Chapter 175: The dream
ÉTIENNE
"We have a deal," I heard her say.
"I do not know if that is what you should do."
The words came out before I had finished crossing to her, and with them came the blood, spilling out from my side in a warm rush that I had not been expecting and could not immediately account for. I pressed my hand against it and felt the quantity of it and understood that my body was not doing what wolf bodies were supposed to do after injury.
I was a Beta. Which meant my healing factor was better than most. But for some reason, I was not healing.
"I know what I am doing," Margaux said.
"I do not think that is entirely true." I kept my voice level despite the effort that was beginning to cost me. "And I say that with the greatest possible respect."
"We share a mate bond." I added when she turned to look at me properly, and whatever she saw in my face sharpened her expression. So I even added. "Remember?"
After that, a cough tore out of me.
Blood came with it.
The kind that came from somewhere internal, which was a different category of problem from the wound in my side.
"What is wrong?" she said.
"My body is probably still processing the injury." I moved my hand away from my side and looked at my palm. It was way too much and I was being a pathetic liar but what could I do. "Give it a moment."
She looked at my palm. Her face went through something.
"Étienne. Are you actually alright?"
"Of course I—"
The ground moved.
Not literally, but in the way the ground moved when the information reaching your legs stopped being reliable, when the signals between the body and the brain became suddenly approximate, and I felt the wall beside me make contact with my shoulder before I had registered reaching for it.
My eyes were doing something. Swimming was the word that arrived for it, the edges of everything going uncertain, the corridor’s dimensions becoming flexible in ways corridors were not supposed to be.
I wanted to tell her I was fine.
I intended to say it with complete conviction, the way I said most things I needed people to believe, and I felt the intention form and then felt the floor come up to meet me faster than I could produce the sentence, and my hands were still at my sides when I hit the ground because nothing had told them to reach out in time.
The pain did not arrive the way pain usually arrived. It was elsewhere, happening to something nearby rather than to me directly. The warmth of the blood was more present than the pain, spreading out from the wound in the side, coating my hand and the stone beneath me in a way that was almost peaceful in its thoroughness.
I could hear her.
She was saying my name, and then she was saying something else, louder, directed away from me, and I understood she was calling for someone, and everything in me that was still functioning wanted to reach for her hand and tell her I was alright, that this was manageable, that she did not need to look the way she sounded.
But I was clearly not alright.
The darkness came without ceremony.
One moment I was in the corridor, and the next moment, I was in nothing. After that, I was somewhere else entirely.
In a field of Forget-me-nots.
They covered the ground in every direction, extending further than any field of them should have extended, the blue of them too vivid and too uniform to be entirely natural. The air here had no temperature. There was light without an obvious source. I stood in the middle of it and looked around and understood that I was not awake, which meant this was something else.
A dream? A nightmare?
"Have you forgotten what you promised?"
The voice was familiar before I could place it. Something in the register of it, the particular way it shaped certain syllables, landed in a part of my memory that had been sealed off for a long time.
I turned.
The apparition looked exactly like my brother in the way a mirror in a funhouse looked like your reflection. The proportions were right, the height, the set of the shoulders, the jawline I remembered from childhood. But something was happening to it that should not have been happening, the image cycling through something terrible. I watched as his flesh gave way to fire and then to what fire did to a person until nothing was left except what the bone remembered of the shape.
He burned.
Over and over. And in the way a damaged recording returned to the same moment, and each time the fire reached its completion he was whole again and then burning again.
"Little brother." His voice had shifted into something underneath itself, a second register running beneath the one I recognized, deeper and older and belonging to nothing that had ever been my brother. "Are you going to let your love get in the way of what you need to do?"
I looked away from the burning.
"No," I said. "Never."
"You have killed many," he said.
"I have."
"But not the three that matter." The air around him changed quality, pressing closer. "The monster Lucian. Your mother-in-law. And your mate."
I turned back to face him.
"All their heads," he said, "need to be in boxes too."
"Margaux did nothing." The words came out without hesitation. "She was a child. Whatever her family did, she was not the instrument of it."
"WHERE IS YOUR LOYALTY?"
The field shook with the volume of it, the forget-me-nots flattening outward from the sound like a pressure wave, and the apparition’s face contorted into something that had fully abandoned the resemblance to my brother, the features rearranging themselves around an anger that was not grief and was not love and was not anything that had ever belonged to my brother in life.
I looked at it.
Behind the apparition, in the space just beyond where it stood, something moved. Low and sinuous, catching the sourceless light in a way that suggested scales, disappearing before I could fix my eyes on it properly.
Something else was here.
Something that was wearing my brother’s face to speak to me.
So I asked. "Who the fuck are you?"
"Your brother, of course. Do you not remember me anymore?"