# Chapter 2: What She Told Me
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I don't dream about her often.
That's not true. I dream about her all the time. I just don't usually *remember*, because I made sure I wouldn't. That was one of the first things I learned how to do: put a door on it, lock the door, lose the key somewhere in the part of my brain that handles lacrosse stats and the periodic table.
But tonight there's a girl asleep on my couch who felt frost come off me in the dark, and the door is open, and I'm too tired to close it.
So.
Fine.
Let's do this.
---
**FOUR**
The first thing I remember is the ground going away.
Not falling. The opposite of falling. My mom has me under the arms in the preserve, back behind the old Hale property where nobody goes, and she says *ready?* and I say *ready* because I'm four and I would've said ready to anything she asked, and then she lets go and I don't come down.
I'm just… up. Six feet off the pine needles with my sneakers dangling and my arms out like a plane, and I'm laughing so hard I hiccup.
She's laughing too. Head back, full-throated, the laugh nobody in Beacon Hills ever heard from Claudia Stilinski, because Claudia Stilinski laughed politely at PTA meetings and dinner parties and my dad's terrible jokes. This laugh was for the woods.
"Higher, Mieczysław?"
"Higher!"
And she lets me. Not far. Never over the tree line, that was a rule even then. But high enough that I can see the whole preserve going gold in the evening light, and for a second, I understand that this is what I am. Not the crying kid at daycare. Not the one who couldn't sit still.
*This.*
When she brings me down, she crouches so we're eye to eye, and she puts a finger on my chest.
"That's ours," she says. "Yours and mine. Not Daddy's. Do you understand?"
I didn't. But I nodded, because she was looking at me like it mattered.
---
**SIX**
She showed me her real face on my sixth birthday.
We were in the kitchen. Dad was on nights. She'd made a cake that was terrible, because she could do a lot of things but baking wasn't one of them, and I'd eaten two slices anyway. And she'd said, *I want to show you something, and I want you to not be scared,* which is a great way to make a six-year-old scared.
Then she let go of the glamour.
I'd like to say I was brave. I wasn't. I fell off the chair.
Horns. Curving back from her hairline, black and ridged and *huge*, the way I'd only seen in a movie I wasn't supposed to have watched. Cheekbones that could cut you. Her eyes went from the brown I knew to something green-gold with slit pupils, and when she rolled her shoulders, the kitchen got *darker*, like the light was afraid of her.
And then wings.
They didn't fit in the kitchen. They filled it wall to wall and the tips bent against the cabinets, black-feathered and enormous, and one of them knocked the ugly cake onto the floor and she didn't even look.
She just watched me. Waiting to see what I'd do.
I got up off the floor. I walked over. I put my hand on the leading edge of the nearest wing—it was warm, warmer than skin—and I said:
"Do I get those?"
She made a sound like a laugh and a sob got into a fight in her throat.
"Someday," she said. "If you're careful."
Then she picked me up and let me sit on the counter and told me her name. Her real one.
I didn't know what it meant. I was six. I thought Maleficent was a cool word.
I found out later.
---
**SEVEN. EIGHT. NINE.**
Here's the thing nobody understands about magic: it's not the power that's hard. The power's *easy*. The power is a river and you are a kid with a bucket, and the only question is how much you're brave enough to carry.
The hard part is *not* using it.
She taught me both.
Every Tuesday and Thursday, when Dad had late shift, we went to the preserve. There's a place out past the Hale land, a stump the size of a truck, where the ground hums if you know how to listen. She never told me what it was. She just said it was *listening*, and that we should be polite.
Telekinesis first. Rocks, then branches, then a fallen log I couldn't have pushed with my whole body. Then the growing things—she'd put my hands in the dirt and say *ask*, and I'd ask, and the ferns would come up green through the needles in November. Healing on a bird with a broken wing. Shapeshifting on a squirrel that did *not* want to be shapeshifted and bit me for it.
Fire. That came from her side. Not the fae side—the *other* side, the one she talked about with her voice low. The Phoenix. She said her people came from something that couldn't die, only change, and that if I ever felt something in my chest go *hot* and *bright* and *hungry*, I should come find her immediately, because that one wasn't a bucket. That one was the river.
