Chapter 216: Sea Knoll Ebbill

BONNIE

"Good people make mistakes all the time. They fall in love with the wrong people. They fall in love with people who hide their worst, who wear the right face at the right moment. It happens to the wisest and the kindest. It happens in every house and every pack." His thumb brushed my cheekbone. "It does not make your mother a terrible person. It makes her terribly mortal."

"She was not afraid of him," I murmured. "In what I was showed. Not in the slightest and he looked like he cared about her too. It made me somewhat humanize him. Because my mother was a good person. Surely, there has to be good in him."

"Maybe there was," he said softly. "Maybe he loved her, in whatever way a man like him is capable of loving someone. I cannot tell you what was in his heart, Bonnie, and neither can anyone else who never knew him as she did."

His fingers slipped from my chin to my cheek, his touch gentle enough that it hurt.

"But you have to be careful with that thought. You saw a man who looked at your mother with affection, and because you know the kind of woman she was, you want to believe that affection must have come from something good in him. I understand that. I do." He paused, searching my face. "But looking at someone with love and being capable of treating them well are two very different things. Sometimes, a terrible man can love someone. Sometimes, he can even be gentle with them. That does not mean he is a good man, and it certainly does not make him any less responsible for the things he has done. I would know."

I swallowed, but the ache in my throat refused to ease.

"Then how could she have loved him?"

"Because she was mortal, Bonnie. Because whatever you saw was only a moment in their lives, and whatever passed between them was theirs, not yours." His thumb brushed beneath my eye, catching a tear I had not realised had fallen. "Your mother could have loved him with every good part of herself and still never known the full extent of what he was capable of. Or perhaps she knew things about him that you and I will never know. I cannot say."

He leaned closer, his forehead nearly touching mine.

"But whatever the truth is, her love for him does not make her foolish, and it does not make him innocent. You do not have to choose between believing your mother was a good woman and accepting that the man she loved was a monster. Both things can be true, Bonnie, even if they are difficult to live with."

Something in my chest cracked open, quietly, like ice letting go in spring. I did not cry. I had nothing left to cry with. I only leaned my forehead against his collarbone and breathed.

He let me. For a long time he let me.

Then I felt him go still against me, the way a man goes still when a thought arrives.

"What?" I asked, lifting my head.

"Nothing. It is only..." He frowned at the fire. "I always believed the Lycan race was extinct. Every history I was ever taught implied it. Even the elders that I trust believe it. The curse takes them. It eats at them like death itself, and they cannot breed true. It made sense that Lycaon survived, because he is a god’s son and a god’s son does not die easily. But the others." He shook his head slowly. "How could any of them still be alive?"

"I do not know," I said.

"Well." He rubbed his jaw. "It is out there now. We cannot unknow it." His eyes sharpened. "I know that monster can hop into people’s dreams. Yours, at least. And it makes me wonder what else he could do from inside that tank. What else he has already done."

"When we are back, I will call the witch families who helped with the seal. They need to strengthen it. The runes must be weakening. Almost two decades is a long time for any working to hold, and he has clearly found the cracks."

I nodded. It was all I could manage.

He drew me against him again, one hand sliding up between my shoulder blades, and I closed my eyes and let my weight fall into him. The linen smelled of lake water and sun. His chin settled on top of my head. For a moment the world contracted to the beat of his heart and the fire’s soft crackle, and I thought, with a dizzy, grateful wonder, nothing has changed.

I had spent days believing that the moment he knew the real shape of me, he would leave. Yet... here I was in a room that smelled of lavender, in the arms of this man I was starting to care a lot about, and he had only held on tighter.

I opened my eyes.

The window was wide, its casement thrown open to the afternoon. A breeze stirred the curtain. And on the sill, perfectly still, a heron stood and looked at me.

It was a big bird, gray and white, taller than I would have guessed, with a long dagger of a beak and a black plume sweeping back from its eye. The sun lit the edges of its feathers. It stood on one leg, as herons do, one round yellow eye fixed on me with an intensity I did not like.

It was a long way from the lake. And it was so unlike herons to come to windows.

I stared at it. It stared back. Its head tilted, slowly, the way a person’s might, as though it were listening.

Lysander’s heart thudded under my ear, steady, unaware.

"Lysander," I whispered.

"Mm?"

The heron opened its wings.

They were enormous, a gray sweep that blotted the window for a heartbeat. Then it pushed off the sill and lifted into the blue, long legs trailing, and was gone over the roofline before I could draw breath to say anything more.

"What is it?" Lysander asked.

I watched the empty square of sky.

"Nothing," I said, and he did not feel the lie, because I had made sure my fingers were pressed hard against the bond. "It was only a bird."