Page 26 of Cursed Shadows 4 (The Dark Fae)

DAXEEL

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A black boot flattens on the blood-spattered terrain. The frost that layers the blades of grass crimps under the soft leather sole.

Ocean eyes sweep the crimson drops of blood peppered over the frosted forest floor. Only some black droplets here and there, but not enough for the death of a dokkalf.

His brothers are safe.

But Nari…

He can’t be certain.

There is too much crimson. And he can smell her, but only faintly, threaded through the scents of other litalves. Impossible to peel through the layers and learn exactly how much blood came from her.

She is injured.

That is a certainty.

Her blood tells that story, speckled over the frosted grass, the frozen soil, reaching back to flat rocks of the plateau.

Daxeel stands in the shade of the treeline, shrouded in his darkness. The shadows are restless over his shoulders.

He studies the plateau, as though it can tell him something, whisper Nari’s fate to him.

In the way of the mountain, the proximity to the gods perhaps, he cannot feel her—and so cannot be sure if she has survived what appears to be fallen arrows that now litter the plateau.

The arrows look something like weeds sprouted out from the cracks of the rocks, smearing across the plateau.

Twigs crunch behind him.

Daxeel looks over his shoulder, face tight, and his lashes lowered. He watches Rune stomp through the bloody puddles and past the smears of crimson and black sprayed up the tree trunks.

Daxeel peels away from the treeline.

Silent, a shadow, he advances.

Rune pauses—and stands over a litalf corpse. One of three within eyesight.

But he takes an interest in this one. A limp corpse lying facedown in a crimson puddle.

A strand of yellow hair falls into Rune’s face as he studies the body at his boots, the rest piled up with a firm-knotted ribbon. He tilts his head, a heartbeat passes—

Then he boots out at the corpse’s side. The gold threaded seams of his armour glisten with the movement, glisten like the hunger in his sharp yellow eyes.

Daxeel knows the look to be of the hunt, of instinct clawing to the surface.

The corpse is flipped through the air, swirling until it cracks into the frozen trunk of a tree, then crumples to the dirt. The dead litalf lands on his back, mouth parted and slack.

Instantly, Daxeel understands Rune’s interest in it—and why Rune has turned his chin to his shoulder, looking over at Daxeel.

Daxeel advances. His prowling steps are near-silent in the whistling winds of the mountain. But his stare doesn’t stray from the face of the litalf—

A face without eyes.

Gouged clean out of his head.

Not with a blade, not a clean cut, this attack was desperate, panicked, messy. It was the fight of an amateur.

What Daxeel sees, what they both see as they look down at the torn-out eyes is self-defence.

Rune’s murmur agrees, “Gouged out by fingers.”

Shadows lick around Daxeel’s boots as he reaches the corpse. Dropping to a crouch, his forearms rest on his knees and he studies the torn flesh within the eye sockets. His gaze cuts, quick, to the litalf’s neck, crushed as though trampled on, and then finally to the scratched and ripped flesh at the corpse’s hands.

Nari.

He knows it.

Knows it as well as he knows his own self.

The litalf must have gotten a hold on her from behind, and she scratched at his grip before realising that the litalf’s eyes were her best chance to escape. She must have torn out his eyes with her own hands, then fled.

The killing blow to this litalf was the boot to the neck. Whether intentional or mere trampling, he doesn’t know.

But he doesn’t care, either.

Nari got away.

That’s what matters.

Now, he just has to find her.

Daxeel lifts his chin to the cold breeze.

His lashes flutter shut as his chest fills with a deep, focused inhale.

Rune is silent, watchful, as Daxeel studies the scents that still linger in the air, those scents that these ruthless winds have not yet stolen away.

Plums… cinnamon… bitter almonds.

Arsenic.

His heart pins to his throat.

Nari.

“She was here.” That’s all Daxeel says as he rises to stand over the corpse—and let’s his gaze linger over the gouged eye sockets.

Vicious one.

How vicious you truly are.

He almost smiles.

“Samick, too.” Rune jerks his chin to the side, a gesture aimed at the black glitter in the tufts of foliage.

There, a familiar throwing star is nestled in branches, slick with crimson. Ateralum metal, chalky and glittered with the faintest hint of silver.

Its edges are serrated, its centre engraved with the circles of the winds from the Ice Mountains up north.

One of Samick’s own designs.

Daxeel runs his stare over the snowy terrain. He searches for any clue that might tell him who else was here.

And he finds it.

It was left for him, left behind with intent, not accident.

On a deflated boulder, in thick red blood is the sketch of a circle, bordered by arrowheads. A sun. Crudely drawn in blood, but the sign of a soul brother, one who must have sensed how close Daxeel was before this battle broke out.