I felt it once. At eight. A kid at school pushed me down and called my mom a freak because she wore long sleeves in summer, and I felt the hot bright hungry thing wake up and *look* at him.
I put it back. It took everything I had. I was sick for two days.
She sat on my bed and stroked my hair and said, "Good. Good, baby. That's the most important thing you'll ever learn."
"What is?"
"How to put it back."
---
**THE RULES**
There were three. She made me say them back to her until I could do it in my sleep, which, evidently, I still can.
*One. Never let anyone see.*
Not Dad. Not Scott. Not a teacher, not a doctor, not a stranger in the woods. Not once. Not a flicker. Not a floating pencil, not a plant that grew a little too fast, not a scraped knee that closed a little too quick.
"Why?" I asked. Nine years old, righteous.
"Because they'll never see *you* again," she said. "They'll see *it*. Every conversation, every hug, every kind word for the rest of your life, there will be a little voice in their heads asking what you want from them. What you *really* are. And the ones who don't fear you will want to use you." She looked at me, and for a second she wasn't my mom, she was something that had been alive a very, very long time. "I trusted a human once. He took my wings while I slept. I loved him, and that is how he thanked me."
I didn't understand then that she was talking about a king in a story. I understood it as: *the person you love most is the one who can hurt you most.*
Which, it turns out, was the lesson.
*Two. This world isn't ours.*
Where she came from, there was a place. The Moors. A whole world under the hills where the trees walked and the water talked back and things like her weren't monsters, they were *neighbors*. She'd had a war there. She'd won. She'd gotten bored, or curious, or heartbroken, or all three, and walked out through a door she never fully explained to me, into a world that had werewolves and hunters and no Moors at all.
And no *iron rules*.
That's the part that killed her. I'll get to it.
"There's no home for us here, Mischief. No court. No queen. If they come for you, no one is coming to help. So you make sure they never come."
*Three. If you ever find your mate, run.*
I remember exactly how she said it. Kneeling in the pine needles, hands on my shoulders, that green-gold in her eyes.
"Dark Fae have one. One, in a lifetime. And you'll know. There's no wondering, there's no *maybe*. It sounds like a bell in a place you didn't know was empty. And once it rings, Mieczysław, you don't get it back. You'll give up *anything*. You'll give up *everything*. You'll burn down a world for them without ever asking whether they'd do the same."
"Did you?" I asked.
She went very still.
"Yes," she said. "And he cut off my wings."
"So if I find mine—"
"You run. You run before it's finished ringing. You never look at them long enough for it to *set*. You save yourself the way I didn't." Her thumbs pressed into my shoulders. "Promise me."
"I promise."
I meant it. I did. I want that on record.
---
**TEN**
I said I'd get to the iron.
This world is made of it. Rebar in the buildings. Nails in the walls. Cars and cans and coins and the bed frame you sleep on. Where she came from, it burned on contact, and you just… didn't touch it. Here, you can't *not*. It's in the water. It's in the air off the freeway. It's in the blood of the man you married, a little, because his people had been eating it for ten thousand years.
She'd held it off with glamour and will for longer than she should have. Long enough to fall in love with a deputy with a stupid grin. Long enough to have me.
Then it started getting into her head.
They called it frontotemporal dementia. Dad believed them, because he had no reason not to. I watched her forget where the coffee was, then forget my name, then forget the *glamour*—just for a second, in the produce aisle, her horns flickering in the fluorescent light while a woman with a cart looked right at her and didn't see, because people don't see what they've already decided isn't there.
The last three months were bad.
I don't need to walk through them. I've walked through them enough.
She said things. At the end. That I was trying to kill her, that I was *doing it*, that she could feel me pulling at her. She said it looking right at me with her real eyes, with Dad in the hallway pretending not to hear.
And the thing is—I don't think she was wrong.
I think a Dark Fae child, terrified, in a hospital full of iron, sitting next to its dying mother, *pulls*. On instinct. The way a drowning person pulls on whoever's closest. I think I was drawing on her without knowing how to stop, and I think she was too far gone to tell me how.
