Chapter 128: The Unfolding Truth VIII

Third Person POV

The door was closed.

The fire had burned down to something quieter than it had been when they were all three sitting around it.

The room felt different with just the two of them in it, smaller somehow, the way rooms got smaller when the thing that had been filling them was gone.

Sonita’s bag sat on the floor, where she had dropped it when they arrived. The bag was worn soft at the corners. The weight of everything she had packed in the dark was still in it.

Helen turned from the threshold.

She looked at Sonita. At the bag. At Sonita’s face again.

"Why are you here with your bag?" she asked. Quiet. Not accusing. Just asking the question that had been sitting in the room since the door opened and she had seen it on Sonita’s shoulder.

Sonita opened her mouth.

Nothing came out.

She closed it. Tried again. Her hands moved at her sides, restless, looking for something to hold onto and not finding anything. She looked at the wall. At the fire. At the small window, the morning light was beginning to press against the glass.

Anywhere except Helen’s face.

"I..." She stopped. Started again. "I... just."

Nothing useful came after that either.

"Sonie," Helen said.

The nickname landed softly and Sonita’s hands went still.

Helen crossed the room and sat down on the low bench near the table. She reached out and took Sonita’s hand, pulling her gently down beside her. Not forcing. Just making space. The way she made space for things, quietly and without making it a production.

They sat together for a moment. The fire did its low crackling. Outside, the last of the rain was dripping from the eaves.

"I know you were not just a wolf," Helen said.

Sonita’s head came up so fast her neck complained about it.

"W... what?"

"I knew." Helen’s voice was completely calm.

The calm of someone stating something they had known for a while and had simply been waiting for the right moment to say.

"I knew when I first met you. Something about you was different. The way certain things happened around you that did not happen around other people." She looked at Sonita’s face. "I kept waiting for you to tell me. I thought eventually you would. But you never did."

Sonita stared at her. Her heart was doing something irregular inside her chest.

Helen tilted her head slightly. "So you can tell me now. What are you?"

Sonita looked down at her own hands. They were shaking slightly, a fine tremor that she pressed flat against her knees to stop. She had been keeping this folded up and put away since before she had words for what it was. Since she was small enough to understand that some things were safer left in the dark. Since she had watched her mother’s golden light appear at her fingertips one evening and understood immediately and instinctively that this was not something you announced.

But Helen was sitting beside her with her hand in hers and her grey eyes patient and open and not going anywhere.

"I am a sorceress," Sonita said. Barely above a whisper.

Helen smiled.

Not wide. Not dramatic. Just warm, the small real kind that meant something rather than performing something.

"Sorceress," she said. Like she was trying the word on. "That is actually kind of amazing."

Sonita blinked at her. "Amazing?"

"Why would you hide something like that? It is not bad."

"It is not bad," Sonita said slowly. "But people like us. We are different. And different is not always." She looked for the word. "Safe."

Helen was quiet for a moment. She nodded. Not agreeing exactly. Just acknowledging that she had heard it and understood what it meant.

Then she looked at Sonita directly. "Tell me why you ran away from home."

Sonita exhaled. The kind of exhale that had been waiting to happen for several hours and took its time on the way out.

"I had an argument with my family," she said. "It kind of resulted in this." A gesture toward the bag on the floor.

"What kind of argument," Helen said carefully, "would make your family turn you out?"

Sonita looked at her hands. "They did not turn me out. I am the one who left."

Helen looked at her. The words sat between them and the fire crackled and the morning kept pressing at the window and then something shifted in Helen’s face. Slow and quiet.

"It was about me," she said, "right?"

Sonita did not answer.

She did not have to. The silence answered for her, complete and obvious, and Helen looked at her own hands and was quiet for a moment. Her fingers were still. She was thinking through something, Sonita could see it, working through whatever it meant that her best friend had walked out of her house in the rain and the dark because of her.

"Why would you go that far?" Helen said. Her voice had gone small. "I mean. I am just."

She stopped herself. The word she had been about to use sat in the space where she had stopped and Sonita felt it without hearing it.