Rune traces his stare. The softest breath escapes him, just a flitter in still air, but relief all the same.

He voices Daxeel’s realisation, “And Dare.”

Those two simple words hit Daxeel like a blow to the chest. A confirmation he didn’t know he needed.

Nari was here. On the plateau, arrows rained down on her—but she made it to the treeline. A litalf got his hands on her. She escaped.

Dare and Samick took down the others.

But…

Now where are they?

They got away, but did litalves survive and chase after them? Just because they aren’t here does not mean they are free of danger.

Daxeel sighs a breath that deflates him.

He runs his hands down his face.

It’s taking longer to find her than he ever expected.

Maybe it’s the mountain warping his skills of tracking, or the gods twisting the evate bond to be silent in him as though she is already dead.

This reassurance, that his brothers have her and fight to keep her alive, it’s enough to calm his heartbeats, but not enough to soothe the ache stirring in his chest.

The warmth of his breaths cloud at his face.

His shoulders slump. He lowers his lashes and his eyes shut on the prickled sensation climbing through his insides, a thorned warmth laced with anxiety.

Nari might be safe with his brothers—

But he will only feel the strength of reassurance when he has her in his own arms.

Rune kneels at the deflated boulder.

His cat eyes gleam as he studies the bloody sun sketch.

Carefully, he dances his gloved fingers around the edges of the bloody sunrays, the same peculiar way Dare has always drawn them, like arrowheads surrounding a block circle.

A frown starts to furrow Rune’s brow.

“What?” Daxeel takes a step closer. “What do you see?”

“Dare stopped mid-battle to mark this,” Rune murmurs. “For us. We’re the only ones who will recognise it as a clue to find Dare.”

Dare sensed how close they were, and left them the clue to follow, an indication that he is alive—and the sun particularly means Nari is alive. Or at least she was when he drew this, his own understanding of love. The sun in the dark.

“But it’s messy,” Rune says. “Smudged and rushed.”

Daxeel only thinks his answer, ‘ And Dare is too much of a perfectionist to draw his dreamy sun any other way .’

It’s the same sun he’s been sketching since their younger years in the barracks. He would scratch it into walls, carve it into tables at shifty taverns, dream it every other night, paint it onto his hand when his mind drifted from him.

Never, not once, was he careless in how he drew it.

“They didn’t escape.” Rune looks over his shoulder at Daxeel, a grim twist to his mouth. “They were chased.”

Daxeel’s gaze drops to the forest floor.

He reads the blood and the bodies like language inked onto parchment. If he finds something, interprets something that he missed, he might be able to learn more about where they have gone.

“If she’s close,” Rune starts, the hope whispering his voice, “you will feel her, right?”

He shakes his head. “I don’t sense her.”

Rune pushes up from the boulder and advances in two long strides. “Try.”

Jaw clenched tight, Daxeel’s tone is unforgiving, “I don’t know what this mountain has done, but I can only feel flickers of her sometimes. Her scent is… a whisper—then it’s gone. Not enough to track her on.”

Rune rolls his tongue against the inside of his cheek. His mind whirls behind the yellow of his eyes, those black strokes for irises glistening as he looks over the blood and broken branches and disturbed snow piles.

Brow knitting together, he growls his words out, “So we track the chase.”

Daxeel observes the spot between the trees, where the leaves have crunched and twigs are snapped. A few fae ran through there—and they weren’t soft footed about it, either.

The track is too obvious.

The fae are too light on their feet.

These tracks were left intentionally.

“Looks like they ran in the direction of—” Rune doesn’t get the chance to say it, the word that thrums Daxeel’s chest with ice-cold panic.

Daxeel’s voice is a rumble of dread, “The crevasse.”

He lifts his cerulean gaze to the icy tower of the mountainside, a distance ahead. Not a side of the mountain to be scaled, not a side of the mountain to run towards.

Nari must have panicked. She took any direction she could—and the others chased.

But she ran towards a death sentence.

And the others with her.

The crack in the mountainside splits the earth in two. Death drops fall from ledges and overhangs all over the incline, giving a death drop straight into crevices and underwater caves, the kind no one ever escapes from. Any slip, any wrong footing or stumble ends in a fall that would kill any fae, not just Nari.

But the longer they study the crevasse off in the distance, the sharper their sight becomes.

The overhands and ledges are crafted from ice and snow.

If one loses their grip, it’s a straight fall down—with spearing icicles ready to tear a fae in two.

Daxeel is the first to move.

He throws himself forward and pushes into a barrelling chase through the trees.

Rune is hot on his heels.

But they are both racing against time.