Page 22 of Cursed Shadows 4 (The Dark Fae)

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The smooth sound of his voice jolts me.

A breath pins to my staggering heart, and I nearly fall over myself as I flip around. My knees press into the bloody soil, hands fisted, and I look up at the trees.

A pair of sleek black boots of fine quality dangle from above. I trace them upwards, dragging my gaze over the muted leathers wrapped around legs carved from muscle, up the black vest that looks painted on his lean physique, a black so dark that it’s a striking contrast to his porcelain complexion—

Then I find his face.

Marble, smooth, beautiful.

Inky waves brush his brow, a glitter of gilded irises beneath thick dark lashes, a jaw so sharp it’s not unlike a fistful of knives.

The knots in my shoulders unwind.

Dare flashes me a grin. The smile behind it is sincere enough to melt his eyes into pots of molten gold.

An aching swell rises through me.

I choke on a raspy sound, somewhere between a laugh and sob. The sob wins—and in a heartbeat, it wracks through me. My shoulders jolt at the same moment that my face twists into something ugly.

Relief.

That is what carves into me.

That is what brings my hand to my aching chest as I aim my twisted face up at him.

And there Dare is, through the glaze of my tears, perched on a bough, sitting , as though merely enjoying a day amongst the trees.

He arches a brow. The width of his wolfish grin fades. Then, in a blink, he’s pushed off the bough and falling down to the ground.

He lands in a crouch, the soft thud of his boots on frosted soil just a touch more than silent.

Before he’s even fully risen, I have already scrambled out of the hot pool of blood, and I’m running at him.

I slam into his chest, hard.

My arms come around his middle, firm, a grip that is locked, that is afraid to let go—afraid that he will leave, and I will be alone again, fighting to survive, starving and running and hiding.

“What took you so long?” I choke through my sobs, the very sobs that rattle me and shudder my breaths as though grated.

His arms come around me.

He holds me to him.

His voice is soft, a murmur, “You made good work of masking your scent. I might admit that I’m a little impressed at just how evasive you are, heartbreaker.”

A wretched, watery smile warps my face. It’s buried in his chest. My hold doesn’t loosen.

Neither does his.

If Dare isn’t much of a hugger, he dismisses the urge to peel away from me. He allows me this moment of relief, of comfort. A flicker of what I now realise is friendship.

Maybe pity, too.

“I landed at the summit,” he murmurs into my caked hair, thick and cracked with dirt and blood alike. “To say it’s been a battle down this far is something of an understatement. Though, it is me we are talking about,” he adds, and I can just picture his lopsided grin forming, “so I cut through those litalves like they were nothing more than butter, and I looked great doing it.”

That watery smile lingers on my face.

A thick swallow bobs my throat before I slip my hands away from him.

He mirrors me, releases me, but slowly, and his hands linger on my shoulders as he takes a step back.

Golden eyes rinse over me.

He considers me, searching for injury, I think, but it’s the grim, bloody smear of my face he finally settles on. “I told you I would find you.”

My answer is wrought with sniffles, “But you are late. And if I hadn’t had luck on my side, Boil could have killed me.”

Dare’s smile is small. “He was never going to kill you. I wouldn’t have let him. I had the perfect striking spot.” He gestures over his shoulder, to the tree whose bough he took a perch on. “I only waited to see what you would do.”

I blink, once, twice, and tears fall from my lashes. “You—you sat up there and watched?” I pull out of his hold. “I was in danger!”

“Actually, I think he was the one in danger. I was prepared to strike him,” he adds with a gentle sigh, and his fingers dance fleetingly over the collection of throwing stars strapped to his vest. “But then you seemed to have crafted a trap for him—and I wanted to see where you were going with it.”

My breath hitches, that awful shuddering tail-end of a sobbing fit still lingering.

“It was a beautiful thing.” He grins; a gesture to match the glittering gold of his eyes—to match the hungry excitement stirring deep within him. “The blood of your enemies suits you well, Nari.”

“We have different ideas of beauty,” I mutter as Dare snakes my arm into his gentle hold.

I watch, mute, as he fastens a rag around the gash along my forearm.

