Chapter Seven
THE NIGHT KING
My soul-fated has summoned me again.
Or at least her fear and pain have, and my ashes-cursed shadows did not relent until they’d convinced me to dreamwalk across time and realms. In truth, I feared their clamor would have triggered the curse, so I had reluctantly acquiesced.
Besides, there’s no harm in giving in because my presence is not real to her.
She has no idea who I am or who we are to each other, and I intend to keep it that way.
In her mind, these are innocuous dreams where she seeks comfort in a world of her own making.
If I can break this bond, I will not hesitate, but for now our souls and fates are tethered.
My shadows burst from me in agitation when we enter her dream space as if they can tell immediately that something is wrong.
This isn’t her home in the desert . . . or even her quarters in the palace.
It’s somewhere new. A brewing storm with violent branches of lightning splits the blackened sky overhead, illuminating a cliffside and a churning sea.
This tiny corner of her mind is shrouded in gloom, the very air seething and pulsing with a viscous anger.
Unlike the last few times I’ve comforted her in dreams, the landscape of this night terror is bleak and barren, desolate of all life and all color.
It’s so unlike her that for a second I feel a pang of worry. My darkness writhes.
Calm, I tell my shadows.
We find our tiny mate sitting on the edge of a rocky outcropping, her knees pulled up to her chest, dark hair whipping in the wind. The ocean in front of us is foaming and wild, massive waves crashing into rock with destructive fury.
“You’re here,” she whispers bleakly as my shadows flock to her, rubbing carefully over her cold skin to warm her.
She gathers them close as if they’re hers to command, and I fight my rueful smile.
In another lifetime, they would be—she’s the other half of my soul, after all, born to command the night sky.
Tightening my jaw, I steel myself, battening down my careening emotions before they spiral out of my control.
My sister has cautioned against getting too close to my soul-fated if I have any future hope of rejecting the bond.
While I have played with her before, unable to resist the offer of her delectable body in her seductive dreams, I must allow myself to feel nothing.
She is a beautiful inconvenience and a pleasurable distraction, no more than that.
Anything else, and the cost will be untenable.
“Why have you called me?” I growl.
“I didn’t want to be alone,” she replies. “I have no one. Not Roshan, not Clem. Not even Vena. But I knew you would come. You always do. You never forsake me.”
I frown. “Vena?”
“The Royal Star,” she says. “My guardian. She visits me sometimes, though I haven’t seen her in a while, and I think I imagined the last time.
Perhaps she has abandoned me, too.” She drops her head onto her knees with a broken sound.
“I’ve gotten myself into a mess. Sands, I am a fool.
I trusted them with my magic and my heart, and they trapped me. Not they. Him.”
She doesn’t continue for a long beat, the wind howling like a dying animal between us as the tides rage in tandem with her emotions, battering the shoreline.
“I don’t know who he is anymore. Or perhaps I never did.” Her voice breaks on the last word, her pain so visceral that an earsplitting peal of thunder nearly drowns out her next ones. “Can you stay with me for a little while? Please.”
Despite my forced ambivalence, my chest squeezes at the sound of her pain, and the beast inside of me flexes his claws in warning. It won’t take much to set the curse off, not with her volatile state and her cursed connection to me. It’s a risk I cannot take.
Not now.
My sister’s wise counsel thrums in my head.
I grind my teeth and yank my uncooperative, protesting shadows back to me. Enough, you’ve seen her. She’s alive and unharmed. There’s nothing we can do. They struggle and seethe and tear against my control, even stinging me with their displeasure, but I stand firm.
“Please . . .” she whispers.
“I cannot,” I say, watching her shoulders slump and her faint starlight dim with defeat.
It might be cruel to leave her this way, but distance is for the best.
At least, that’s what I tell myself.