Nobody.

"You are my friend," Sonita said. Firm. No room in it for argument. "You are not just anybody. You are my friend and if I have to protect you I will. That is not complicated."

She reached over and took Helen’s hand again.

"I am not a normal werewolf," she said. "And I know you are not normal either. We are both things that do not fit into the categories people make for things they understand." She looked at Helen’s face. "So if my family calls you a monster, then by their measure I am one too. And I would rather be a monster beside you than whatever they want me to be without you."

Helen’s face did the thing it did when something had hit her somewhere she had not been expecting.

The smile stayed but the eyes changed. They went bright and wet at the edges, the kind of bright that came just before tears rather than after them. She did not wipe them away when they fell. One and then another, running down quietly.

"Thank you," she said.

Sonita shook her head. "No. That is not all."

She squeezed Helen’s hand and leaned forward slightly.

"I want to know what you are," she said. "You are my best friend. I have been wondering since the beginning. And I think I have been patient enough."

Helen looked at her. The tears were still on her cheeks, unhurried.

"Do you really want to know?" she asked.

"Yes," Sonita said. "Please."

Helen looked at her for a long moment. At the face, she knew better than almost any other face. At the eyes that were waiting with a patience that was real rather than performed, that would wait as long as it needed to without making her feel the waiting.

She exhaled slowly.

"I am a nine-tailed fox," she said.

Sonita’s mouth opened.

It stayed open for a moment while her brain worked through what her ears had just delivered.

"What...," she said.

"Yeah." Helen’s shoulder lifted slightly. "I know."

"A nine-tailed fox," Sonita said again. Not a question. Just repeating it as if hearing herself say it would make it settle. "Like in the stories. Like the actual myths."

"Like the actual myths," Helen confirmed.

"But how are you even..." Sonita stopped. She did not have the sentence ready. She had several half-sentences and none of them had endings. "I mean you just... Helen, you are a living legend, and you stay..." Sonita looked around, "Here in this tiny place with a garden"

"It’s still my place," Helen replied. The corner of her mouth moved.

"That is." Sonita leaned back slightly. "That is genuinely incredible. I cannot believe you were sitting on that and you never said anything."

"You never said anything either," Helen pointed out.

Sonita opened her mouth. Closed it. Conceded the point with a small tilt of her head.

A moment passed. The fire had found a comfortable rhythm. The morning light was properly through the window now, pale and steady, falling across the table and the floor and the bag that was still sitting where it had been sitting since Sonita dropped it.

"Can I see it?" Sonita asked.

Helen blinked. "What?"

"The tails." Sonita leaned forward. "Can I see them? I just. I need to see them. I need to know this is real."

Helen went still.

"I do not think that is a good idea," she said carefully.

Sonita’s shoulders dropped. Her face did the thing it did when she wanted something and was being told she could not have it, a specific expression she had been deploying since childhood with variable success. "So I can never see it?"

Helen looked at her.

At the face she had known since before she understood what it meant to have a friend.

"I did not say never," Helen said. Something warm moved through her voice. "Just not right now."

Sonita’s face came back up. The particular brightening of it when something had been restored.

"That is why you are my best friend," she said. And she pulled Helen into a hug before Helen had finished deciding whether to brace for it. Tight and immediate, the way Sonita did everything, without half-measures.

Helen hugged her back.

They sat together on the low bench with their arms around each other and the fire doing its quiet work and the morning continuing to arrive outside the window. Two girls holding on to what they had found in each other, which had turned out to be more than either of them had known to look for when they started.

"You are not a monster," Helen said from inside the hug. Muffled slightly. Completely certain.

Sonita held her tighter. "Neither are you."

Outside, the sun was pushing through the mist. Slow and unhurried, the way mornings pushed through when they had decided to arrive properly.

Neither of them knew what was coming toward them from the direction of that rising light.

But right now they had this. The warmth of the fire and the arms around each other and the truth that had finally been put down between them, solid and real and taking up exactly the space it deserved.

That was enough.

For now, that was completely enough.