Page 29 of Cursed Shadows 4 (The Dark Fae)

The air rushes up to my back.

Arms and legs splayed, I don’t fight the whirl of frost around me. I am limp against the whooshing winds, my lashes are weighted over my eyes, and with the little sight that I have, I stare up at the mountainside I was dragged from.

Bodies barrel around me.

Above, Caius falls much the same as I do. But unlike me, he has no acceptance of the fate he faces. Blade bitten between his teeth, he hacks at the whirling, tumbling litalf. Caius keeps a grip on his ankle, locking him close, and he hacks an axe into his gut over and over and over—

I do not mourn for the litalf, the one who has killed me.

I do not cringe from his crimson blood that spatters me like a wet dusting of rubies.

I simply fall and gaze up at the fae who will join me in death.

The litalf hasn’t accepted his fallen fate as I do. He whirls through the plummet, as though he fights it, and he lashes out at Caius with his blades and spilling guts.

They fight more than each other, but their fates, too.

I don’t fight.

I just fall.

I don’t scream or weep.

I fall.

And I’m just about to shut my eyes on the glaze of the air, the eternal frost that numbs me to my heart, when a black rope cuts through my vision.

The loop of a shadow ripples above me. I watch it catch around my boot.

Faintly, I am aware of shouts coming from all directions, of blood spattering around the edges of my vision—but only the shadow holds my distant focus.

Just as it lassoes around my boot, and a violent jerk rips me out of freefall, my lashes shut on the sudden scream of pain that tears through my leg. My mouth parts around a hollow cry that gathers in my chest but never quite makes it to my throat.

If my soul was still in my body—if it hadn’t abandoned me the moment that litalf and Caius knocked me off the cliffside, or even earlier, when the litalf shot me with her arrow and stole too much of my blood—maybe I would understand what has happened to me, that the force of the shadow’s tug has snapped a bone in my leg, or the impact of being yanked into a boulder has broken a rib.

Maybe I would understand the pain that ignites beneath my flesh like a fire blazes through a village. Maybe I would understand that familiar voices call out for me and Daxeel.

Instead, I only understand the darkness that ebbs into my sight… I understand that it’s a blessing. Because it steals me away entirely to a numb place of nothing and peace.