His voice is as soft as his hold, “But the same ideas of truth.”

I flinch.

The flutter of my lashes is quick to pass.

Dare releases my arm.

He acknowledges my ability to lie. Something he hadn’t known about me. Something that, now, the whole of fucking Comlar knows.

Father …

My eyes shut on the thought before it can blossom.

Swallowing thickly, I turn my back on Dare and scoop up my belt, weapons and all. It clatters and clangs as I re-fasten it to my waist.

Silent, Dare watches me as I trudge through the bloody mud to a satchel. Boil’s satchel.

Toppled onto its side, it’s just an arm’s reach from his corpse. I drop into a crouch and snatch it closer to me.

If Dare is surprised to see me looting through the satchel, stealing from a dead fae, he doesn’t show it.

Some fae have superstitions around this sort of thing. More so among the warriors. But I’m no warrior, I’m just a survivalist, and I will loot what I can from the dead.

Dare shadows me to the pool—so much blood that I think Boil is emptied out completely—then stands at the corpse’s limp arm, washing his gaze over the torn, shredded flesh littered all over it.

I pick through a handful of phials from the satchel. Some black powder, some white powder.

“I admire your trap.” He kicks into Boil’s side. The body flips over onto its back. Dare studies his slack face for a moment before he adds, “Personally, I never would have fallen for it, but it was elegant in its brutality.”

A scoff jolts me. “I don’t believe you. A halfling ready to spread her legs for you? You would fuck first, kill after.”

A faint laugh, curt, comes before he says, “You know you didn’t have to go in for the final blow. If you had kept this male alive for Daxeel, you could have watched as he carved him into pieces.”

I rifle through the satchel in search of a soothing ointment. Already, the lies have prickled my tongue like needles and my throat is starting to tighten, as it sometimes can when a bee stings me.

I throw a baffled look over my shoulder. “Why would I want that?”

Why would I want to see that?

A wispy smile ghosts over his rosy mouth. “Romance.”

Blankly, I stare at him.

The look in his eyes tells me he isn’t joking. And I wonder what the blend of dark and light blood does to some hybrids.

Romance is a very litalf thing, and dokkalves care nothing for it except to woo their light lovers. But Dare is as serious as a common cold in my halfling body.

To him, romance is brutal torture, it’s carved flesh and drawn-out deaths.

It’s twisted.

I push aside the thought as my backpack comes skidding over the dirt. Dare knocked the side of his boot against it, tossing it to me. I flip open the flap then stuff inside all the treasures I found in Boil’s satchel.

A little jar of soothing balm, good for things like nettle rashes and plant stings; a sachet of black nuts; three white salmons; phials of the white and black powder—

And I pause on the painted pocket picture. A little portrait, compact enough to fit in the palm of my hand.

I eye it for a moment, a sinking sensation weighing me down. “It’s me.”

It’s my face sketched and painted roughly onto a cloth of threaded material. I turn it over and, on the back, is a crudely penned number.

My bounty.

The exact amount of my tocher…

Dare’s mouth flattens. He jerks his chin in an uphill gesture. “We need to go. The scent of fresh blood is too strong.”

“I know,” I mutter under my breath. My fingers unfurl from the fabric portrait. It flitters down to the blood pool and quickly starts to soak up all the crimson.

I heave a sigh, then fasten up my backpack.

I sling the straps over my shoulders.

Dare reaches out for me, offers his hand to help me stand. A glimmer of his litalf side piercing through the stoic dokkalf nature.

I hesitate. Then, after a beat, I step on the painting of my face. I really sink it into the blood of the fallen, the one I killed, the one paid a bounty to slaughter me.

It’s not enough that the litalves are out for my head just because I am Daxeel’s second heart. That to kill me is to kill him and win the Sacrament.

That , I can understand.

That, I can live with.

But the bounty is not for Licht.

That is a personal target on my head.

An extra incentive to take me down.

My mind flickers to Ridge—

My breath shivers at the reminder of him, of his betrayal, of his slack, lifeless eyes.

Is that why he turned on me?

When he was trying to kill me, he kept going on about Luna. A friend of his who didn’t make it past the first passage. What that has to do with me, I haven’t the faintest idea.

