Page 112 of Curse of Darkness
Amaya’s eyes blink open as if she can sense me, and we share a moment. She goes so still, I can sense the pulse in her neck thundering.
She can sense the same thing I can: The threat within me.
“You are safe,” I whisper, brushing the back of my fingers over her cheek. Death stirs through me hungrily. It senses the other half of itself. Ityearnsto reunite. But this is Amaya. This is the daughter I would do anything for. I would kill for her. I would die for her. I would sacrifice the entire world for her. She will never know another moment of pain if I can help it. “I will never hurt you. No matter what I must do. Guard your mother. I will return.”
She swallows and nods, but she doesn’t relax until I back away from the bed.
“Thiago?” Thalia makes a move toward me, but I wave her off.
Death is strangely silent within me as I close the doors to our bedchamber.
“Well?” I demand of it.
“Do you not think I grieve too?” comes the whisper.
“What wouldyouknow of grief?”
No response comes.
I want to bury this monster within me, but in that moment, I alsoneedthe answer. Because when all is said and done, it’s as much a part of me as I am of it.
“It is the burden I alone truly know,” it finally answers. An image sweeps through my mind’s eye. Fae villagers running from us in fear. An old woman holding up a symbol against us as she shrinks from us in fear. Village after village, it’s all the same.
Until a woman forms in the quagmire of memories.
Golden as the dawn, her blue eyes as bright as the sky as she reaches a hand toward us. “Why don’t you come out of the shadows?” she whispers as she sits by a stream.
“Because you would run from me,” he tells her.
The woman tilts her head as if trying to part the veil of gloom. Her brow crinkles. “Then I am afraid you are wrong. I was born without fear, they tell me. It is both my curse and my strength.” She pauses. “Come out of the shadows.”
The step he takes feels momentous.
Her eyes widen….
But she does not scream. She does not run. She does not form a diamond with her thumbs and fingers pressed together—a symbol of Maia’s flames—in order to ward him away.
Instead, she invites him to sit with her.
“I cannot touch you,” he warns, though he yearns for the silk of her skin and the warmth of her mouth. She is pure golden flame, pulsing with light. And the wretched coldness within him will smother it.
“You loved her,” I breathe, still caught in his memories.
“Always.”
The memories flash through stolen moments. Laughter, teasing eyes, and a woman who dared talk to the nightmare who stalked the night.
The abrupt cut to a woman screaming as she plunges through a night-dark forest is jarring. A pair of hunters clad in dark cloaks chase her.
“I was not the only one of my… kind.” Death says. “Not then.”
He rides behind them, desperate to save her.
Too late, too late, too latescreams through our veins as one of those dark riders lifts his bow and an arrow forged of Darkness drives through her back.
It’s like watching the snip of a puppet’s strings.
She falls, her pale skirts gleaming in the dark.
