Page 2 of Cursed Shadows 4 (The Dark Fae)
I have never truly understood the value of the bracelet that I drape over my wrist.
Is it that it once belonged to my mother?
A woman I don’t remember, who cared so little about me that she never intentionally left this bracelet for me to keep—it was a mere oversight.
Click,
clock,
click,
clock.
I fasten the clasp, then tug the sleeve of my fitted sweater over the bracelet. Now, it’s hidden, this flimsy silver string of unpolished beads.
I consider leaving it behind.
But I can’t.
I must have it with me for the Sacrament. It must be on my person in the second passage.
It’s the one treasure I can’t bring myself to leave behind.
And I just can’t seem to understand why.
Because Mother didn’t leave it for me. Knife found it tucked behind her mattress some days after she was released from her bargain and ran back to the human world.
Click,
clock,
click,
clock.
Knife gave the bracelet to Father.
Father gave it to me.
It became mine.
So I then wonder, is it because the bracelet is pretty?
I peel back the wrist of the sweater.
Click,
clock,
click,
clock .
I frown at the bracelet.
The beads are in dire need of polish, of a shine, and even then, it won’t come to life. The age is drab, too far gone, and really, it’s just some beads attached to a silver-coated string.
It is not a pretty piece.
So why is it that just the thought of unclasping the bracelet from my wrist and placing it on the table beside the tall gold-framed mirror is a thought that clenches my insides and bares my teeth?
Click,
clock,
click,
clock.
I swallow back the tension in my throat.
I surrender to the bracelet and, again, tug the sleeve of my fitted black sweater over it. There, it is safe.
Click,
clock,
click,
clock —
I glare at the brass ornament on the table.
The pendulum clock talks too much. The steady sway, left, to right, I don’t just hear it rushing me this late hour of the Quiet. I feel the clicks and clocks thrum my bones.
A moodiness settles over me like a storm cloud.
It’s slick with unease, the kind that pins my voice to my throat and my muscles to my bones.
Click,
clock,
click,
clock.
The rising panic reaches through my chest. An ice-grip that curls its fingers around my fluttering heart.
It squeezes, tight, too tight, and I might be sick.
But the pendulum clock is not wrong to rush me, to remind me of the passing seconds I don’t have to spare on a bracelet.
So I do what I have avoided for too long since waking.
I lift my gaze to the ornate framed mirror, an unpolished brass that traps me. Well, traps my reflection.
The sight of myself hooks my breath in my chest.
My mouth is parted, as though about to fall wide open into a gape. I firm my lips together and draw in a long, steadying breath through my flaring nostrils.
Seeing myself like this, it makes it all so real.
Click,
clock,
click,
clock.
Of course it is real, and I am to enter the second passage of the Sacrament in less than two hours—and that pendulum clock likes to remind me of that harrowing truth.
I swear on my ears, it’s taunting me.
But I throw no glare at the clock this time.
All that self-obsession I have been accused of, the self-pity I have marinated in, I see it now, right there in the mirror, looking back at me. It’s in the gloss of my eyes.
I watch the tear fall down my blotchy cheek.
The flush spreads down my neck to my chest, hidden by the sweater, as my heart starts to thump, and my breaths sharpen.
I look a way I never thought I would.
A way that mocks me for my own defeat.
Father meant me for dresses and gowns.
But now, I look the part of a warrior.
And I hate it, I hate it, I hate it.
Leather trousers cling to my legs so firmly, so fluidly, as though painted on, and I suspect they might just become a second skin to me.
An array of black metal and silver weapons glitter at me. Dozens of them slotted into the weapons belt that’s strapped around my waist, another two holsters to boast even more daggers and throwing knives wrapped around my bicep and thigh.
The corseted vest is moulded to my shape, the firm leather fitting snug on my midsection, something of an armoured bodice. Yet, there is no suffocation to come with it. Firm, yes, but breathable, and leather so thick and laced that it will protect me from any speared blades aimed my way. Dragon leather.
Under it, I wear the fleece-lined black sweater, and though it feels like buttered feathers embracing me, I want nothing more than to rip it off, all of it.
For the first time in my life, I am in leathers.
