Page 19 of Cursed Shadows 4 (The Dark Fae)

??????

I shove myself from the branch and fall sideways just as the arrow shoots into the bough.

My ribs scream—and I hang off the branch. The rope keeps me tied to the tree.

Scrambling for a blade, I wrench out a sharp silver knife from my belt, then hack at the rope.

My wide eyes flicker between the sawing of the rope and the dark male perched in the tree opposite. He threads out another arrow from his back, then notches it.

His gaze is as focused as his aim.

This one is directed at my shoulder.

I only just healed that.

He releases the arrow.

The blade saws through the frayed rope with a pop .

And I fall.

No plan, no scheme, no reason to my reaction.

I just smack my hand down on my backpack, fist a grip in it, and fall.

The narrow, wooden limbs of the tree lash at me. Each strike feels like a whip battering my sides, my skull, my knees—

Until my middle comes smacking down on a bough, and my bag smacks me on the back of the head, hard.

A raspy whine ebbs at the edges of my grunt.

It’s not so much that the air has been punched out of me, but that my ribs are thrumming, and my mind is blurring.

But even in my dull pain, I stay sharp enough to react.

I grab onto the bough and stop myself from falling any further. I might not survive all the way to the packed earth below. And even if I did, what would it cost me? Broken bones and a cracked skull, probably.

An arrow spears above me. So close that it disturbs my braids, as though the python has returned to licking me. The arrow plunges into the tree, right above where my bag has toppled.

I flinch at the striking sound.

Teeth gritted, I grab onto my bag with one hand, and the bough with the other, and I pull myself up.

The bough is long and creeping—and its branches reach the distance to the neighbouring tree.

Scrambling into a crouch, I spare a look over my shoulder at the dark fae.

He’s tugging the bow over his head, so it sits firm and secure across his chest, and the glossy purple of his eyes flare on me. There’s a flustered rage to the clench of his jaw, the rustled stress of his auburn hair. That particular male rage that comes from ego.

I spare him no more of my precious moments.

Hooking the bag straps over my shoulders, I crouch for the next tree over—then I lunge.

My gloved hands extend for the branch that snakes out towards me—and I pray to the gods it doesn’t snap under my weight.

My hands come smacking down on it and it only shivers in distress… but it doesn’t break.

I swing under it with enough force to propel myself to the next tree. I land steady on an arched branch. I get no moment for pause, no pause for breath. Behind me, on other side of the frosted trunk, a bough groans beneath the sudden weight of the dark one.

He closed the distance too quickly—too easily.

I swing for the next tree. Then the next, I grab onto a vine and swing myself across the path, then I run down another bough, then leap onto the next…

And the male keeps my pace the whole way.

He must be a hybrid.

There is no doubt about it in my mind, because he has the trees respond to him the same way they respond to me. Leaves fall for him, flimsy branches hold steady under his weight, foliage parts like doors for him to leap through.

And that means he’s keeping pace with me just fine.

I hear it—

The sudden sharp zipppp of a blade singing through the air. Spearing .

I drop.

I made to aim for the neighbouring tree, but the song of the blade is too close, and so I step off the branch, and I plummet.

The wink of silver zips overhead.

I land, hard, on the snow-dusted earth.

My knee screams on landing, my boots flat on the crunch of the dehydrated soil, and I wobble, unsteady.

A sickening smack comes down behind me.

I spin around, my boots staggering under me, and land my wild gaze on the rough rockpile some trees down from me.

He landed there, boots on jagged rock, in a crouch. His fist presses into the coarse stone, and his gaze lifted.

I don’t fuck around.

That one look sends me reeling through the woods.

Branches whip at me. The whistling winds are lashes against my burning cheeks.

Still, the punishing pace of the dark fae chases me down.

The tree I spent my hours in gave me a bird’s view of the area. Downhill takes me back to the pass, the river, the cliff-like drops into the water, and it’s too hard to move through any of it. So I race in the direction of the red field, the smear of crimson and rust-brown that I could barely make out from a distance.

It’s the only place I can think to go.

To head for the kinder waterfall means to curve around the dark fae that’s hot on my heels and hope he doesn’t catch me as I pass him by.

Not like I have a lot of time to think about it.

I just have to act.

And luck has been on my side so far.

The gods have been on my side.

I hope that holds.

I drop to my knees just as a low-hanging split tree breaks my path. I skid under it with the same precision as I would in dance, as I would skid under the flip of another dancer. The wounded tree sweeps over me. Then it’s gone, behind me, the crashing bootsteps closing in on me.

I throw my body forward, pushing the momentum into a forward flip—and I land on my boots.

