Page 95 of Curse of Thorns
Rev
Ilean over, handsa tight fist in my hair.
“But what about the spellbook?” I ask my brother in wraith form.
I continue to struggle between loving the soul of my lost brother and the realization that he’s not who I thought he was. He never was.
It means what I saw in the Orb of Terrors of what he did to Caelynn was likely true. And it means when she said he deserved to die...
I shake my head from those thoughts. I’d prayed—begged—so many times for a chance to talk to my brother again. One more time.
Now, I’m getting that chance to do it. It’s just... not at all what I was hoping for.
“What about it?” Reahgan asks, exasperated. He always did get annoyed with me so quickly.
“The High Queen sent me here to get the spellbook because it has the cure to the scourge inside it.”
Reahgan begins a hysterical laugh. “So, the queen is in on this too. My! How elaborate this plan was. The Night Bringer has certainly been working overtime.”
“The queen... in on it?” I mumble.
“Oh, my sweet, naive little brother.” He’s pleased he knows more than I do. “The only thing in that spellbook is the means to unbind the Night Terror from her cell inside these curse walls.”
“What?”
“Would you come up with something more intelligent to say thanwhat?”
I groan.
“The point of all of this, Rev, is that your damaged lover cannot get her hands on that book. We cannot allow it to happen.”
“I can’t let you kill Caelynn,” I say with more force than I’d yet had toward my brother. The words surprise even me.
He grows still. “Excuse me?”
“I don’t know as much as you do about the scourge and this Night Terror, but I’m not going to let you hurt her.”
Reahgan chuckles. It’s softer than before, but if there is one thing I know about my brother—when he gets quiet, he’s angry. “She sure has got her claws in you deep.”
“That’s not true. I hate her. But I still...”
“You hate her,” he repeats, dumbfounded. “You hate her, but you will betray your own brother to save her life?”
“Stop,” I say, pressing my fists to my eyes.
Reahgan circles me, examining me like a wild animal caught in a trap. “It’s the magic of the mating bond,” he says definitively. “Yes. If you mean it, that you hate her, yet you’d say those things...”
He presses his face close to mine, and I squirm back, avoiding looking right into the black void where his eyes should be.
“Then, you are simply being manipulated by the magic of the bond. Your feelings for her are not real, little brother. It will convince you to protect her at all costs, even when it makes no sense.”
“No,” I say, even though I’ve had those same thoughts. Where does the mating bond begin and I end? What’s real, and what’s the magic? That, I don’t know.