I think I helped.
I've never said that out loud. I'm not saying it now.
The night she died—the night the monitor went flat and Dad made a noise I'd never heard a human make—she'd had a clear hour. One. At about two a.m., with the ward dark and the nurses gone.
She took my hand and she wasn't confused. She was *her*.
"Listen to me. I don't have long. The rules. Say them."
I said them. Crying, but I said them.
"Good. Good boy. Now here's the fourth one, and you don't tell anyone I told you this, not ever." She pulled me close. Her lips were against my ear. "When it's *worth it*—and you'll know, you'll *know*, don't you dare pretend you won't—you break every one of them. You break them all and you don't look back and you don't apologize to *anyone*."
"But you said—"
"I know what I said. I'm saying this too. Both things are true. You'll figure out which one you need when you need it." She kissed my temple. "Be good to your father. He's a better man than the one I married the first time. And he'll never know. That's my gift to him. Don't take it away."
She let go of my hand.
Twenty minutes later, she let go of everything else.
---
**ELEVEN. TWELVE.**
I stopped going to the preserve.
Not right away. I went back once, alone, and stood by the big stump and waited to feel like her. I didn't. I felt like a kid whose mom was dead. I felt *human*, which she would have laughed at.
So I got good at human.
Turns out that was the easiest magic of all. You just talk fast enough that nobody looks at your hands. You fidget so nobody wonders why you're still. You get the ADHD diagnosis and take the pill and let the pill take the edge off the thing that's *actually* wrong with you, which is that you can hear the trees on a quiet day and you'd give anything to shut them up.
Dad grieved like a person. I grieved like a *project*.
And Scott—
Scott was the one thing I never had to fake. Scott McCall with his inhaler and his crooked jaw and his dad walking out the door, who never once asked me why I didn't cry at the funeral. Who just showed up with a video game and sat on my floor.
I'd have broken rule one for Scott a thousand times over.
I never did. Not once. That's how much I believed her.
---
**THIRTEEN**
This is the part where I made sure.
I was thirteen and I'd been sleeping badly. Dreaming, actually—dreaming about a bell. Not a real one. A sound that hadn't happened yet, ringing somewhere in a house I didn't have a floor plan for, and every time I woke up my chest hurt like I'd been running.
And I thought: *No.*
I'd watched what love did to her. Not the iron. Not the dementia. The *love*. A woman who could flatten armies, and a man had gotten close enough while she slept to take her wings, and she'd carried that for centuries, and she'd carried it *into my hospital room*. She'd looked at me on her deathbed and the first thing she'd said was *run*.
So I went back to the preserve for the last time.
I sat down by the big stump, and I told it I was sorry for what I was about to do, and I opened the river.
I didn't use magic for the binding. Not the way she taught me. I used the *other* thing. The Phoenix. The hot, bright, hungry. I let it wake up and I pointed it inward and I said: *find the place where the bell rings. Find it and brick it up.*
It took all night. I passed out twice. The stump hummed so loud I could feel it in my molars, and something under the ground went *no, no, no,* the way she used to say it when I reached for something I shouldn't, and I ignored it because I was thirteen and I knew better than the woods.
By dawn there was a wall inside me where the bell was supposed to be. Solid. Fae-forged. Burned into place with something that wasn't supposed to die.
I stood up and I felt *nothing*, and it was the best I'd felt in three years.
I made sure.
I *made sure*.
That's what I meant, in the station, when I heard the bell anyway.
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**FIFTEEN. SIXTEEN.**
I want to be honest about this part, because I'm the only one here.
I *wanted* to break the rules.
The night Scott got bitten in the woods, I could have found the Alpha in ninety seconds. I could have followed the blood in the air like a dotted line, put my hand on Peter Hale's chest and *asked* his heart whether it felt like beating anymore. I sat in my Jeep instead and looked up *lycanthropy* on my phone like an idiot.