I am in armour.
In that alone, I am prepared—
But not prepared in the ashy tint to my complexion, the tremble of my clammy hands at my sides, not in the dark circles around my eyes, or the writhing in my gut.
Click,
clock,
click,
clock.
My mouth twists.
My bottom lip quivers, and I turn my cheek to the mirror before the next tear can fall from the reddened glaze of my eyes or the dark, sleepless patches that circle them.
I draw away from the mirror and, with a shuddering breath, snatch a pair of slick gloves from the foot of the bed.
Click,
clock,
click,
clock.
Fingers trembling, I wrestle on the gloves.
They clasp at the wrist with small pearly buttons, and I think it a lovely touch. A perfectly wretched gift from Aleana that stirs my insides and has salty tears lingering on my pinched mouth.
All of this is Aleana’s gift to me. The whole outfit.
And it was a horrible thing to wake to.
I woke less than an hour ago. Tris was setting a tray on the other side of the bed. Right where Daxeel had been. But he was gone, it was only me—and Tris.
On the tray, there was a steaming pot of freshly brewed coffee, a full breakfast that I didn’t have the steady gut to eat, and water. Lots of it. I managed only a glass.
And I watched Tris.
I watched her leave, then return with a sturdy black box, too wide for her stretched arms, too bulky for the point of her chin to arch over, and so her flushed tear-streaked face was mostly hidden as she waddled it to the bed.
She set it down beside the tray.
The matte black box lured me out from under the blankets.
No note, just a silvery bow wrapped all around it—a box containing the armour, the gear, the belts, the weapons.
I’ll always be haunted by the thick sound of Tris’s grated voice as I lured off the ribbon. “Aleana.”
A familiar thickness chokes my throat.
I draw closer to the box, lid lifted and strewn on the bed with the tangled ribbon and discarded bow.
I land with a cushioned thud.
Stray chestnut locks fly up around my face for a moment before I yank at them and start the gruelling process of wrangling my too-long hair into a system of braids that wind around my hairline. A crown of braided hair. Best to keep it all out of the way.
As my fingers spindle, I wonder if Aleana knew for certain I would enter the second passage—or if she had all of this done for me as a backup, that she betted on a maybe .
All Aleana’s efforts to fight this fate between me and her brother, what was the point of wasting her energy on that if she knew I was to enter the Sacrament in the end?
‘I’m afraid…’
Her voice echoes through me like a sword through my heart.
I swallow back the tears.
My fingers tremble in the gloves as I pin the braids into place along my scalp, until I have nothing more to distract myself with. I reach down to the small leather backpack on the floor and tug it to rest between my feet.
I dig through it again and again and again.
Of all the supplies—a perfectly folded fishing net, fillet knife, waterskin, pinkie-sized phial of black powder—I take out only one from the bag. Just one supply that I set down on the floor to be left behind.
Shooting sparks.
The kind that, when aimed upwards, will erupt a pocket of the sky into bursts of sparkling lights. Humans call them fireworks, though theirs are of a different kind.
These shooting sparks are black and silver—and so if I used them, I would be calling for the help of any dark fae nearby.
I want no dark fae to find me.
I won’t be needing them—so I leave them on the floor.
Click,
clock,
click,
clock.
The sob strikes through me.
My face crumples as my hands slap to my leathered thighs, and I double over. My cries are of silence, the kind that make my face all damp and ugly.
I don’t even have my Eamon to comfort me.
How empty I feel to not have his arms around me in this moment, his familiar scent of oak and wine and valerian to tickle my nose.
Eamon left for Dorcha right after Aleana’s funeral. I held him like it was the last time we would touch each other, see each other, love each other—because it very well might have been.
I might never see him again.
I might not survive.
He might not survive.
And even if the gods shine on us both, and we are reunited… what will happen then?
Taroh flashes in my mind.
His hand raised to strike me down. Father takes his place, and the back of his hand connects.
I flinch.
Sucking my mouth inwards, I grapple with my unravelling.
Click,
clock,
click,
clock.
Running out of time.
I blink my teary eyes.
And my shoulders jerk with a fright.
