Page 37 of Queen of Stars and Shadows

Frustration bubbles up inside of me, and anger, and as emotion floods my body, I feel a splitting pain lance through my head. I’ve experienced agony in my life, many times, but this is so breathtaking I nearly lose consciousness. With a groan, I stumble forward, landing on my knees, hands wrapped around my head. Blackness swoops in around me…

“Zyren! Zyren!”

I blink my eyes and my vision returns. Sarielle is hovering over me, her face stricken, her hands on each side of my face.

“Dark goddess… are you okay? Can you hear me?”

I let out another groan. I’m lying on my back. I must have passed out after all. “How long was I out for?”

“A minute, maybe…”

Tears track down Sarielle’s cheeks, and a sob shudders in her chest. She sniffles and wipes a hand across her face, turning away from me and covering her eyes with one hand while she continues to cry.

“Sarielle, I’m okay now…” I sit up, eliciting another groan, and wrap one arm around her shoulders.

“You’re… not… okay,” she gets out between sobs.

“What do you mean? I feel fine now.”

“It’s… part of the curse.”

“The curse?” I remember then, what she’d said to me about my memories. “Oh, family bloodlines? And our nightmare blood?”

She nods, her eyes rimmed red and blurred with tears.

“I thought that was just my memories.”

A fresh wave of sobs takes her, and I can’t get another word out of her for several minutes. When she’s finally able to speak again, she says, words shuddering, “Losing your memories is the first stage. It said in the book that the madness eventually led to…”

She can’t seem to finish, but it’s clear what she’s trying to say.

“So, you really are going to be the death of me,” I say wryly. Somehow, I can’t help but find dark humor in it. Everything else seems to be going wrong…

Sarielle shudders and covers her face with her hands again.

I reach up and slowly bring her hands down, weaving my fingers around hers. “I guess you need to stop loving me, then. That seems the logical solution.”

“I’ve tried that before,” she says, misery etched across her face. “It didn’t work. But you… you don’t even remember me, so if anything was going to solve it, that would have been it. Because you can’t possibly love me if you don’t remember me, but your memories are still gone, and now it’s getting worse.”

And while her words make complete sense, I realize in that moment that they’re still false. I don’t know how it’s possible, either, to love someone I don’t even remember.

But I do.

I’m still not entirely convinced she didn’t do all the awful things my brother says she did, but I know what I feel. And Sarielle at my side feels so right, so familiar, that even if she is in fact some villainess, it doesn’t change things. I couldn’t stay away from her if I tried. That had become abundantly clear inthe forest… I had tried to do what my brother asked, and I couldn’t. The moment I saw her I knew I was lost.

“Well,” I say softly, stroking one thumb across hers, “I’ve been cursed a very long time with this darkness inside me. I guess that’s just the fate I’ve been dealt. And if what you say is true, falling for you was my fate also. And I have no intention of fighting fate.”

I climb to my feet and pull Sarielle with me.

“Come on. Let’s find a way out of here.”

Chapter Twenty-One

Sarielle

We reach thewater maybe two hours later. It stretches as far as I can see in either direction and laps up onto the shoreline in small waves. The tang of salt in the air confirms what we suspected and feared: it’s an ocean, and therefore undrinkable.

There are no signs of boats, or docks. There have been no signs of life anywhere.

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