Page 1 of Cursed Shadows 4 (The Dark Fae)

An indescribable unease thickens the air of Kithe.

The winds should be stiff, the temperature crisp, the air stagnant. Yet warm winds lash at the faces of the fae moving swiftly up and down the path to Hemlock House.

The Warmth teeters on the edge of invading the lands, battering away the last few moments of the Quiet. In the early intrusion of the Warmth, a hushed panic rushes the front porch of Hemlock.

Melantha heaves a case over the gate, tattered, scraped and peeling brown leather.

Morticia catches it with a tightened grunt. Before she can twist around to shove the case into the arms of the waiting coach-rider, Eamon comes rushing out of the shuddering front door, a door that seems to whine and hiss with frustration.

Eamon yanks the strap of his satchel over his head, his boots smacking on the stone path, his blouse billowing in the winds.

He sweeps past Melantha, the winds growing harsher the further out of the tree-lined coverage he ventures. His pink cheeks are raw against it, and his fine braids that whip at his face.

His steps don’t falter. He marches straight for Morticia.

He snatches her by the arm. “No, mother.” His growl is as terse as the look she gives him. “You must stay. It isn’t safe.”

Morticia yanks her arm free.

Her lip curls over her teeth. “You forget who the parent is. I will be by the side of my son, and a son in danger is all the more reason to accompany him.”

Eamon lets a snarl break through him.

He turns it on the coach-rider who wrestles Morticia’s lumpy luggage onto the carriage roof. The dokkalf is dressed, prepared, for the long ride through harsh weathers and morke infested darkness. His old black leathers are muted from age, too long gone from Dorcha armies, a warrior turned coach-rider over the centuries.

How much gold he was paid to come for this ride, this assignment, Eamon doesn’t ask. Doesn’t want to know, because he can’t pay the Taraan House back.

And he knows it will have been Melantha who paid the fee, his mother’s sister.

She comes up behind him in two, silent steps. But she stops at the wrought-iron fence.

“Do not argue it.” Melantha hisses, her hands turning to fists on the arrowheads of the fence. “The Warmth is coming. You are losing the advantage of time. You must go, now .”

Eamon tenses all over. His muscles turn to lead, his jaw clenches, teeth grinding to dust. None of that helps. None of that removes the danger lurking over him like a storm cloud. Danger that he’s about to take his own mother into, all because of her stubbornness.

The rider disturbs the family spat.

The case is fastened to the roof of the coach, and so he jumps down onto the road, his boots smacking too loud, and he yanks open the carriage door. The old wood groans and snares the glares of the dokkalves gathered around the fence.

The rider throws his one-eyed gaze to Eamon, a bite of impatience on his scarred, twisted mouth.

Eamon yanks out of his stillness with a throaty snarl.

He turns on Melantha.

His aunt arches a dark, thin brow over her ink-blot eye.

Eamon fishes out a crisp envelope from his pocket. He pushes it into her bony hand. “For Ridge.”

Her gaze cuts down as she takes it, then she gives a single, deep nod. “I will have a servant run it to him.”

The coach-rider clears his throat.

Eamon’s jaw rolls before he turns and jumps into the carriage.

Morticia sweeps in behind him.

The rider doesn’t give them a moment to speak, not a moment for a goodbye to Melantha before he slams the door shut so hard that the wood rattles all around them.

Time is too precious, too sparse.

And so the only farewell they have with Melantha is Morticia reaching for the curtain to tug it back.

Before she can, the rider has scrambled up to the seat and grabbed the reins. The coach sways and teeters under the shifting weight.

The rider’s call splits the carriage air. “ Ha !”

The rocky sway of the coach is quick to turn turbulent. The carriage jolts into an urgent race, and the clocking of hooves rains down on the road like fist-sized balls of hail.

Eamon sinks into the wooden back of the carriage seat. The ache blooming on his spine pins him in reality.

Fleetingly, he has the thought, the memories of Bee, how she would dig her own fingernails into the meat of her palms, or tug and scratch at her own flesh whenever she stood alone at village parties and ceremonies.

There is something grounding about it, Eamon decides.

Opposite him, Morticia snatches the leather grip above her head. She fists her hand onto it, then tenses her arm, an attempt to better navigate the rocky violence of the carriage thundering through the upper streets of Kithe.

“Have you a sword?” she whispers as though her voice might somehow overpower the punishing pace of the kelpie steeds if she speaks a note too loud.

Eamon turns a frown on his mother.

A single braid is draped over her shoulder, hair of ink like her sister, but threaded with strands of white, just like her dark eyes, speckled with ivory flakes.