The door shudders with a single, firm knock.
I loosen a grated breath.
The knock was a message.
I know it must be Daxeel out there.
Time , that knock tells me.
Time to leave.
Time to make for Comlar.
Time to walk to my death.
I don’t bother swatting at the tears on my cheeks. They are mostly dry now, caked onto my blotchy complexion, but it will be no secret to anyone how my fear rattles me. I have no shame in my tears.
I reach for the parcel. And I pluck out the last part of my gift, the final piece of my armour: black leather boots.
Flat soles to make for soft steps.
I pull them on.
The boots are thermal-lined leather, arching all the way up past my knees, utterly comfortable in that they feel something like feathered butter on my feet.
And like every other part of this uniform, the boots mould to my body, to my shape, to my size—and it suddenly feels like I’m wearing nothing more than a second skin.
This must be how dragon’s feel in their scales.
Maybe Aleana didn’t think this was the end for me, or for me and her brother. Maybe she suspected the second passage would be that final battle between us—and I would be the victor.
Or—maybe it is time…
Time to release these silly hopes I cling to.
Maybe it’s time to release Daxeel.
I smile something grim on the thought, because without the smile, all I have is an icy metal fear that will claw at me from the inside out.
And so, with that grim look on my tightened face, I snatch the small leather backpack from the floor, and spare the bedchamber a final look, a room where I have spent phases rotting away in puddles of my own sweat, where I have slept in the arms of the male I love and who hates me, and where I held onto too much hope that it must be considered nothing less than foolery.
Delusion.
For too long, that is what I was. Not hopeful, not desperate, not a warrior in love—but merely a halfling flooded with delusion.
I feel shame in that.
It carries with me as I leave the bedchamber behind, shame on my flushed cheeks, in the proud lift of my chin.
The walk down to the foyer is a lonely, quiet one. The candleflames and the lanterns are dim all the way.
Shadows haunt me down to the lobby.
I am the last to arrive.
Even Melantha and Tris and General Agnar are here before me. If there were any goodbyes to be wept, I missed them—and thank the gods for that. I don’t have it in me this Quiet. To thank and hold and wish the best for anyone else but me.
But, as I lift my bloodshot gaze to the fae peppered around the narrow foyer, I recognise that maybe I’m not the only one too beaten down. The grief has its grip on them, each one, from Rune and Dare who are slouched on the bench, to Samick as still as an ice sculpture by the door, and even Daxeel who looks up at me with dead, ocean eyes.
I come down the stairs, each step thundering through my legs, screaming at me to turn around and flee.
I would.
I would run.
If it wasn’t for Daxeel’s command—the one he so softly whispered in the bed early this Quiet, the one that prickled me as far as my dreams and echoed franticly around me once I opened my eyes and he was gone.
“You will not run, you will not hide—you will step onto the bridge and into the second passage.”
The moment I land on the other side, the moment my boots are swept from this land to a mountainside, his power over me is cut free.
Until then, he is a master to a slave, the very reason he tricked me into signing away my freedoms to him and his authority. Because until the moment he steps through the portal, I belong to him.
I cannot go anywhere. Not unless he allows it.
I wish he would—but I know he won’t.
I look down at the rug. I say nothing.
Gazes fall away from me. No one speaks.
And since I throw no glances to anyone at all, I see no looks of acknowledgement from the carved from stone warriors around me who will have such higher chances of survival than I do.
We leave Hemlock House.
Silence keeps to us through the streets of Kithe.
The fae we do pass, join us in our thick quiet, or they speak in the smallest of murmurs, whispers .
The path comes to Comlar.
Rune leads the charge, and I’m a mouse tucked behind him. Daxeel and Dare flank me, and I look at neither.
Surrounded, I feel as alone as I have my whole existence.
More fae merge with us on the trail to Comlar. Contenders, spectators, warriors, light and dark.
The atmosphere doesn’t change.
The air is wrought with silence.
Fleetingly, I think of taut violin strings, hushed. No murmurs, no whispers, no laughs, no growls. Nothing but the pressing suffocation of darkness.
I yearn for so much, always.
But most of all, in this moment, I yearn for my Eamon.