The spectators watching me shove into a run, dodge around the trees, duck under low branches, they must be wondering why I run from the dokkalves as fiercely as I do the litalves. I wonder how quickly the spectators figured out that I have no alliance out here. That I am the most alone of any competitor.

So many times in my life I have felt like everyone was out to get me. I’ve never been this right about that. As Ridge proved, even my friends cannot be trusted.

I can’t outrun them all, and not for much longer.

The only thing keeping me alive, out of this dokkalf’s reach, is that I dodge around trees and duck under fallen branches. I create obstacles.

It won’t work much longer.

The strategy isn’t longstanding—and he will plough through it with ego and impatience at any moment.

I need a fresh scheme.

Dehydrated earth crunches beneath me. Whatever blades of grass are left out here, the ones that haven’t withered and gone with the winds, are crisp beneath my boots.

It’s too loud.

My boots are smacking and crunching on hard, packed soil for too long—and the dark fae is gaining on me.

The earth slopes to my left.

I can’t falter my pace by looking over at the rusty red field downhill, but I can make out enough of it by looking ahead—

And I am not going down there.

This was a bad choice. A poor direction to take.

Red field my ass.

Stupid, silly halfling.

It’s a fucking bog. A rusty swamp the size of small lake.

And I have cornered myself right at its border.

But that bog is my only escape.

He’s getting closer. So close that I fear he can just reach out and snatch my braids. So close that I can smell the dirt and sweat on him.

The breath spears through me, curt and sharp.

I jolt into a hard, sudden left, then drop to the ground. I flip into a roll—and it takes me downhill.

“Fuck,” he grunts.

His steps stagger, growing quieter, and I know he’s stumbling back around to chase me down to the red field.

Into the bog.

I tumble down the hill.

My head smacks off a pebble, a twig spears into my temple, the air is knocked out of me with each crashing thud.

But the dirt starts to soften. Damper, softer—

I throw up my hands to shield myself.

But I bounce off the soft soil, and right into the thick, brown liquid.

I splat on the sludge, face-first.

I’m splayed on the bog.

The liquid is quick to shove into me. It’s a hot, slick rush down my throat—nothing like mud… and a lot like blood.

I shove up from the thick sludge. It clings to me, like sticky fingers gripping at my body, trying to drag me under.

My hands dig into the watery mud—and I start to push my chest up when I hear it.

The smacking crack of a hard landing.

My chin grazes my shoulder.

I look back at the dark fae.

Smart enough to avoid landing in the bog, his boots are firm on the smooth surface of a black boulder. It glosses under him, as though a swollen, enlarged pebble, or as though painted with a varnish.

Whatever it is, the boulder is tucked back some distance from me. He can reach me, if he steps off the safety of the rock and into the bog I am stuck in.

But I doubt he will.

With his furrowed brow and slanted mouth, he considers me, the bent knees of my legs stuck in the bog, so close yet so far from him, then the bog itself, the thick almost black sheen of it.

He settles his attention on the next boulder over. Glossier than the one he’s crouched on now, but if he makes it, he can grab at me.

My legs writhe against the bog. My hands push deep into the sludge—and I am starting to sink.

It’s taking all my strength just to keep my chest up from the slick mud, like I’m stuck in a barrel of oil and taffy.

The dark fae makes the jump.

My breath hitches as he lands on the boulder, the one right there, an arm’s reach from me.

But before I can think he’s got me now , his boots slip over the slick surface and are taken out from under him.

Panic alights his face before the fall.

Then his back comes crashing down on the boulder, and his skull connects with a sickening crack.

A ripple of relaxation runs through his body, like a ribbon unwinding through the lovely summer air.

Limp, the male slips off the surface of the boulder and into the bog…

I watch the dark liquid wash over him.

There is a reddish hue to it, a rusty brown shade, slinking over his flesh like claws creeping over him—and then a sickly sensation burns down my insides.

This isn’t mud.

It is blood.

The kind that comes from deep within a body, from the organs. This is a bog filled with the blood of death.

And it’s in my fucking mouth.

A gurgling retch is quick to escape me. My body heaves once, twice, then—

A spill of sick falls from my parted lips.

So fucking disgusting.

It’s blood.

It’s definitely blood.

My heartrate is jogging now, threatening to break out into a sprint, a full panic, as I watch the dark fae’s body sink into the sludge.

The crimson snakes over him. It trickles and stretches, and he’s pulled under. Like the bog knows he cannot fight and so it will claim him now.

Fleetingly, I wonder if that is how this bog became. Maybe so many contenders from previous Sacraments have fallen here and the blood of dark and light became the bog. Or it’s entirely new, and I’m in the blood of the mountain itself.

Another heave crawls through my body.

My shoulders curve before another flow of sick escapes me, and it’s remarkably close to the blood that was forced down my throat when I landed in here.

