Page 112 of The Guardian's Curse

“Should I leave?”

She shook her head. “I need you here,” she said. “I didn’t realize until I was working on Lucia how important her soulmate bond was. I think that’s where the curse came from, but it was also how I broke it.” She rooted through the box and came up with a piece of red string. She clasped his hand, then wrapped their hands in red.

He listened in awe as she recited a ritual in French, invoking the power of the earth and the air. Her voice seemed to vibrate in his bones. It seemed like standard ritual stuff, until she came to something unexpected. “Threads of destiny, red as blood, bindings break and poisons purify. As it is spoken, let it be done.”

The ground shuddered beneath them, and a powerful wave of heat rolled up his spine. Desire roared to life within him. She gripped his shoulders painfully tight, and he claimed her lips in a hungry kiss, devouring her. It took every ounce of willpower not to bite her, with those sweet arteries pounding like drums.

Fire surged from his hand, up his arm, and into his still heart. Every muscle in his body tensed. It felt as if he would split in half, with pain rampaging up one side of him and mindless pleasure rolling down the other. He was breaking, shattering, and melting all at once.

Suddenly, he was falling into the black, unmoored as he floated into oblivion. He was curiously numb.

“Shoshanna?” he murmured. He was all alone. The world was deep, fathomless black, with fireblooms of blue and purple igniting like fireworks.

A pale woman clad only in bluish light emerged from the shadows. “Cursed one,” she said, her voice coming from all around him. Thunder rolled, then blue lightning burst across the void. In its afterglow, he saw millions of tiny threads in a thousand shades of gray.

“Who are you?” he asked. His voice was thin and flat, barely a whisper compared to the woman’s thunderous voice.

“Are you worthy of her?” the figure asked.

He froze. “I do not know. I hope so. I love her.”

“You have a choice,” the woman said. “Bear your curse forever, and she will live. Break your curse, and she will die.” Her head tilted, alien eyes narrowing. Lightning illuminated her again. In that flash of sickly blue light, he could have sworn he saw the body of a spider, long legs clinging to the web of threads around them. “What is your choice?”

“It is no choice,” he replied firmly. “I will bear my curse. Let her live.”

“You have cursed the Night Weaver’s name for nearly a hundred years,” the female figure said. The spider’s body was no more, leaving only the lithe, slender woman’s figure. “One human, a mere flicker in eternity...is she worth such a trade?”

He growled and surged forward. “I would bear this curse for millennia for her. For the rest of time if that’s what it takes.”

The alien figure smiled, baring impossibly long, sharp canines. Her eerie silver eyes reflected his monstrous face. “Very well. You have chosen.”

Lightning flashed again, and the ground rumbled beneath him.

The dull numbness was gone, and he plunged into a fiery pit of agony.

I love you, he thought as he fell into the darkness. Please let me see her again.

28

Glowing threads of bruise purple and midnight blue surrounded Shoshanna, as if she was a tiny fly snared in a monstrous spider’s web. Screams on the icy wind bellowed her name, cursing her in languages she could not comprehend. It hadn’t been like this with Lucia, and she feared that she wouldn’t survive this time.

No.

She had not fought her way through this witch’s curse, then survived Elliott’s indignities just to die in a damned spider’s web inside her own mind. There was a soulmate and a whole lifetime of possibility waiting for her, and she would not give it up without a hell of a fight.

Raising her left hand felt like lifting a mountain. Wrapped around her wrist was a red sash, its tail whipping in the vicious wind. It unraveled slowly, threatening to escape her grasp. But as she clenched her fist firmly, the ribbon tightened around her wrist. Soon it, streamed up her arm, then split into a thousand brilliant strands that tangled into the bruise-like web. The web resisted her, sending a painful shock back into her body.

This was too much power. So much malice was woven into Alistair’s curse, and thus, the curse that had afflicted her. Gazing at the massive display of Armina’s power, she understood what the Night Weaver had done. Looking up, she could see a mirror image of the web below her. This was a curse upon a curse, unleashed upon the one Alistair dared to love with all his heart. It was the soulmate bond that had triggered her curse, and it was that same bond that would break it.

Somewhere in the distance, she heard Alistair scream, an inhuman sound of agony. Despair wracked her, and she clawed to get free. She had to protect him. There was no point to all of this without him.

I love you, she thought, feeling the warmth of him all through her, surging through her veins, sparkling and crackling on every nerve ending.

The gravity of the Night Weaver’s power pulled her down into the web. But the red ribbon around her wrist pulled taut, wrenching her upward. She reached for the ribbon and plucked it like a harp string. The deafening sound threatened to vibrate her entire body into subatomic particles. A shockwave rumbled across the web.

“With love’s bond, be broken!” she bellowed into the void.

Light exploded across her vision, and then she was sinking, holding onto the burning red thread with her fading strength. Though she clawed upward, she sank deeper and deeper into the consuming dark.

---