, I mean, then I need to have a very brutal discussion with the wolf on personal accountability, post-traumatic stress, and getting a fucking clue.” I headed to the next open set of statues; a path filled with a handful of ordinary looking people. Were they friends? Family? People I’d slaughtered?

The last thought made me pause. How easily could I become that monster?

I clenched my hands into fists and closed my eyes, breathing deep and trying to pull forward whatever that beast was. My mother hadn’t been a nightmare unless someone directly hurt her, and I recalled my years before her death, in which she taught me the same. Control.

Her death shattered my control. Did I ever find it again or continue killing indiscriminately? Hector’s memory led me to think that I’d regained some semblance of balance. From time-to-time humans came and went, and I even wandered among them. Gentler beings never had to fear me, as I nurtured the forest back to health and kept the humans out with legends of spooky events and an occasional scare.

Not unlike a thousand ghost stories I’d heard in this lifetime.

“I could have slaughtered all of Europe,” I said to no one. “But I didn’t. That means I’m not all bad, right?” I glanced back at the kitten who stared at me from a little loaf position at the base of Sebastian’s tree. “Every memory I complete triggers the awakening of a thousand more,” I said. “The first acts as a hammer of emotion, the rest a trickle of pieces falling into place.”

I nodded to myself, understanding some of what this sanctuary meant. “I have to face my past to have a chance at my future. I get that. My therapist is going to have a field day if I get out of here.” The path was a battleground of choices, good and bad. Things the wolf thought I needed to grow stronger, or turning points that led it to ripping us in half?

For the first time since I’d entered this terrible realm, I got an aching sense in my heart of a gaping hole. A wound which throbbed like an old injury. Soul pain? Emptiness? The sense of something missing inside. I thought for half a heartbeat that it was Wesley, but that wasn’t right either. My heart longed for him, a strange attraction that made me want to wrap him up and protect him unlike I’d ever felt before.

The soul wound dug deeper, as though it oozed blood and kept anything else from finding a connection to me, including Wesley.

“Fuck,” I cursed again pressing my hand to my chest. “Becoming a werewolf tore my soul, made it two instead of one.” And now I was missing the other half of my soul, which was the wolf. It tried to give me a normal human life, without all this trauma, but injured both of us further. “Fuck,” I said. “This is a disaster.”

The kitten gave me another breathy meow that sounded like agreement.