Queen of Stars and Shadows (Dark Fae Guardian #3)

Zyren

Chapter Twenty

Zyren

T here’s a roaring like a great wind. One moment we’re standing in the forest, night pressing in around us, and the next we’re standing on a sand dune, a gray sky overhead, the skeleton of a huge beast a dozen paces away.

It looks like some sort of hellscape.

I spin to Sarielle. “What did you do?” I growl.

Her eyes widen. “Me? I didn’t do this!”

I throw an arm up, gesturing to our surroundings. “Then how do you explain this?”

She opens and closes her mouth several times, her head pivoting to take in the new landscape. There’s nothing but endless sand in every direction, huge rolling dunes, dotted here and there with a dead tree or the remains of something massive and monstrous.

A place where nightmares come to die. Either that, or something here killed them.

“It has to be the demon,” she whispers.

“The what? ”

Her gaze locks on mine. “You knew this, before… I told you, before you lost your memories. We were forced to seek refuge in a cursed forest on the way to the Court of Memory. I had to make a deal with a demon in order to save us.”

My chest tightens. “What kind of deal?”

“To release her from her prison in the forest one night a year.”

“To prey on the people of Valaron?” I hiss.

Sarielle’s face crumples. “I know, Zyren. I thought… I thought if we survived, I could figure a way out of the deal later.”

I shake my head, my thoughts spinning. “But why would she bring us here?”

“She’s been haunting my dreams. She knew I left Valaron and thought I was trying to escape. So she told me I had five days to reclaim my throne in the Court of Nightmares, or she would consider the deal reneged and be free not just for one night, but… forever.”

“So the five days is up? She’s free now?”

“No! I still had almost two days left… I don’t understand…”

Anger spikes through my core. “A convenient story. The whole thing. You seduce me, like you seduced my brother, and now we’re trapped in this wasteland of monsters?”

Sarielle’s face goes from panicked to furious in an instant. “How dare you. I never seduced your brother. I was betrothed to him as an infant, completely without consent, I might add, but I have only ever loved you .” She steps up close to me, stabbing a finger into my chest. “And when exactly was I seducing you when you had a knife to my throat?”

She spins and stalks off. She still has no clothes, so she’s tromping through the dunes completely naked. I hate the visceral response it stirs in my body, the desire to run after her and tackle her in the sand.

“Where are you going?” I yell after her.

“To find a way out of this place!” she calls over her shoulder. “You’re clearly not going to be any help whatsoever.”

I stare after her for several moments, undecided, then I follow. Sarielle is already halfway down the giant dune we’re traversing. When she reaches the bottom, she stops and throws her arms into the air, screaming at the top of her lungs. “This is cheating, and you know it! I have two days left, you evil hag!”

She does seem truly incensed. If she’s manipulating me, she’s rather excellent at it.

But, of course, my brother had told me she would be.

I let out a groan. I don’t know who to trust anymore, or what to believe. How can I trust this woman over my own family? My brain tells me that’s absurd. But my heart keeps telling me the opposite. All I know in this moment is that I need to figure out how in the hell to get out of this place. And staying close to Sarielle seems more prudent than going our separate ways. If she’s telling the truth, we can help each other. If she’s not… well, better to keep my enemy within sight.

Sarielle turns left at the bottom of the dune, and when I look that way, I can see what she no doubt had spotted. There seems to be a large body of water far, far in the distance. An ocean, perhaps, judging by the fact that it spans the horizon. She’s still a dozen paces ahead of me, so I jog to catch up.

“Have you come to your senses?” she snarls. She turns and looks up at me, and the ferocious look in her golden eyes makes my heart do a strange flip.

“It makes sense to stick together.” I gesture toward her chest. “Here, take this.”

I pull my tunic off over my head and hand it to her. She gives me a funny look, half wary, half shy, as if just realizing she’s unclothed. But she takes the tunic from me and pulls it on over her head. It’s large on her, hanging halfway down her thighs. She’s swimming in it, but I can still see the curve of her breasts, and now that everything else is covered, I almost instantly want to take it off again. It’s tantalizing knowing what lies out of sight above the hem of my tunic.

This woman really does have me completely under her spell. I don’t know why I’m bothering to fight it.

Her eyes move up and down the expanse of my now-bare chest, drinking me in just the same as I did. “Thank you,” she says softly.

