Page 119 of Of Serpents and Ruins
I stood against the wall, iron manacles holding me fast, muscles burning and aching from the unrelenting pressure of the position. They dug into my wrists and ankles, but the pain grounded me in a manner that provided comfort. So long as the metal dug into my flesh and gripped my bones, I wasn't risking following my urges and tracking Stella down.
Again and again, this dream had come to me, bursting through the darkness of my sleep. It had come after the grotto and on the night Stella had come to kill me. It filled my mind's eye, though I had barely dozed off.
Now it returned. It was never fully the same, though its core message was unchanged.
Dread spun in my gut and warned me as surely as if I were a seer myself that there was something far worse coming.
I had not told Stella that I had felt the claws of the curse even then, scraping across the back of my mind. The Gola Resh's warning stirred some deeper knowledge within me, reminding me just how precarious our position was.
The need to be with Stella burned in my chest, barely muted by the nightmare, but that nightmare showed me what I did to her. What I always did to her.
I willed the images out of my mind. The late afternoon wind scratched and whispered across the stones.
My charm and its lurching forward tormented me from deep umber to bright yellow in a breath to Stella beneath me, neck snapped, eyes glassy.
The truth was that ever since Stella's return, the curse had worsened at an alarming rate and in ways that could not be denied.
Memories of our lovemaking and of her death cycled one after another, faster and faster. And this last one… In this last one, I had found her in some hot spring, naked and vulnerable. She’d looked up at me with those big golden eyes, her expression soft and tentative.
And she had stayed.
She didn’t run.
She wouldn’t!
My muscles clenched as I tried to push the dream from my thoughts.
It wasn’t going to happen. There were no hot springs anywhere near Castle Serpentfire, and she was on a ship nearing the Wild Lands.
Yet the dream had been so insistent. The way she stared at me even as I tried to force the words out, to beg her to leave…
In the dream, we made love. It felt almost as real as when she had pressed her slender body to mine here in this very room, her skin salty and sweet at once. I inhaled her scent in that dream, unable to fight off my lust. She clung to me, kissed me, and offered herself to me.
My eyes shuttered as my breaths went ragged. If only the dream had ended there.
But it didn’t.
It continued as the need to kill her intensified more than it ever had before, as if the curse had crept deeper into my body now and taken hold of my very form before its time. Our coupling grew rougher. She slipped under the waters. I clutched her tighter.
Then it all blurred and sped by until she lay beneath me, dead.
I wanted to retch, shaking my head as if to remove those images. They weren’t prophetic. They couldn’t be. Every time they came, they were different in settings, even sometimes in time and tone.
Just nightmares. That was all these were.
They’d probably worsened because all I had to think about was keeping her safe.
Thank all that was good she and I were so far apart right now. I hated myself and what I had become, and I did not know how to fight it any better.
The pulsing ache in my wrists and thighs felt stronger, more insistent now. The manacles’ biting embrace stung. I focused on each point of discomfort.
This was the cost to keep my beloved safe.
This was what I had to endure.
It had been hours since the curse had claimed me, leaving me writhing and frothing like a mad man. My limbs had healed from my twisting struggles and raging bellows, but the hollowness within me had not.
I licked my lips, staring at the shadows as they inched across the floor.
