Page 30 of Cursed Shadows 4 (The Dark Fae)

Darkness envelopes me, but it is a fresh kind, different to the pitch-black nothingness that has encased me in a soothing grip for… How long? Truthfully, I don’t know.

I do know that this new darkness is blended with the warmth of red gleams, the sort that I feel roasting my flesh.

My heavy lashes fringe the familiar orange and red glows of firelight. I watch those warm tones flicker over the stone ceiling curving above me—and it takes me only one, two, three heartbeats before I understand my surroundings.

I am in a cave.

The heat of a campfire burns at my side.

Shadows flicker and arch over the grey stone ceiling above me.

And I cannot move—

Not more than a blink.

The weight of a fur is pressed down on my body. It pins me in place, on my back. So heavy that it’s a faint surprise my chest can lift against it with each steady inhale of air I draw in.

I blink against the dark warmth.

So much familiarity in this sluggish weight…

The black powder .

It’s in me, healing me, but fatiguing me, too.

The black powder will drag me back down, steal me away to the unconsciousness I dared to escape, surrounded by the walls of a cave, the warmth of a fire—and whatever else has me surrounded.

Without the strength to turn on my side, all I can manage is to let my head loll to the side, to press my cheek to the cool damp touch of the stone ground.

I turn my heavy gaze to the fire—

And my heart flutters.

It slingshots up into my throat where it lodges… and I suddenly can’t breathe.

The sight of him knocks the air right out of me.

You saved me.

Daxeel sits on a log beyond the flames licking the air between us. With his head bowed, dark tendrils fall into his face, and his forearms are braced on his leathered thighs.

I watch him.

For a while, with each moment that the black powder allows me a scrap of awareness, I watch Daxeel—as though I expect that, with a mere blink, he will disappear and it will all have been an illusion.

But he doesn’t disappear.

There he is, hunched on the log. The steady breaths that gently swell his chest against his leathers, each muscle carved from stone itself, his pink mouth only slightly parted.

He doesn’t see that I am awake. His eyes are closed, his long lashes casting spidery shadows down the honeyed hue of his handsome face.

So beautiful.

So peaceful.

I ache to reach out and touch him, even if I burn my flesh on the flames between us.

But isn’t that what I have done?

Isn’t that what I have been doing all this time?

Reaching out, burning myself, then reaching out again and again, trapped in this eternal loop of pain.

I drop my gaze to his boots.

He saved my life in my plummet to death. But he only did that to save me for the end—for his mission.

To kill me.

‘What if I were to push you?’

I stand on the edge of the tower. ‘Then I would die.’

His arms come around my middle. ‘It is not your time.’

My lashes shut on the mist of my eyes.

He told me then. All that time ago on the tower at Comlar, he warned me of what was to come.

The clues in all his words, how I thought he was toying with me, and he was, but in a way I never imagined.

Foolish halfling.

Too romantic for her own good.

‘Apologies for not thinking in poetry as you so clearly do.’

One of the first things he ever said to me.

So much I have learned these months in the Midlands. And yet, to pay close attention is something my selfishness never allowed.

I didn’t learn enough.

My brow knits at the thought. A pain burrows deep in my chest. I swipe it aside before it can stir Daxeel awake in our shared echo.

I tug my gaze from his boots—and I find a gleam of golden eyes in the dark.

Down the fire, near my boots, Dare watches me.

The flames cast a warmth to his marble complexion, and he looks gently sunkissed. The gold of his eyes darkens to amber.

Dare lifts his hand. Ungloved, slender fingers pinch a strip of raw meat. It’s now that I smell the flesh of a beast swelling in the cave’s suffocating heat. He bites into it with pearly white teeth, a feral grin that he gives before a wink.

Then he lifts his other hand. Pinched between his thumb and finger is a small phial of black powder.

As if I didn’t understand my fatigue, didn’t recognise the silence that keeps me prisoner.

The black powder heals my injuries, from the arrow that speared my shoulder to the shadow’s pull. The sear of my ribs no longer burns my insides; the scream of my leg has silenced to a hum.

The black powder is knitting me back together again.

And these dark warriors have taken cover while I sleep off the effects of the powder.

My head starts to fall.

My cheek presses harder against the stone floor of the cave. Almost feels like someone has their hand to my head and pushes me down and down and down…

But that is no someone.

That is the black powder calling me back to the darkness.

And so into the darkness, I return.