Page 31 of Cursed Shadows 4 (The Dark Fae)

Samick’s glacier voice frosts the cave, “The mountain can throw us back through the portals at any moment.”

“The longest second passage on record is fourteen phases.” Rune’s voice comes with a weariness that tells me he’s only just risen from his rest, a rest that I pretend to keep, my eyes shut and my body hidden beneath the furs. “We are only four phases shy of that.”

If I were to peer through the darkness, I suspect I would find the males gathered at the entrance of the cave. Their voices have an echo to them, a distance that still creeps over me like a faint breeze.

I don’t feel the warmth of Daxeel pressed against me anymore. The heat of the fire has vanished now, too.

“Maybe we have phases,” Daxeel murmurs, “or maybe we have just moments. What we do know is that each second we spend chasing her, taking cover from the sun, fighting them —that’s a second wasted.”

Dare smacks his tongue off the roof of his mouth, a dismissive tut, before he says, “We are too close for all this worry. Mother Stone is right up there—and if we can see it, Mother can see us. We all felt the mountain shake with her awakening. She will wait for us.”

“As admirable as your faith is,” Rune sighs, “and as visible as the Mother Stone is, it doesn’t change that it will take at least another phase to reach the summit.”

“One phase, if we don’t encounter another challenge,” Samick says.

“Another fight,” Rune agrees with a mutter.

Dare adds, his tone dark, “Another scheme from that tricky heartbreaker of yours.”

I cringe under the furs. My eyes squeeze just a touch tighter, my toes curling in my socks.

“So we leave now,” Daxeel says.

I can almost hear the shrug in Dare’s tone, “The halfling is awake anyway. Aren’t you, Nari?”

A faint rustle follows his words, like four heads turning my way all at once.

My eyes snap open, and I find my stare fixed on the stamped-out ash of the campfire.

Snubbing the stares spearing into me, I push the weight of the furs off my body, then sit up to stretch my arms way above my head.

Rune and Samick are the first to tug their gazes from me. They each move, branches spearing apart, for bags and waterskins.

They start to pack up.

Daxeel is next, but he moves for me.

I don’t look at him as he crouches by my boots and starts to roll the fur into one messy lump that I doubt would pass a barrack inspection.

A yawn splits me. I stretch my arms out in front of me and distantly notice the smears of ash littering my arms. The wound to my shoulder is gone, but the evidence is raked down my bicep in trails of dried, dark blood.

I must look a fright.

Not that it matters. This is the Sacrament, the Mountain of Slumber, not the High Court.

Still, it’s not particularly a fresh feeling to wake to my wounds healed… but the evidence of them all over my body. I don’t look my best, and—with the crinkle of my nose—I certainly don’t smell my best. But I don’t have to.

The black powder sleep soaked me with sweat. And while it’s dried off now, the stink isn’t. It’s a musky scent I’d rather never smell on myself again.

What I wouldn’t do for a copper tub full of warm, soapy waters and bubbles…

And yet, it isn’t a wash I crave most of all.

My gaze lingers over the greyish metal pot Dare snags from the stamped-out firepit, then shoves into his bag.

I should know better, and yet I croak, “Coffee?”

Dare groans and turns his dark look on me. A frown wrinkles his brow—and I think this might be the only thing we truly have in common, other than being halfbreeds. Our addictions to coffee.

Fleetingly, the wonder passes—does he keep his love for coffee when he’s on mission? If Dare is a hunter, tracker, assassin, I wonder if he finds his victims, kills them, then sits at their kitchen tables with some cinnamon coffee and has his moment of relaxation amongst all the bodies and blood.

I wouldn’t be surprised. It is Dare.

I get no answer from him. He rises and, as he does, pulls the bag straps over his shoulders.

I turn my puffy gaze on Daxeel. Standing over me, he wears the strap of his satchel over his chest like a scabbard belt. His gaze lingers over me for a moment—then he hands me the soft woollen bunch of my sweater.

My hand is heavy as I snatch it from him.

Lethargy is knitted deep into my muscles, my bones. That makes me slow. Slow enough that, as I pull on the sweater, then refasten the corseted harness to my middle and fix the belts back into place, Dare and Rune and Samick have gathered at the cave’s entrance—and they wait.

