The Nightmare Dilemma

30 The Curse

It was so unexpected that for a full second I just stood there, frozen by shock. Then all thought and reason gave way to physical impulse. I raised my hands to his head, sliding my fingers through his hair as I pulled him farther down, deepening the kiss. Eli responded at once. He leaned into me, opening his mouth against mine. He tasted like he smelled—something dark and musky and male.

His hands slipped down my arms to my hips. He took hold of my waist and pulled me into him, his large body seeming to swallow mine. No space existed between us, and still it wasn’t close enough. I pushed him with my whole body, forcing him backward across the room until he hit the sofa with the back of his legs.

He fell onto it, taking me with him. He pulled and I climbed until I was on top of him—not in the Nightmare way, but stretched out over him. Our kiss broke but only for a second before Eli captured my mouth with his again. His hands on my waist rose up beneath my shirt. As his rough fingers grazed my bare skin, a violent shiver shot up my back and down my legs. His hands climbed higher, exploring.

Mine did the same, sliding away from his face, down his neck, then across his chest. Eli turned his head, our lips parting, as he began to kiss his way down my cheek to my neck. My entire body convulsed from the sensation of his lips moving against that sensitive skin. But even as he did it to me, I wanted to do it to him. I pushed his head back, making room as I kissed my way down his neck to his collarbone.

A soft groan escaped Eli’s throat. He sat up, lifting me off him. For a second, I thought he was calling an end to things, but then he stood, effortlessly switching our positions as he flipped me onto my back against the sofa. He stretched out on top of me, bracing his weight with one arm as he kissed me again, harder and deeper than before. I struggled to catch my breath, but I didn’t care. I wanted this. I had never wanted anything more in my entire life.

I grabbed the sides of his shirt, and pulled up until I was able to slide my hands around his bare waist, the muscles there flexing against my fingers as he breathed in and out, in something close to a pant. This time Eli hissed when I touched him as if in pain. Only I knew by the way he kissed me that it wasn’t pain. Not at all.

You should stop, a voice whispered in my head.

I ignored it. I didn’t want to stop. Not ever. And neither did Eli. In this moment, I knew it with absolute certainty.

But then Eli jumped backward off of me. I sucked in a breath, completely taken by surprise. I sat up as across the room, Eli paced back and forth, his chest heaving.

“Oh, God, Dusty.” He clenched and unclenched his fists. “We can’t. Don’t you get it? We can’t do this. Not ever.” I flinched at the desperate, agonized tone of his voice. He really believed it, whatever this reason was why we couldn’t be together.

I wrapped my arms around my chest, feeling naked despite my clothes. “Why?”

He stopped pacing and stared over at me, his expression torn. I watched his inner turmoil blaze in his eyes.

“Come on, Eli.”

At last he drew a deep breath then slowly exhaled. I braced for the truth.

“We’re cursed,” Eli said.

I just stared at him, his words nonsensical.

“Dream-seers,” Eli said, his voice strained. “Our ability to predict the future comes with a curse attached to it.”

I sat up straighter, his words now making far too much sense. I’d been living among magickind long enough to recognize the ring of truth in the idea of something so powerful, so useful, also being so costly. “What kind of curse?”

Eli licked his lips. “The star-crossed kind.”

“You mean like Romeo and Juliet?”

“No, more like Angel and Buffy.”

I tilted my head. “Who?”

Eli exhaled. “Never mind. The thing is, Lady Elaine says that if a pair of dream-seers become involved”—he hesitated, and I could tell he was searching for the right word—“romantically, then they are bound to destroy each other.”

I crossed one leg over the other, a shiver traveling over my skin. “Define destroy.”

“Like Marrow and Nimue. Just like them.” Eli looked at me then looked away just as quickly. “You heard Marrow. He said he was in love with Nimue and then he killed her right in front of us. I don’t understand how it works, but the curse turns love into hate.”

I slumped back against the sofa, as the memory of Marrow first confessing his love for Nimue and then killing her played through my mind. Even after she was dead he claimed that he had set her free, shown her mercy. It was all so twisted and perverse.

“There’s a long history of it,” Eli said. “The dream-seers fall in love and then something happens to drive them apart. Most of them end up killing each other.”

“Who told you this?”

Eli walked over to the desk and sat down. “Lady Elaine, a couple of days after we fought Marrow when I was still in the infirmary.”

I desperately searched for some hole in his story. “But if this curse is true why didn’t she tell us about it right from the beginning?”

“I asked her the same thing. She said she’d hoped that given our age and our rocky relationship at the start that she could put it off for a while, but then she saw the way I was after the fight and decided it was time.”