Her words don’t quite sink into his tangled mind for a heartbeat.

Reaching over her shoulder, she draws a bow seemingly from nowhere. Bleached bone and ateralum string. It’s only now he notices that she has a quiver fastened to her back.

Her fingers are tight on the feathered flick of the arrow, but she rests the green tip on her knee—dipped in poison.

That gesture alone reminds him of her question.

‘Have you a sword?’

His mouth flattens into a line.

He shakes his head, then—reaching around for the rear of his waistband—he glides out the silver of a dagger. Its polished blade is longer than his forearm, the ribbed handle a decent grip in bloody battle.

But the problem isn’t the weapon.

The problem is them.

Eamon never took to warriorship in Licht.

For the most part, Morticia raised him as a light male. And she nurtured parts of him that yearned for no violence at all, parties and smiles and pretty folk.

Always, he’s been passive in it, in the violence of their kinds, both light and dark.

He collects humans from their realm, lures them in to light lands, then simply hands them over to the High Court. He doesn’t torment them himself, torture them, harm them.

There’s always been that distance in him, the reluctance to shed blood the way so many others hunger to do.

Morticia encouraged other desires in him. And he is much happier in that life she crafted for him, to chase laughter and spill wine and roll down grass hills. She raised him in a way she could never have done in Dorcha, where he would have been stolen from her too young, thrown into the barracks, and turned to stone with a heart caked in ice.

So the dagger in his grip, the one he unsurely presents to his mother, is something he is acquainted with, but not familiar with.

That distinction will mean his life in battle if Lord Braxis has sent hunters after him.

An edge of premature defeat softens his voice, “How many arrows?”

Morticia’s mouth pinches. She fishes out three more bone arrows, then—lamely—touches her fingertips to the throwing knives that glitter around her waist, a black leathered weapons belt hastily fastened over the black of her nightdress.

Eamon decides, she mustn’t have had time to find more arrows or dress in leathers that might protect her, definitely protect her better than a nightdress. Four arrows, a weapons belt speckled with around five throwing knives, and a bag that she probably tossed random items into before running out to the carriage in a flurry.

It was as little time as he had before he left Nari on the porch—and decided to run.

The carriage was called in a hurry.

Melantha eavesdropped on his conversation with Nari, on his private farewell to his sister of the soul.

Melantha lurked in the shadows of the foyer, then rushed to call on the coach-rider she knew to be a warrior. An added layer of safety that does little to soothe the disquiet in the carriage.

Just four arrows. A dagger. Some knives.

Little skill between them.

And a last-minute rider that Eamon hopes can fight well enough that—if Lord Braxis has anticipated this escape and has prepared for it with warriors in waiting—they might survive.

His face tightens. “You shouldn’t have come.”

She scoffs. “And let my only child make this journey alone?” Her hand fists on the arrows, her other clenched on the curve of the bow.

Eamon’s shoulders sag with his deflated tone, “It is too dangerous, Mother.”

“That is exactly why you cannot be left alone.” Her fine nose seems to sharpen with her glare. “This is more than a mother’s love. Aleana is gone.”

A strike across the face.

A dagger in the gut.

A twisted fist in the chest.

That’s what the reminder feels like.

Eamon flinches.

Aleana’s glossed, balmed corpse on piled wood, a black flame dancing over her flesh.

A sharp breath cuts him, and he sucks himself back into the hard wood of the coach.

“Caius and Daxeel might die in the passage,” Morticia says, softer now, and turns her flushed cheek to him. “That will mean you are the last of the bloodline’s breeding generation. We cannot let the Sgail line die.”

His lashes flutter over dimming eyes, a gold melting into charred embers.

The carriage jolts, a sudden bump in the road.

And so they have passed the streets of Kithe, now at the edge where the roads are cheaper, less kind to the metal wheels and the passengers.

Morticia’s bony fingers tighten on the bow. Her nerves are betrayed in that gesture Eamon catches out the corner of his eye.

She says, evenly, as though her entire skeletal body hasn’t stiffened opposite him, “You have a duty, whether you rejoice in that or not. As I have a duty you, to give my life to protect my bloodline.”

The roads are so violent now that his shoulder knocks into the wall, and he has to plant his boots firm to steady himself.

The leather grip above him is gone, but the bolts remain. Someone before him has wrenched it clean out.

His mouth thins, grim. “You care so much about your duty that you abandoned it for the light.”

Morticia snarls, and it strikes him silent.

“I abandoned the dark,” she hisses. “I abandoned Dorcha. But never Sgail.”

Eamon has no answer.

Whatever thoughts find their way to his tongue, he silences them with a tightened jaw. He brings the dagger to rest on his lap and cuts his gaze to the drawn curtains that shield the window.

