Chapter 126: Negatives 1

BONNIE

I woke up on my back, but there was nothing beneath me. No stone, no straw, no cushion of grass. Just a gray that stretched in every direction, flat and blank, wiped clean of anything that might have told me where I was. I tried to sit up and my stomach lurched, the kind of drop you get when you look down from too high, except I wasn’t high. I was nowhere, and nowhere had no floor to catch me.

My hands hit the ground. Except it wasn’t ground. It was texture without temperature, solid without substance. I dug my fingers in and felt nothing resist them.

"Not again," I muttered, thinking it was another dreamscape mess. My voice didn’t echo. It died before it reached anything.

I pushed myself up to my knees. The gray had depth if I stared hard enough, layers like dirty glass stacked one behind the other, and staring at it too long made my eyes water. I blinked, and when I opened them, something was there.

It stood twenty feet away, or maybe twenty inches. Distance didn’t seem to mean anything here, and neither, I was starting to understand, did anything else I thought I knew. The thing was massive, shoulder-height to my chest if I’d been standing, and I was no short woman. Its fur was black, but the wrong kind of black. It drank the light instead of throwing it back, each ripple of the coat swallowing the dim glow of the place whole.

I’d have called it a wolf if I hadn’t looked at its eyes.

It had horizontal pupils which were rectangular, like a goat’s, set in a yellow-white sclera that glowed faintly against all that ink-dark fur. I didn’t know what animal had eyes like that. I didn’t know what animal grew to the size of a great moose with paws that could crush a skull like an eggshell, either. I only knew it wasn’t anything I’d met before, not in this life or the last dream that had spat me out here.

I scrambled backward, palms sliding uselessly against the not-ground. "Who are you?"

It tilted its head. The movement was too fluid, too knowing, like something wearing an animal’s shape the way I might wear a coat. It sat back on its haunches, tail curling around its feet, and when it spoke, the voice came from everywhere and nowhere at once, female, and familiar in a way I couldn’t place, like a word sitting on the tip of my tongue that refused to land.

"You have forgotten me again." It sounded amused. Tired. Like this was a conversation we’d had a thousand times and it had grown bored of playing its part. "I seem to you to be nothing more than a duvet you crawl into when you don’t want to face the world."

My breath came short.

"Why wouldn’t you let me finish them?" Its ears pricked forward, waiting.

"Finish who?"

"Don’t play stupid."

I got my feet under me, wobbling, legs numb from the not-cold as it continued.

"Johann. The others. You let me take over. We had our hands around his throat, and then you stopped."

"Stopped?"

"Well, let me finish. You stopped when I did not want to. Why?"

I didn’t know how I knew that was true. I only knew it was.

"Are you talking about killing people?"

"Little idiot." The voice dropped into something like a purr. It took one step toward me, then another, and each footfall made no sound at all, but I felt it in my teeth anyway, a vibration that rattled my jaw. It closed the distance until I could smell its breath: copper, no iron... it had to be blood. Blood that had gone dry years ago. "You think I stopped because I wanted to? You think I craved restraint?"

It was like it was ignoring eveything I was saying and focused on killing. Vague flashes of memory came to me as it circled me, its bulk brushing my shoulder, fur coarse as wire against my skin.

I flinched away, spinning to keep it in front of me, but it was always faster, always at my back, always breathing against my ear before I could turn all the way around.

"You wanted to finish them. You craved it. Especially that Prince. I felt it in your marrow, that sweet, hot want to crush his windpipe until it gave like wet paper. Don’t put your shame on me."

My head throbbed. I pressed my palms against my temples and more fragments surfaced, sharp as broken glass. Fia’s face, pale and terrified. The crack of my hand against her ribs. Lysander’s voice, hoarse, begging me to stop, and something in me laughing at him. It was... It was this thing.

I dropped my hands. "You hurt Fia."

The wolf stopped circling. It went very still, those goat eyes fixed on me, unblinking.

"You wanted to harm Lysander too." My voice cracked on his name. "I felt it. You wanted to crush him. That was my mate."

The air shifted around us, thick and close, like the moment before a struck match catches. The wolf’s shape blurred, stretching upward and inward, fur retracting into skin, limbs folding and reforming with a sound like wet leather tearing. I stumbled back, my heel catching on nothing, and went down hard.

A woman stood where the wolf had been.

She had my cheekbones. My jaw. My hands, down to the tiny little discolartion on the left knuckle. But her hair hung black and tangled to her waist, and her eyebrows sat like dark slashes over the same goat eyes, the same horizontal pupils, staring out of a face that belonged to me and didn’t.

I touched my own hair without thinking. She looked exactly like me. The difference was the hair. Mine was Platinum white. It had always been platinum white.

"She stood in our way," the woman said. She wore my clothes, or clothes cut like mine, torn now and marked with things I didn’t want to name. "Fia. She called herself a friend and stood there with her hands raised, her voice so steady, and chose the crown over you. Over us."

"She was trying to help."

"She was trying to save her own skin." The woman crouched, feral, knees splayed, fingers dragging through the gray like it had current in it. "And Lysander. Your precious mate. Your beloved. He betrayed the trust you gave him. You begged him to finish it, to make Johann pay for what he’d done, and he chose politics over your grief. Over justice."

I shook my head, hard enough to hurt. "He chose the kingdom. He chose to keep us alive."

"He chose his throne." She crawled toward me, unhurried, certain of where this ended. "I did us a favor, Bonnie. I showed them what happens when they push too hard. I showed them the teeth they’ve spent this whole time pretending to believe that we could not possibly have."

"Who the hell are you?" I scrambled back on my elbows, but she matched me stride for stride, her hips swaying low, her fingers trailing through the not-ground like it was water she meant to drown me in. "How did you get inside my head?"

She stopped. Her head tilted, that same wolf-gesture, patient and inhuman, and she laughed. It sounded like bells breaking.