He wasn’t right. He was high off the tail-end of the white powder. And since he was trying to kill me, I didn’t waste time asking questions.

His strained, feral voice rumbles through my mind: ‘I’m not doing this for the gold… I’m doing this for her.’

Gaze downcast, I watch the blood soak onto each individual thread of the cloth-portrait.

Dare’s fingers are firm around my wrist. A gesture to move.

So I do.

I walk alongside Dare.

“Ridge tried to kill me,” I say, soft, quiet, as though it’s a wretched confession that no one should hear, ever. “So I killed him.”

Dare’s face shutters. He turns his blank gaze to me—pots of golden alarm.

I find I can’t meet his gaze for longer than a moment.

I watch the ropes of tree roots weave over the earth before I step over them. “He said… Ridge said that we expected him to love the ones who took her from him.”

I look up from under my hooded lashes.

Dare’s frown tugs at his mouth.

So he knows. He knows what Ridge was talking about, he knows who they took from him.

I ask outright, “Did you kill Luna?”

“I did.”

Blankness slacks my face. I turn my stupid look on him. “ You did?”

I wasn’t necessarily asking if he specifically killed her. I meant more as a group, any one of those soul brothers.

But it was Dare.

His nod is slow and regretful. But I know Dare, and I know that he doesn’t regret killing anyone, but rather he regrets the added danger that put me in.

Dare keeps his cheek to me, smooth marble, his high cheekbone shining like a polished blade. “She was advancing on Rune—and though there was hesitation in her, I couldn’t risk that.”

My nod is bitter, my lips sucking inwards. “So he went after me for revenge.”

Dare is quiet for a moment. He fishes his hand into his pocket, then tugs out a tiny glass jar of beige ointment. “Put this on your wound.”

I snatch it, moody. “Doesn’t make up for it.”

His smile is small and fleeting.

Our steps don’t falter as I tug down the cloth wrapped around my forearm. The gash isn’t so deep, more like the blade slipped over the edge of the flesh before sinking into Boil’s face or collarbone or neck—wherever I could reach.

This wound doesn’t need black powder, and it’s not worth it, either. It’ll knock me out too long. So I unscrew the flimsy metal lid and finger out a generous scoop of the balm. This will heal me, ease any infections that might want to snake into my body. But the scar will remain. Probably thin and flimsy, but permanent all the same.

The pad of my middle finger grazes over and over the gash. With each measured stroke, the bleeding is slowed that bit more.

I don’t know how long we have been hiking uphill, but I do know my legs feel stretched and pulled like rinsed laundry by the time I tug the cloth back over my now not-bleeding-but-angry-red-and-scabbing wound.

Dare’s question is soft on the stagnant air of the mountain. “What happened?”

I hand him the jar. “With Ridge?”

He nods, faint, a severe tension to his jaw.

I tell him.

And he doesn’t interrupt, doesn’t speak once, doesn’t ask a single question, but the whole time his jaw gets tenser and tenser, his eyes turning into gilded blades.

‘I’m not doing this for the gold…’

I huff, exhausted by our climb, “He knew about the bounty. He basically said as much. And Eamon said he was approached—” by Ronan, but I leave that stab of betrayal out, because how much more treachery can I withstand, really? “—to kill me, too.”

“Daxeel didn’t work so hard to keep you confined to Hemlock for no reason,” Dare says. “Any time you were allowed out of that house, it was with a team of escorts.”

My mind flickers to Eamon, to Ridge, to Aleana, when we once went for lunch, and then I managed to worm my way out of the group and head to the scripture hall.

Daxeel wasn’t too pleased.

But I didn’t see rage.

Maybe Eamon did, when I wasn’t there.

Might have been chewed up and spat out.

And Ridge…

He was with us. He could have turned on us, on me, at any moment…

Why didn’t he?

As though reading my thoughts, Dare sighs, soft, “We trusted that litalf. Seems he was around to gather intelligence on us and reporting it. Biding his time.”

Ridge shouldn’t be getting all of our thoughts right now. The image of my portrait crudely drawn onto a cloth, it’s burning in my mind, seared—permanently.

