To heal a Rogue

Chapter 19: Past sin

JOHANN

I laughed.

It came out of me before I could stop it, sharp and disbelieving, the kind of laugh that had nowhere else to go. "You’re insane." I said it plainly, because it felt like the only sane response left to me. "You have officially lost your mind, and I don’t know if it’s the disease or the medication they’ve got dripping into your arm, but you are not a Lycan, Mother. Lycans are a bedtime horror story. They are the thing werewolf children get told about so they behave. They do not even exist."

"It’s true," she said, and her voice held none of the wildness I would have expected from someone spinning a delusion. It was calm. Steady. Worse, somehow, for being so composed. "That makes you part Lycan and part werewolf. A combination that has not existed in living memory, Johann. You have no idea how special you are. How badly your grandfather and I orchestrated to have you."

"Orchestrated." I repeated the word like it might taste different the second time. "What does that even mean?"

"You are our salvation."

"I am very confused, Mother." My back was still against the wall. I hadn’t moved from it since her eyes had done that thing, that impossible thing, and some part of me was still waiting for her to laugh and tell me it had been a trick of the light. "And you are starting to scare me."

She studied me for a long moment, and something in her face softened, the way it used to when I was small and frightened of something in the dark corner of my room and she needed to explain why the shadow wasn’t going to hurt me.

"You know the history," she said. "The werewolf version. The one every pup gets taught before they’re old enough to shift." She didn’t wait for me to confirm it. "Long before kingdoms were built, before vampires learned to walk among men, before witches learned to bargain with the world for their magic, there was Selene."

"Mother—"

"Let me finish."

I let her finish, because some old habit of obedience was still stronger than my growing unease.

"Every night she crossed the sky," she said, "watching the world below, taking interest where her sisters did not. She looked at humanity and chose a handful of souls. The ones who protected their families. The ones who kept their word. The ones who lived in harmony with the world around them rather than tearing at it. She gifted them pieces of her own light. That became the first shifters." Her mouth curved, thin and humorless. "A divine blessing. Under every phase of the moon they grew stronger, faster, more connected to each other, and yet they kept full control of themselves. Some of them were closer to her than the rest. Close enough to calm wild beasts, heal wounds with a touch, push back darkness itself." She paused. "The story conveniently leaves out that those particular ones carried her blood directly. Not a gift given. A bloodline shared."

"Okay," I said slowly, because I didn’t know what else to say, and because some part of me wanted her to keep talking so I didn’t have to think too hard yet about what any of it meant.

"Eventually," she continued, "some of them grew greedy according to that flawed tale. They used the strength she gave them to conquer villages. To slaughter people who couldn’t fight back. To rule through fear instead of the harmony she’d chosen them for in the first place. Selene didn’t strip the blessing away." Her eyes had gone distant, fixed on something past me, past the wall, past the room entirely. "She twisted it instead. The silver light inside them curdled into something else. Hunger. Their instincts swallowed whatever humanity they had left. Their shifts became agony instead of grace. They lost themselves completely under every phases of the moon, especially the full moon, and their golden eyes, once a mark of her favor, started burning with something closer to bloodlust than divinity." She looked back at me. "Those became the first cursed wolves. The Lycans."

"Right," I said. "That’s the story. Everyone knows that story."

"That is not the truth." Something in her voice hardened, an edge slipping in beneath the calm. "Our song is the truth, Johann. We loved her first. We fought for her, spread her word before the wolves she defends to death now ever had the heart to carry it. A god walked among us and lived at our side and loved our kin as her own. But her own grief, a loss that was no fault of ours, blinded her eventually. She decided she no longer needed us." Her jaw tightened. "We stopped being the perfect creations in her eyes. We became simply monsters, and so she made us into exactly that."

I stared at her. I didn’t know what to do with my hands, so I crossed my arms instead, holding myself together with something that felt embarrassingly close to physical effort.

"A torment," she said, "so complete that no man born into our bloodline lives to see twenty-five. The women die just as young, or they live long enough while they suffer unimaginable pain and sickness, until they either end it themselves or life ends it for them." Her eyes met mine, steady and unflinching. "I have suffered. I have survived, against every likelihood that says I shouldn’t have. My people, Johann. Your people. We have endured this for longer than you can imagine, waiting for what’s coming."

"I’m twenty-three, Mother."

The words came out before I’d fully processed why I’d said them, some small animal part of my brain doing math it didn’t want to do, running toward the one detail in everything she’d said that actually applied to me directly.

"I did not think you needed to know any of this sordid history until now," she said quietly.

"Because I might die." My voice cracked somewhere in the middle of the sentence, and I hated that it did. "Is that it? Is that what you’re telling me? That I have two years left, if I’m one of your precious Night children, and you decided this was a good time to mention it?"

"You would get the throne," she said, and there was something almost pleading in how quickly she said it, like the words were meant to be comforting.

"As if Father would just conveniently die in time for that to matter." The bitterness came out of me faster than I could soften it, uglier than I meant it to sound, and the second it left my mouth something shifted behind my eyes, some thought arriving before I was ready for it. "Will he? Are you..."

My mother’s face didn’t move. "Of course not."

I didn’t believe the flatness of her answer nearly as much as I wanted to.

"...And what does the throne have to do with any of this?" I said instead, because pursuing the other thread felt like standing too close to a cliff edge in the dark. "The Lycan curse, the bloodline, whatever this is. What does the Alpha King’s seat have to do with a god’s grudge against her own children?"

My mother reached for the water glass on the table beside her bed, took a slow sip, and set it back down with the careful precision of someone buying herself a moment to choose her next words.

"During the age of legend," she said, "after she condemned us, that cruel goddess decided to offer something she called kindness. I call it mockery, personally, but the histories remember it as mercy." Her eyes found mine and held them. "Selene decreed the curse would not be eternal. That one day, should the blood she rejected and the blood she favored become one again, joined properly, the gates she closed on us would open."

"I don’t understand."

"Neither did our ancestors," she said. "Not at first. It took generations for anyone to work out what she actually meant by it." A small, humorless smile crossed her face. "But we did, eventually. We always do."

I felt something cold settle into my chest, the shape of an idea forming before she’d even said it outright, the pieces sliding into place with a horrible kind of inevitability.

"The Alpha King’s seat," I said slowly, "is what governs the entire werewolf world." I heard my own voice as if from a distance, flat and mechanical, working through the logic even as every part of me wanted to refuse it. "And you are currently heir to whatever throne governs your people. The Lycans. Crowned Queen, or whatever title your kind actually uses."

"Yes."

"And I am your son." The cold in my chest spread lower, into my stomach, settling there like something with weight. "Which makes me heir to that as well. Whatever it is. Whoever your people actually are."

"Yes," she said again, quieter this time.

"So if I hold the seat of the Alpha King," I said, the words coming slower now, each one costing something to say aloud, "and I also hold whatever seat waits for me among your people. Both crowns. Both bloodlines, joined in one hand."

My mother didn’t answer right away. She simply watched me, waiting for me to finish the thought myself.

"You end the curse," she said finally, when I didn’t finish it on my own. "That is what the old song promises, Johann. Should the blood she rejected and the blood she favored ever become one again, held by a single hand, in a single crown. You would not simply inherit two thrones." Her voice dropped lower, and something in it trembled now, something that sounded less like triumph and more like desperate hope wrapped around decades of buried grief. "You would be the one who finally closes the distance she opened between us. You would be the one who ends what she started."