Terror spikes.What?—
A flood of unknown sensations race through me, and I clutch my chest, shuffling away. There’s a loud booming in my ears, out of sync with my pulse, and a deep voice whispering across my mind. But it doesn’t belong to me.
The Cursed One jolts upright and our gazes lock. In that instant, understanding snaps into place. These foreign sensations, these rustling thoughts, they’re his.
I can feel him. Every beat of his heart, every flicker of thought, every restrained surge of emotion bleeds into my own. The intimacy of it turns my stomach, and panic coils.
“What-what’s happening?” I choke out as I scramble to my feet. I try to control it but I can’t. My training is out of reach, seemingly lost to the darkness. Only he remains.
Lust licks at me within. Pain throbs, and I’m contracting and expanding.
I force the thoughts and sensations away as much as I can.
None of this makes sense. He should bedead. I saw my arrow strike him with my own two eyes.I saw it.
His frayed wings stretch in a deliberate, languid motion, as though testing the air, the gravity, the world itself. But like me, there is confusion on his face. Or…is it that I canfeelhis confusion deep within me, like a vibration against my soul? Like me, he takes in the gold glowing on his chest before looking up at me again.
“W-what…” I begin.
“It’s…you feel it too?” he asks. Like before, his voice is deep and almost hypnotic.
But instead of answering his question, I blurt out, “You should be dead.”
His eyes flash. “It takes more than a mere arrow to kill me, human.”
I’m still breathing hard, and I wobble on my feet as my body struggles to get used to the storm of new feelings.
My chest still burns, the bond screaming, the golden patterns throbbing in tandem. “What’s happened?” I gasp. “What—what are these gold patterns? Why are they on me?”
“I think…” He hesitates. “I think we’ve been…bound. Somehow. You and me.”
I stagger back a step, a chill running through me. “Bound? What does that mean?”
He watches me, and his expression softens. “It means you touched what you should have not and you set off something.”
“Like what?” I ask.
“Like fate.”
The word makes me reel. “I don’t… How?”
“It means, little human, that fate had other plans for us.”
“No…” The thought nearly suffocates me, curling around my ribs like iron bands. Not knowing what else to do, I search the ground for my dagger, and when I find it not even a foot away, I seize it and point it at him. “I can’t be bound to—this is one of your tricks!”
“A creature may only be soul-bound to a human if their spirits were once one, two lives drawn from the same cosmic tapestry at the dawn of creation,” he says, eyeing my blade.
“Once one?”
“You ask a lot of questions.” He nods and a small smile appears. “But yes, it seems we were meant to find each other.”
He takes a step toward me, but I shift back. His casual demeanor irks me even more, especially when I can feel his hum of acceptance inside me. Then he does something even more unexpected. He lifts both hands in surrender.
“I don’t want to kill you,” he mutters. It’s the second time he’s said the lie to me.
“That makes one of us,” I snap.
“It wouldn’t be wise for you to do that. Especially now.”