I already face down the threat of litalves on this mountain. But the bounty is the real worry, it’s the cause of the flurry in my chest, that sickly sensation that nearly wobbles me.

Boil meant to take his time with me.

Ridge waited out the powder so he had more time, more awareness—to do what exactly?

How slow and painful is my death ordered to be?

Ten thousand gold pieces is a strong motivator.

The exact amount of my tocher. I can’t shake that. If that’s a coincidence, it’s a stark one. It’s more likely that it’s an intentional figure, one that niggles at my brain for me to understand the message behind it.

I find the message.

“It was Taroh.” My voice is a whisper wrapped in frost. The cold of my breath mists around my face.

Dare cuts a glance at me. He doesn’t break pace.

“The bounty is my tocher. He wants me to figure out that the kill was paid for by him.”

“Taroh is missing,” Dare says, but it isn’t a dismissal of my theory. “Must be his father. You are no worse off than if the bounty didn’t exist. You and Dax are the targets on this mountain regardless.”

I force a smile at him. “Lucky me.”

“Lucky you,” he agrees with a faint nod, “because you have me now.”

My chin lifts a touch. “I did fine without you.”

Not certain how true that is. But no prickle itches my tongue, a tongue that’s already a little swollen from all my earlier lies, so it must resonate with my heart.

Guess I did alright.

Better than anyone would have expected… even me.

“You did better than fine,” Dare says, then ducks under an overhanging bough, cracked and fallen. “You thought quickly, you reacted effectively.”

I stoop under the bough to keep pace. But my steps are heavy, staggered, and I am certain he slows down just for my benefit.

“You might make a career of killing,” Dare throws the compliment over his shoulder at me, his gaze drifting down to the heavy thuds of my boots on hard soil.

I manage a forced smile.

But a deep growl is quick to rumble the air between us—and it came from no beast.

It came from me.

My face floods crimson.

Dare’s brow arches and his gaze drops to my belly.

“I gave my food away to a faerie hound,” I mumble.

That perfect arch of his brow above his eye remains, and he lifts his gaze to mine. Questions glitter in his gilded eyes, amusement flecked throughout.

If he wants to ask more about it, he bites back the words, and instead says, “Let’s get you fed. We can’t have you losing those lovely curves of yours.”

With that, he turns and hikes up the slope.

I follow.

Wherever Dare is leading me, it’s a fucking trek.

I hike the slanted incline behind him and, twice, I pause to sick up some bile.

The distance between us is a mere arm’s reach, maybe closer since I am so sagged over myself, as though I am about to drop to my knees and claw the rest of the way up this never-ending incline.

“Where’s Daxeel?” I rasp out the question with what feels like the last of my breath.

Dare cares nothing about the harshness of my breaths, the panic fluttering in my chest that still thrives, or even the blood and mud spattered all over me.

My quads tremble under my skin. My glutes burn in my ass. And that sickly twist in my empty stomach is singing up my windpipe with promises of more bile to come.

“Maybe with the rest of our folk,” Dare says, quiet.

Our folk.

Not litalves, not dokkalves, not folk of Kithe.

Us.

The way he so easily includes me in that group of close-knit friends, it ignites an entirely new ache in my chest.

Aleana…

I stomp out the embers of her memory before they can take flame in my mind.

Now is not the time nor the place to let her haunt me.

I fight for another focus, another means to distract myself from the silence of the dead woods surrounding us, the grated breaths heaving through me.

“Have you ever loved someone?”

The bluntness of the question startles him.

Dare throws a look over his shoulder at me. His eyes flash just once before he settles on a frown.

He considers me for a moment, then, “There was a time…” He turns his back on me and climbs. “I had a lovely crush.”

I arch my neck to squint up at him. The shine of his inky waves glares at me.

I have questions. Mountains of them.

‘Who was it?’

‘What happened to her?’

‘What was your romance—was it leaving decapitated heads on her doorstep?’

But he cuts through anything I might ask—

“Think you can shut up a while? You’re louder than a wild boar caught in a trap.”

My answer is silence.

Don’t so much as have the energy to scowl at his back.

I fall onto my hands and knees—and I crawl up the hill.