“Make for the water, then?” I ask, pointing into the distance. “See if there are boats or something?”

She nods. “It seems the best choice at the moment.”

So we walk. And walk and walk and walk, for miles and miles. The sky doesn’t change in this place, the sun seeming fixed in place, so it’s hard to tell the passing of time, but it must be hours that we traverse the sands. As we climb and descend the giant dunes, we sometimes lose sight of the water in the distance, which as we travel, I feel more and more confident is an ocean. It is too vast to be anything else, a great expanse of green-gray.

Even though the sky is gray, and the single sun hanging in it shines a dull pewter color, it somehow radiates an intense amount of heat that soon has us both sweaty, miserable, and thirsty. There appears to be no water except the ocean we’re traveling toward, which I doubt we’ll be able to drink. It would be ironic if dehydration killed me, given all the perils I’ve faced over the centuries.

I have lived for so long, and possess so many memories, but none of them are the ones that are important now.

None of them explain how I got transported to Eldare, when for two millennia Valaron was cut off from the rest of Aureon.

None of them explain how my brother got wrapped up with Avonia.

And none of them explain how the woman I’m stranded with came into my life, and why I can’t think of anything else but wanting to protect her and hold her in my arms. Run my fingers through that silvery hair. Pick her up and kiss her until neither of us can breathe.

Frustration bubbles up inside of me, and anger, and as emotion floods my body, I feel a splitting pain lance through my head. I’ve experienced agony in my life, many times, but this is so breathtaking I nearly lose consciousness. With a groan, I stumble forward, landing on my knees, hands wrapped around my head. Blackness swoops in around me…

“Zyren! Zyren!”

I blink my eyes and my vision returns. Sarielle is hovering over me, her face stricken, her hands on each side of my face.

“Dark goddess… are you okay? Can you hear me?”

I let out another groan. I’m lying on my back. I must have passed out after all. “How long was I out for?”

“A minute, maybe…”

Tears track down Sarielle’s cheeks, and a sob shudders in her chest. She sniffles and wipes a hand across her face, turning away from me and covering her eyes with one hand while she continues to cry.

“Sarielle, I’m okay now…” I sit up, eliciting another groan, and wrap one arm around her shoulders.

“You’re… not… okay,” she gets out between sobs.

“What do you mean? I feel fine now.”

“It’s… part of the curse.”

“The curse?” I remember then, what she’d said to me about my memories. “Oh, family bloodlines? And our nightmare blood?”

She nods, her eyes rimmed red and blurred with tears.

“I thought that was just my memories.”

A fresh wave of sobs takes her, and I can’t get another word out of her for several minutes. When she’s finally able to speak again, she says, words shuddering, “Losing your memories is the first stage. It said in the book that the madness eventually led to…”

She can’t seem to finish, but it’s clear what she’s trying to say.

“So, you really are going to be the death of me,” I say wryly. Somehow, I can’t help but find dark humor in it. Everything else seems to be going wrong…

Sarielle shudders and covers her face with her hands again.

I reach up and slowly bring her hands down, weaving my fingers around hers. “I guess you need to stop loving me, then. That seems the logical solution.”

“I’ve tried that before,” she says, misery etched across her face. “It didn’t work. But you… you don’t even remember me, so if anything was going to solve it, that would have been it. Because you can’t possibly love me if you don’t remember me, but your memories are still gone, and now it’s getting worse.”

And while her words make complete sense, I realize in that moment that they’re still false. I don’t know how it’s possible, either, to love someone I don’t even remember.

But I do.

I’m still not entirely convinced she didn’t do all the awful things my brother says she did, but I know what I feel. And Sarielle at my side feels so right, so familiar, that even if she is in fact some villainess, it doesn’t change things. I couldn’t stay away from her if I tried. That had become abundantly clear in the forest… I had tried to do what my brother asked, and I couldn’t. The moment I saw her I knew I was lost.

“Well,” I say softly, stroking one thumb across hers, “I’ve been cursed a very long time with this darkness inside me. I guess that’s just the fate I’ve been dealt. And if what you say is true, falling for you was my fate also. And I have no intention of fighting fate.”

I climb to my feet and pull Sarielle with me.

“Come on. Let’s find a way out of here.”