My grandmother…our grandmother…always used to say, “If you run with wolves, you learn to howl.” I thought of that many times as I reflected on what I had become. A creature that was very powerful and knowledgeable, but also very cruel and widely feared even among fearsome beings. It was during one of these periods of introspection and self-loathing that I began to formulate a plan.

I couldn’t kill myself—Angelica had too strong a hold on me for that—but perhaps I could kill an earlier version of myself. Time and some aspects of reality had become much more…fluid and exploitable for me over the years, and I knew it was possible for me to go back along my own timeline to before I found the Bowl.

So that is exactly what I did. In the original timeline of events, I never saw “the monster” in the woods. The killings and such happened, as well as the fake meltdown to cover-up the deaths, but they were all related to something else that had escaped the hotel through the Bowl, not me coming back to kill my earlier self. When I originally fell into the Bowl, I was trying to get away from the guard that had stabbed me, but without any intervention from my monstrous future self.

When I came back to 1986, I found my younger self with the hunting party, and I killed those men—men who I had once known and called friends, without hesitation or pity. The only effect their deaths had upon me was to further demonstrate what a despicable monster I had become. So I approached the younger Alexi with every intention of ending his life before he could become the monster that I am.

But then I found I couldn’t. Whatever magic Angelica has, it had found its way deep into my bones. So deep in fact, that I couldn’t do harm to my past self any more than I could to my own body. I had a moment of panic, but I’ve grown exceedingly clever in my own terrible way, and I quickly saw another solution.

When I licked Alexi, I split him in two. Half would stay as he was, following the unassailable path that would lead to a version of me. The other half would become Brian Favors—an infant orphan soon found in another part of the world. My hope at the time was that, at the very least, I would be sparing some portion of my soul from rotting under Angelica’s gaze.