No silence fills the carriage. Not with the assault of the kelpies outside, those punishing hooves on the gravel roads. The wood of the swaying carriage, it groans and creaks, hinges squeak, and the rocking clatters loud, too loud.

Eamon cringes against it.

His hand finds his chest.

Palm flat against the heavy thuds of his heart, he shifts his eyes on the dark.

The ache blooms.

No matter how firmly he rubs the sore spot of his chest, the blouse rustling under his touch, the ache spreads until it’s a chill creeping along his shoulders and tingling down his spine.

No breath he forces into his body is filling enough, deep enough, to soothe him.

“She will be fine.” Morticia’s lie is effortless, too much so. “Every dark one will dedicate themselves to protecting her.”

Eamon’s mouth twists.

Morticia’s reassurances are as empty as the hollow feeling in his chest.

Yes, Nari will be shielded in the Sacrament. But that protection is not absolute.

Every contender will step through that portal, and be swept to the Mountain of Slumber, alone .

They will land alone .

She will be alone.

The mountain will bleed crimson and black—and no one can guarantee that the blood spilled will not belong to her.

Eamon’s throat bobs as he swallows down a thick, choking sensation.

His mind flitters to the letter he scrawled fast, too hurried, to Ridge before he left. Before he left her behind…

A letter to say goodbye, to wish him luck, to declare a need to see him again one day—and to ask of him a favour, not something a fae does often. A debt.

He asked Ridge to protect her.

“Nari is cunning,” Morticia adds. “More than others recognise in her. She will do well.”

Eamon just stares at the cropped curtains, eyes prickling.

Morticia shifts on the creaking seat. She reaches out for the curtain. Her slender fingers pinch the edge—she peels it back just a touch, enough to see that, beyond the window, darkness is stealing the air.

Eamon watches the lights fade. Lanterns and streetlamps left behind as the gravel beneath the carriage wheels turns to dirt, and the town is gone.

They fall silent.

And stare at the sliver between the drapes, the tiny gap that they can look through to see that Kithe falls away.

Morticia slides an arrow across the bow. She readies it.

Eamon flexes his grip on the dagger’s hilt.

The darkness thickens.

And this, if anywhere, is where the strike will come.

Out of the borders of Kithe, there are no lanterns or lamps or jars to break the dark. No folk. No witnesses.

These are barren lands.

Even wild lands soften the darkness in white blades of grass or pearlescent fruits that swell on gleaming blue trees, and orange fireflies flitter above the ground.

Here, it is desolate and dead.

And without dark ones around to spook them away, Morke skitter somewhere above in the skies.

Eamon listens to their thick, wet, slapping sounds as they battle and tangle far over the carriage.

The presence of Morticia and the rider spook the creatures. Dokkalves are repellents, true, but there aren’t enough dokkalves around to disperse the morke completely.

Just hearing their slick, slapping sounds, their music of movement, Eamon can picture them above. Thousands of them coiling and skittering backwards, tentacles curling inwards as if to make a path for the carriage, for the dark ones spearing through their territory.

His muted dark blood has no effect on the morke. He is half of the light.

Morticia’s blood is enough to repel them, to keep them at bay—but they won’t scatter for her.

It is the dark male who draws the carriage, he is the one who has them falling over themselves, making that wretched whispery hissing call of theirs, that skrrt skrrt skrrt that Eamon feels scraping over his bones.

It sets him on edge. His shoulders curve inwards.

Morticia, too. Her teeth are gritted, bared.

Because, beneath the sounds of the morke, there thunders the punishing pace of hooves hitting the packed dirt ground. Steeds, not their steeds.

Distant ones… and they are advancing.

Morticia’s fingers tighten on the bow and arrow. Her lashes shut before she draws in a long inhale through her nostrils. Her chest expands with the breath—the scent of the air, the taste.

Eamon leans closer to the curtained window. His finger hooks around the edge, then tugs. He peers through the wedged gap and out into the sheet darkness of the barren lands.

His eyes take a moment to focus, but when they do, he sees them, almost .

Two black-like-night steeds, so close to being melted into the absolute darkness.

He can’t rely on the visual. There could be more, or just the two. Two is enough. But Eamon needs to know exactly how many litalves are after him and his mother.

He counts the harsh thuds of the hooves hitting the dirt. He finds the pattern, the pace.

Morticia sucks in a deep, icy breath through her flaring nostrils. Her fingers tremble as she notches the arrow and cuts a look to Eamon.

The look he returns is a tight-mouthed, grim one.

He lifts the dagger. “ Litalves .”