To heal a Rogue

BONNIE

The cough dragged something loose in my chest, something that had been sitting there since before I opened my eyes, and I stared down at my own hands while it worked its way out of me. Half of me expected to find blood again. There wasn’t any. Just my palms, pale and trembling slightly in the low light, and I turned them over like they might tell me something my own memory couldn’t.

Had any of it actually happened? The beast who had taken my mother’s voice and cadence to drown me. The pinch that left a real mark on real skin. The strange dream meadow. The bound man with green eyes I’d already seen once before, in several different shapes, snarling over me with claws. His mother’s voice, flat and merciless, cursing him in front of an audience of shifting, faceless women.

What had she said?

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

It was so vivid in my mind. How he’d screamed that he’d done it all for her. For her love.

None of it made sense laid out against a plain infirmary ceiling. I couldn’t tell if the goddess had been trying to hand me something, some warning wrapped in old grief, or if my own mind had come apart under enough pressure that it started manufacturing horrors to fill in the cracks.

I looked around the room properly this time. Stone walls. A lamp burning bright near the door. It felt real. But I still wasn’t entirely convinced.

My eyes found Lysander, and for one unfair, ugly second, my whole body braced itself, waiting for his face to blur and shift the way every face in every dream had shifted lately. I was expecting the worst. I was waiting for his hands to close around my throat instead of reach for me.

Then he pulled me into his arms.

I didn’t relax right away. I couldn’t make myself. But there was something about the specific weight of it, the exact pressure of his palm flat between my shoulder blades, like he was trying to hold me together rather than pin me somewhere I couldn’t escape, that told my body the truth before my mind caught up. This was him. Actually him. My arms came up slowly and wrapped around his back, fisting into the fabric of his shirt.

"I was so afraid," I tried to be brave with my voice, but it shuddered, and my voice came out smaller than I wanted it to, thinner than I would have allowed if I’d had any warning this was coming.

"It’s fine now," he assured me.

It wasn’t, not really. But I let myself believe it anyway, for the length of one breath.

Over his shoulder, movement caught my eye. Someone was being lifted off the floor and settled onto a stretcher. They were limp, with their head lolling to one side.

"Who’s that?" I asked.

He turned, followed my gaze, and something in his jaw tightened before he answered. "Don’t worry about her."

"Why not?"

Something rolled off him through the bond before he’d even finished the sentence. It was guilt, and goddess was it thick and heavy, with worry stacked on top of it like sediment settling in still water.

"What happened?" I said, pushing myself up slightly against the pillows. "Please tell me."

He sighed and glanced toward the girl being wheeled out through the far doors, and I watched his shoulders drop under some weight he clearly hadn’t decided how to carry yet.

"We wanted to figure out who did this to you," he said. "So I brought in a witch. But whatever attacked you was stronger than her. I think... I think it took her magic."

I sucked in a breath sharp enough to hurt. "Goddess... I... I think I can fix her," I said as I tried to sit all the way up, and his hand came down gently against my shoulder, holding me in place without any real force behind it, just enough insistence that I felt the weight of his intent.

"You need to rest," he said. "Your hands and your stomach haven’t even healed yet."

I looked down at my own hands. He was right. They were still open and still raw beneath the salve someone had smoothed over them while I had been unconscious.

I reached for the hum anyway, that familiar pull low in my chest, and waited for the blue glow to answer. It flickered once, weak and uncertain, and then it died before it reached my palms.

"Seeing that," he said, quiet, "I have to assume you’re not exactly in shape to help anyone else right now. If there is even a chance that you can help her, it can wait until you are all better. Help yourself first, Bonnie. Just get better. For now."

I wanted to argue. Every instinct in me wanted to push back, to insist I could manage it if I just tried hard enough, but something in the way he said it, steady and immovable, told me he wasn’t going to accept any other answer tonight. I let it go, though it cost me something.

He fully sat down beside the bed when he realized I was not going to fight him. "What happened?"

"I’m not entirely sure," I admitted. "All I can really say is that some creature attacked me. I do not know if I can call it a creature. It was definitely a man."

He nodded at that, even if it was clear he did not fully understand.

"Your dreams are literally bleeding into reality," he added, dragging a hand down his face. "I thought you were having a—" He stopped himself and cleared his throat instead. "I thought it was an ordinary sex dream. Before you started bleeding from three different places." He let out a breath. "Delta also told me this wasn’t the first time. That your dreams have done this before, she said you once choked water straight out of your lungs."

Heat rushed up my neck at the mention of the sex dream. Had he been awake? I quickly pushed the embarrassment away, though. We were having a very important conversation. "Yeah." I pulled the blanket tighter around myself. "He took the shape of my mother that time. Tried to drown me in a bathtub that felt exactly like the one from my childhood."

"Fuck! I need to know exactly who this bastard is!" Lysander said, something dark cutting through his voice now. "Did you see his face?"

"I’m not sure. He shifts. But it’s a man, and he’s strong. Stronger than anything I’ve felt in a dream before because he is so real there." I hesitated. "He’s trying to kill me because I keep getting in the way of something. He’s trying to reach someone, and every time I show up, it interrupts whatever he’s attempting. He got angry enough at me interrupting him that he decided killing me was worth the trouble."

I looked at his face, at how lost he seemed trying to follow the shape of it, and something in me softened despite myself.

"It doesn’t fully make sense to me either," I said. "But that’s the closest thing to his motivation I’ve got." I let out a slow breath. "This time, though, he had every chance to finish it. To kill me. Hell... He’d nearly succeeded, honestly. And then he didn’t. He let me go, and then I got pulled somewhere else instead into what felt like a memory. His memory, I believe. Except the timeline doesn’t add up at all. Whoever he actually is, he’d have to be old. Impossibly old."

"And also," I said, "The monster that did this to me, he felt like—"

"Like what?" Lysander pushed.

"Like me," I said, quieter now. "I don’t know why. But I think he might be a healer too."

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