I narrowed my eyes. “What do you mean?”

“I was beside myself crazy,” Eli said, not quite meeting my eyes. “You were hurt so badly, unconscious. I thought you might be dying. And when they came to take you to the infirmary I freaked out. Didn’t want you out of my sight.”

My breath caught in my throat. “Really?”

He grimaced. “Yeah. Made a bit of an ass of myself.”

I pressed my lips together, wanting to smile but afraid to at the same time.

Eli exhaled. “So Lady Elaine told me the truth, that our attraction toward each other is connected to our dream-seer powers. We’re literally drawn together in every way. That’s why you and I share all the same classes. We have to get close to strengthen our powers. But if we get too close that power backfires. She told me all the stories of the dream-seers before us. Most of them died really young, except for Marrow and Nimue, of course, but they spent years battling each other before she finally managed to imprison him in that tomb. Then she condemned herself to the same imprisonment. It’s pretty awful when you think about it.”

I nodded. It wasn’t just awful, it was cruel, like dangling the cure over a sick man, holding it just out of reach while watching him die. I sucked in a breath. “Isn’t there a way to break the curse?”

Eli shook his head. “Not according to Lady Elaine. She said it can’t be broken, only avoided.”

“But how do we know that’s true? We don’t know that will happen to us. There has to be some kind of choice about it.”

“No, Dusty. There’s not.”

I felt like screaming. “How do you know?”

“Because I’ve seen it.”

I glared. “What, did you dream about it or something?”

“No, Lady Elaine had a vision of what might happen. She showed it to me with some kind of mind meld like what you’ve been doing with Deverell.” He drew a long, shaky breath. “It was awful, Dusty. And I don’t ever want that to happen to you and me. I care about you too much.”

I inhaled, the gesture painful. It was just what I’d always wanted to hear from him. Just what I’d hoped for, but it was never going to happen. The idea made me feel like I was being wrenched apart from the inside out.

Refusing to cry, I put as much steel in my voice as I could. “Why didn’t Lady Elaine tell me? Why did she only tell you?”

Eli frowned. “You’re not going to like it.”

“Oh, there’s no doubt about that, I’m sure. But I think I have a right to know.”

“She thought, given your tendency to rebel, that if she told you that we couldn’t be together it would just make you seek it out even more.”

A burst of anger went through me, hot and quick like a firecracker only to sizzle out a second later. It hurt to hear it, but I also knew deep down that it was true. Marrow had exposed that truth to me. The more someone told me I couldn’t do something, the more I wanted to do it. Even now I felt that rebellious nature screaming at me to stand up and kiss him again. Forever.

I gave in to it. At first, Eli didn’t seem to know what happened as I rushed over to him, cradled his jaw in my hands, and pulled his mouth down to mine in a kiss hot enough to incinerate us both.

For a few seconds we were nothing more than mouth and tongue, taste and heat. But then Eli wrapped his hands around my wrists. I knew what was coming and I fought against it, kissing him harder, trying to express all my feelings in that one act. For a moment, it almost worked, but then he pulled my hands away from his face, breaking the kiss.

Breaking us.

“We can’t,” he said. “I won’t do this.”

I pulled away from him, a flush washing over my body, my heart wrenching. I turned my back to him as I fought back tears. Eli didn’t try to comfort me, as I knew he wouldn’t. But he gave me time, several long painful minutes as I struggled to regain my composure. I had to regain it. I couldn’t let him see how much I hurt, and I couldn’t be selfish and let this derail us from the task at hand—stopping Titus Kirkwood.

Finally, I wiped the moisture from my lips then turned to face him, making my tone and expression as hard as possible, a difficult task considering how soft and broken I felt on the inside. “So let’s call Culpepper, and see if we can’t get into Corvus’s office.”

“Right…” Eli said, a thousand unspoken things in his voice. But then he accepted the farce I had presented him. He walked over to the table where his wand still lay. He picked it up, reapplied the glamour, and placed the ring on his thumb. Then he went to the desk and slipped on a thick leather bracelet I’d never seen him wear before. Under different circumstances I might’ve asked him where he’d gotten it—a gift from his dad perhaps. But not now.

Finally he turned and faced me. “I’m really sorry, Dusty,” he said, and the longing in his voice, the sadness, made the broken pieces inside me shatter a little more, some of the breakage as fine and thin as dust.

“So am I,” I said. I tried to block out the hurt, to bury the loss deep inside me. I knew if I didn’t, the rest of me would break in ways impossible to repair.

Only, who was I kidding. I already was.