When Derek got shot with wolfsbane and I had to hold the *bone saw*—I could have healed him. Palm on the wound, three seconds, done. I stood there and made jokes about cutting his arm off and let Scott run all over town for a bullet.
When Peter had me in the parking garage and said *you want the bite?*—
I almost laughed in his face. I almost let the glamour drop and let him see what he'd been *threatening*. It was right there. It would've been so easy.
I said no, and I let him think it was because I was scared.
When Lydia was on the field with her throat open, I could have—
I *could have*.
I didn't. I ran and I screamed and I called 911 like a human, and she lived anyway, and I told myself that meant I'd made the right call.
I don't know if that's true. I know I never slept right after.
Rule one: *never let them see*. Rule two: *this world isn't ours*. And I kept them. Through the Alpha, and the hunters, and Kate Argent burning people alive, and a wolf with his ribs pulled open on a lacrosse field. I kept every one of them, and I told myself that was strength.
Maybe it was.
Maybe it was just fear wearing my mother's voice.
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**TONIGHT**
I walked into the station talking about Lydia.
And there was a girl in a chair with a foil blanket and dirt on her knees, and she looked up, and the wall I built at thirteen—the one I burned into place with fire that doesn't die—
*wasn't there*.
I don't mean it broke. I mean it was *gone*, like it had never been there, like I'd built it out of sand and told myself it was stone. One look, and the bell rang in a place I had personally bricked up, so loud and so clear and so *whole* that I knew, I knew in the half-second before I started talking again, that I had never actually made sure of anything.
You can't make sure of this. That was her real lesson. That's what she was too afraid to say to a nine-year-old in the woods.
*You'll know. There's no wondering. There's no maybe.*
There wasn't.
Her name is Hope. She lied to my father about her last name and she was right to. She stands like someone taught her to expect a knife. She smelled the werewolf before we'd been parked thirty seconds, I *saw* her nostrils flare, and she said nothing, and she has secrets that make mine look like a note passed in class.
She saw the frost. I know she did. I saw her look.
And she got in the car anyway.
---
So here's where I am, Mom.
I'm lying on my back in my room at four in the morning, and I'm going through your rules one at a time, and I want you to know I remember every word.
*Never let anyone see.*
I set three wards tonight before I even got my keys out. Salt on the back step, iron filings on the sills, a hazel twig over the door that I pulled out of the yard with my *mind* because I didn't want to go outside and leave her alone for the eight seconds it would've taken. Dad's going to find the salt. I don't have a story.
*This world isn't ours.*
I know. I know it's not. She isn't from here either. I don't know where she's from but I know it's not *here*, and there's something in the way she said *nobody's coming for me* that I recognize, because it's the exact voice I used at your funeral.
*If you ever find your mate, run.*
I'm not going to.
I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. You told me and I promised and I *meant* it. But I'm not running. She can get on a bus tomorrow, she can never feel a thing for me, she can look at me for the rest of her life and see the sheriff's twitchy kid with the big mouth, and I'll still be standing wherever she needs somebody standing.
Not because of the bell.
Well. *Because* of the bell. But not *only*.
Because tonight an old man cut a werewolf in half twenty feet from her, and she didn't flinch at the sword, she flinched at *me*, because I lost it for half a second, and the ground froze, and my *first* thought wasn't *they'll see*.
My first thought was *if he turns around, he dies*.
I've never had that thought about anyone. Not Scott. Not Dad. I love them, I'd take a bullet for them, but I have never once in my life looked at a threat to them and felt the Phoenix sit up in my chest and *smile*.
I felt it tonight.
And I'm supposed to be terrified. And I am.
But you also told me something else. At two in the morning, in a room full of iron, with your real eyes.
*When it's worth it, you break every one of them.*
*You'll know.*
Mom.
I think I know.
---
Down the hall, she just rolled over on the couch. I can hear her breathing change. Slower. Asleep, finally.
I'll be up. Not because I'm scared of the wards failing; I built them right. Because somewhere in the back of my head, for the first time in four years, the door is open, and I can hear the trees again.
They're not saying anything much.
Just: *finally*.
I close my eyes.
I don't put it back.
---
*End of Chapter 2.*