Page 91 of Guarded By the Nightmare

I wanted forherto have it, for her to live a wonderful, beautiful life, to know happiness and pleasure, to experience joy and maybe even pain—but to be breathing. Always breathing.

Liminal thoughts leaked out of her, and I would’ve done anything I could to give them back.

A man in a white coat telling me, “You should cool it off down there, young lady,” after I came in because it burned to pee—like my UTI was because my vagina was a race car, and not because five different guys had raped me!—drunkenly dancing with Ella till the bar played a horrible remix of Cotton-Eyed Joe to shut things down—the time I’d keyed Brad Kirk’s car when I saw it at a grocery store. “No, I’m fine, I’ll stay behind,” when my dad asked me if I wanted to come with him and my mom on their ride?—

All the intersections of things that’d happened to Mina and things that could’ve been, and then her time with me—strong and scared, resilient and loving—as the last grain of sand in the hourglass slowly rattled down.

I couldn’t watch it drop.

I shattered the hourglass and caught it just in time, sending the rest of the sand in the bottom pouring out.

Maybe if it never fell, Mina could still be mine.

And from all around me, where the abandoned fates touched the pulverized stone, time began to speed up.

I ignored it, holding the grain of sand pinched between two fingers, and my Mina with the rest of my body. I would take a scapula from one of the mishmash of surrounding corpses, and scrape her light out of me, to return it. I didn’t want this, I wanted whatshewanted—and I wantedher.She was the only thing that mattered to me and I couldn’t imagine a life, of any sort, with any meaning, in her absence.

“Give her back!” I demanded of everything that empowered me.

“Is everything all right in there?” asked someone from outside the pit.

“NO!” I bellowed—and the stone lid above slid open, letting a sliver of light in.

And the fates I that had been trapped inside the pit with me...exploded.

Some like streamers, others like snakes, all of them evacuating the area, as I hoisted Mina’s body up.

“That stupid bitch,” Trent said, from where he was sitting on the ground outside the pit, all tied up—and five of the streamers went for him.

I didn’t think he could see them, but I could—one plunged into his thigh, another into his chest, and a third slid up his nose—and he started making gagging sounds at once.

I was almost relieved they were saving me the trouble of killing him. I didn’t want to put Mina down. The light inside of her was still dim. I hadn’t eaten her heart, but there wasn’t enough of it left and beating.

Then there was a wicked crack from the vicinity of Trent’s leg, and he screamed, as the bone inside his thigh suddenly twisted sideways.

“What’s happening to him?” asked a young blonde.

“Come away, sweetheart,” Royce said—Royce? Here?—pulling her back behind himself before giving me a look. “Sylas? Did you do that?”

“No,” I said, shaking my head.

“But . . . did you . . .” he went on, glancing down at Mina’s body.

“If I did, I did not mean to. I would’ve given my life for hers.”

Royce’s Arachnaea agent stepped up. “She was a fierce mate,” his translator told me—while Trent screamed, and the young girl shrieked.

“But if you’re not doing that,” Royce went on, “then what is?”

“Fate,” I said, as I realized it myself. “You’re only allowed to push the universe so far.”

The college-aged boy gasped, and then fully collapsed, sprawling within the confines of his ties on the cold, blood-stained stone.

And a tiny piece of light rose up from somewhere inside of him, the size of a gnat, and flew straight towards Mina’s heart...where it...stayed. I watched it land there and pulse, like a tiny star, as I processed what might be done—where were the rest of the threads?

I flew up the stairs with Mina immediately.

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