The flurry in my chest is ice-cold. Like the python is slithering around in there.

It’s all I can do to steady my breaths, nostrils flaring around the whistle of my hiked heartrate.

Don’t panic,

don’t panic,

don’t panic,

don’t panic.

I tell myself that over and over.

The mantra is doing little to soothe the sudden thunder of my heart or the tears falling down my whitened face.

I’ve never been stuck in a bog before.

There are plenty in the Queen’s Court, and I scramble through the ghosts in my mind, searching for an answer.

I know father warned me of them once upon a time, when I was too young to ever need the advice because I was too afraid to chance getting near them.

Still, I force my eyelids to shut as though it’ll help me think clearer and loosen a steady breath from my tightened chest.

I find Father in my mind.

In the grandstands of Comlar, his hands clasped and brought to his face, fingertips pressed to his silently murmuring mouth.

‘Spread your arms, child. Pretend they are lovely wings. Even weight won’t sink.’

My eyes snap open.

A determined clench firms my jaw as I slowly lean my weight onto my side. My shoulder digs into the bloody bog.

A hot metallic scent is quick to snare up my nostrils as my cheek flattens into the blood.

I roll, slow and careful, onto my back.

My boots twist with me, then slip free from the bog with a horrid slicking sound.

I am on my back.

I echo those words like a mantra in my mind, over and over.

I am one step closer to freedom.

Loosening a trembling breath, I spread out my arms, as though preparing to make a snow angel, but one in a bloody, sludgy bog.

I don’t sob with the shuttering of my heart. I weep, silent, a thick ball swelling in my slick throat. The fear isn’t hot blazes tearing through me—it is cold ice.

I swallow down the panic before it can overtake me. Consume me. Then, inevitably, kill me.

Tears trickle down my temples to my hairline, but it’s the shudder of my breaths that I try to sooth as I start the glacier process of writhing my legs.

Above, the skies have taken a pinkish hue. The first time since I landed that it has been anything other than the shades of stone. Bleached or dark, it has always been stone.

Must be the reflection of this dark red mud, flickering off the sheets of clouds.

I watch the clouds, their sunset hues, however faint, and still, I writhe my legs.

As he was in my mind, Father will be on the stands right now, face half-buried in his hands, hoping I remember his early lessons and lectures about the bogs around the village.

Somehow, just knowing that helps. It steels my resolve.

My right leg is the first to slip out of the sludge-trap.

The left leg takes longer, a good few minutes that endanger me so much more. One wrong lean of my weight on my upper body, one wrong twist or shift in my arms, and then the bog will start to suck me under.

Even weight distribution.

My mouth puckers around the steady, sharp breaths that I loosen. My lashes flutter around the tears prickling my eyes.

This is the scary part.

Hands trembling like dead leaves in winter winds, I bring them to flatten on my chest. Arms crossed, I straighten my legs out, and I look like a body prepared on a bed of sticks, ready to face her funeral.

No funerals for the dead on the Mountain of Slumber.

I swallow down the lump in my throat, feeling nothing but ice-cold dread sweeping through me.

But I have no time to spare on finding my nerve.

I roll.

The slicking noise tacking to my every limb is wretched. Like peeling off a bandage from a festered wound. Like honey stuck on the fingertips.

But it is me, rolling through a mud bog soaked with the blood of the mountain’s victims.

I feel the warmth of it soaking against my face as I roll, it pushes up my nostrils, forces its way into my mouth.

I steel myself against the rising nausea.

I can break down when I reach safety.

I can weep when I am safe.

I roll back to the slope I came down. My only route out of here is to climb and claw my way back up to the forest floor.

Father will be watching.

He might even be proud.

Proud that I roll, that I remember his lessons, that those very teachings save me. And they do.

I roll all the way to the edge of the bog, close enough to the slope that I can reach out and claw my fingers into the moist earth of the hill—and not even the gloves can protect my nails from tugging.

If Father is proud, then Pandora might be the one who carries the stunned silence. Neither of them had any faith in me.

Not to get ahead of myself, since there is more time out here to survive, and who knows how long it will take until the mountain chucks us back through space and time to where we belong, or the iilra pull us out if their grip on the portal weakens. I could be here another minute, then gone, or another week, then dead.

But I know one thing.

Father and Pandora never expected me to survive as long as I have, and not in the way I have either. I haven’t hidden. I have been a target, time and time over, I have faced threats, escaped them, defeated them.

I feel the weight of that lift off of me as I claw up the slope.

It’s only when my boots are free from the mud that I pause, just to rest my head on the soil, fingers dug into the dewy earth.

I sag.

For a long moment, I slouch against the slope, boots and hands dug into the mud, and I tuck my chin down. I hide my relieved sobs from the spectators.

I cry into the soil.