Beyond the Aching Door (The Fatebound Duology, #1)

by Victoria Mier

What she didn’t know—couldn’t know—was that the story was an invocation of sorts, a calling of the quarters, a setting of beacons, and when she told it, Fate herself swooped low from the never-places and listened to the story fall from Raegan’s mouth like wine.

A voice like heather on the hills and dusk over the lake spoke to her, over and over again in her ear. Like a chant. A ritual. A prayer, maybe. It stopped the pain. “Outlive me. Please outlive me. I love you too much.” She strained, trying to see the face of the person whom she knew she loved, to take it in one last time. But then her vision slipped away and there was only a curl of black smoke and the smell of things long dead.

When men are afraid, they always kill the witches first.

She knew it was partly because he simply did not feel things the way her human heart did. But the space he made for something he did not understand, and the way he always saw her, was breathtaking in the best way.

he always loved her when she was like this, when she was herself—a wild, keening howl of river water and magic and rage. His love was as strange and inhuman as he was—intense, deadly, unyielding.

The Oracle’s words beat like a war drum inside of Raegan, awakening things sleeping in river muck and lost to bonfires long ago extinguished. All of these lives, all of these years, and so many of them had not meant anything at all because she’d always bent to Fate. The only lives where she had made a dent—Nyneve in the place called Camelot, and Titania during the Uprising in the Otherlands—were when she had spat in Fate’s face and pulled her own fortune from the silt.

“He lives forever and remembers. You die continuously and forget. A punishment that would have crushed the will and resiliency of anyone else, but you two are fools.”