To heal a Rogue

BONNIE

The euphoria did not last.

"You like being his little whore, don’t you."

The voice had been Lysander’s a second ago. It wasn’t anymore. It dragged itself down into something guttural, something that scraped instead of spoke.

"Little Omega thinks she can be a queen because her hands can spark."

I opened my eyes and there was no green in them anymore, no gold bleeding at the edges. There was nothing at all. A grey, faceless thing pinned me to the mattress, and I screamed loud enough to tear something in my own throat. It did not help much but I continued to scream and shove and claw at whatever passed for its shoulders.

I got a leg free and drove my heel into it, hard, and it staggered enough that I twisted out from under it and slammed my palm into the side of its head. Something in its neck gave with a wet, wrong sound, and its head kept turning past where a head should stop, all the way around, like an owl deciding to look behind itself.

Its spine followed. I watched it happen, watched the whole shape of it fold and stretch, legs lengthening past anything a body should allow, fingers sharpening into something that ended in points.

"You fight like a girl," it said, and the words came out wet, like they’d been dragged through something.

I went for the door. My hands found the handle and it wouldn’t turn, wouldn’t budge, no matter how hard I threw myself against it.

It swung at me. I dropped and rolled and heard the mattress tear behind me, stuffing spilling out in a soft cloud. Another swing caught the mirror on the wall and the whole thing shattered, glass raining down in long silver streaks.

I did not want that thing’s claws anywhere near my skin. Not after what happened the last time something in this place had touched me while I dreamed.

There was a window. I didn’t think about it. I threw myself through it and hit grass instead of stone, and I kept running the second my feet found ground, because whatever was behind me hadn’t stopped.

It hadn’t stopped at all.

"What did I ever do to you?" I shouted back over my shoulder, my lungs already burning. "What do you even want from me?"

"You dared give me hope."

Its voice came closer than I wanted it to. "Why do you keep reaching for me?"

I risked a glance back and regretted it instantly. It was gaining, its long legs eating up ground faster than mine ever could.

"You’re the one who keeps showing up in my dreams," I said, my voice cracking with the effort of both running and talking. "Who are you?"

"This isn’t your dreamscape," it said. "It’s mine. I left it open, waiting for a kindred spirit to find me. To free me." Something in its voice twisted, ragged with an emotion I couldn’t name. "You’ve given me hope twice now. I’ll be damned if I let it happen a third time. You need to die."

My foot caught on something, a root or a stone, and I went down hard, the meadow grass tearing at my palms as I hit.

It was on me before I could get back up.

Its claws came for my stomach, and I grabbed whatever part of it I could reach, holding on with everything I had even as the points sank in, even as the pain bloomed white and total through my middle.

"Maybe you’re locked up because you’re a psychotic monster," I gasped, blood already slicking my hands where I gripped its arm. "You’re trying to kill me because I what? Because I—"

"It helps," it said, almost thoughtful now, "that you happen to be one of her special creations."

Eyes began forming where there had been nothing. Slow at first, then all at once, brilliant green, too bright, too alive for something built out of shadow and rage.

At the same damn time too, a nose started to form.

"I want to hurt you," it said."And I want to relish it. I want to see it and I want to smell it."

It drove the claws deeper. I felt them find my stomach properly this time, slicing through without much resistance at all, and I prayed to whatever was left of the goddess in me that my hands would spark, that the hum would rise, that anything at all would happen to make this stop.

Nothing came.

The creature paused.

Something shifted across whatever passed for its face, shock breaking through the malice, and it leaned in close to the wound it had just carved, studying it like it had found something it hadn’t expected.

"What in the world," it murmured.

It pulled back and looked at me properly, and whatever it saw made it smile, slow and wide and entirely too pleased with itself.

"Interesting," it said.

Then it was gone, and I was left alone in the meadow, blood soaking into grass that shouldn’t exist anywhere real, my hands pressed uselessly over a wound that refused to close.

I forced myself upright, my hands slick and shaking, and I stood there in the middle of that too-perfect meadow shouting at nothing.

"Hello! Let me out, you bastard! Let me out!"

Nothing answered. No door appeared. No window to throw myself through. Just grass, endless and silver under some light that didn’t come from any sun I recognized, and my own voice bouncing back at me with nowhere to go.

Then the ground dropped out from under everything.

I didn’t fall so much as the world simply reassembled itself around me, the meadow bleeding away into something colder, older, made of stone instead of grass. I stood in what looked like the remains of a courtyard, ruined columns rising up on either side, and in the center of it, bound with rope that glowed faintly at every knot, knelt a bald man with green eyes.

His eyes.

I knew them. I’d just been staring into a pair exactly like them, set in a face made of shadow and rage, moments before I’d been thrown out of that meadow entirely. Except this face was whole. Human, or close enough to it, gaunt and beautiful in some terrible way, his skin pale under whatever light lit this place.

Women moved around him in slow, deliberate formation, shifting positions like dancers rehearsing something sacred, their robes changing color as they turned, one moment white, the next black, then red, then gone entirely into something I couldn’t name.

A woman stepped forward from among them. I couldn’t make out her face no matter how hard I tried, the details sliding away every time I focused, the same way my mother’s face had slid away in that other dream. But her voice carried across the ruined courtyard clear as anything.

"You have humiliated me," she said. "And just because you are my blood does not mean you will escape punishment."

The bald man lifted his head. "Mother—"

"Tonight," she said, cutting him off without raising her voice at all, "I intend to curse you. And your acolytes, since all of you want a new religion so badly." Something in her tone went colder than stone. "Have it, then."

She raised one hand.

"I curse ******," she said, "first of my womb, and my greatest pain."

What was that? A certain thing she said seemed to glitch out.

The thoughts did not stay very long however as the boy screams pierced the air.

He screamed. Not in pain, not yet, but in something worse, something closer to grief, his bound hands clawing uselessly at the ropes holding him.

"I did this for you," he said, and his voice cracked entirely apart on the words. "Everything. All of it. For you. For your love."

The light around them began to curdle, gold bleeding out of the air and turning dark, and I stood frozen at the edge of it all, watching a mother unmake her own son, unable to look away.

Was this the thing that was trying to kill me? Was this a memory?

Only for the woman to turn back and say, "You shouldn’t be here child. Him giving you access to this memory is not by mistake. He has probably figured out what you are. Which is why I avoided contact with you for so long."

Was this also a memory? I wondered.

I had to know. "Are you actually talking to me?"

"Of course, Bonnie."

I was going to say something else when I woke up gasping with Lysander’s face hovering over mine.

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