Daxeel offers me his hand. Gloved.

Mine, naked and quick to be cold, slaps down on his.

His fingers coil around mine—and though it should feel familiar, the touch, the grip I ached for all that time I was alone out here, it doesn’t. It feels nothing like the comfort I sought, but too much like a cuff and chain fastening to me.

Suppose I am now their prisoner of sorts.

A prisoner to my love, to my friends, I wear these invisible shackles out of the cave and feel the weight of them sagging me as we hike the mountain.

Hours and hours of this climb, and my body is struggling. My calves are on fire, my backside is tenser than a pair of metal balls.

The urge to fall forward and use my arms to climb like a wounded beast, it’s a stronger temptation than I would like to admit.

I am the only one to struggle, which only makes it harder.

Can’t stop the grimace from twisting my face with each trudge up a boulder, around a tree, over slick mud.

Ahead, Samick prowls with as much silence as Dare at his side. Some steps in front of them, Rune marches on twigs, and while the sound of their snaps are as soft as whispers, neither Dare nor Samick seem to step on any foliage at all, or if they do, the snaps are silenced completely.

The three of them move together.

If I have any thoughts of turning my back on them, and making a run for it, those thoughts are stamped out by the towering dark male behind me. So close that I feel the air disturb with each huff of impatience that comes from him.

I frown over my shoulder at my wretched male.

The cerulean of his eyes burns from beneath long, thick lashes. The tips of dishevelled curls brush over his brow, adding to the stormy look he plagues me with.

All softer confessions and whispers we shared in the cave, erased with that one look.

He isn’t so kind this phase.

Still, my mouth twists for a beat before I say it… “I am sorry.”

Daxeel just stares at me, keeping my slow, trudging pace as I turn to face him. He doesn’t stop—and does not give me pause, either.

In one step, he’s closed the distance between us, taken my forearm in his grip, and he guides me alongside him.

“For the loss of your brother,” I add with a side-glance at his stony profile.

He just hums a curt sound.

The loss doesn’t cut him as deep as it would if it were a soul-brother who died, one of the dark males ahead. Even Dare, who chucks tiny pieces of debris at Rune.

“You saved me,” I go on, flickering my stare to Daxeel, and yet the harsh stone of his face is unchanging. “You could have saved Caius—but you saved me.”

“Would you rather I didn’t?” His upper lip twitches, a darkness shimmering in his gaze that he keeps fixed ahead. “You would never dance again,” he adds with a bitter glance my way. “Such a waste of talent.”

The deflection is so obvious that I shouldn’t bother with his insult. I shouldn’t feel slighted. He’s only scrambling to repair the rawness exposed between us—to boulder and bludgeon that sweeter moment we shared.

Daxeel is as predictable as the path of the sun.

He needs to rebuild the wall between us, because that might make it easier for him to finish his mission.

But knowing all of that, reading him like a mere scroll, doesn’t ease the slight. Instead, his words are needles prickling into my flesh.

A hiss crawls up my throat. “That talent has kept me alive on this mountain.”

I wrench my arm out of his grip.

His fingers slip away but his fierce stare does not. “And I am sure your skills of seduction have been just as beneficial.”

My eyes flare. “I am here because I fought to be. I am alive because I fought for my life. You do not get to diminish that because you see nothing more than a brat when you look at me.” The hiss of my tone drops into something of a growl. “I have always been more than you see.”

“Your life is much to you.” His smirk is small, it is cruel for the sake of it, a punishment for all my wrongdoings, for his wrongdoings, and I itch to claw it off his pretty face. “And yet it is nothing to anyone else.”

Something in me shatters.

Like those twigs Rune steps on, I snap—and I shove at Daxeel with a snarl twisting my lips.

My hands smack against his leather-wrapped bicep, and the grunt of the shove forces through me, but he doesn’t budge, doesn’t falter in his step, doesn’t lose an inch of balance.

He swerves his burning blue eyes my way.

I snarl up at him. “Your kind with their evates are as monstrous as my father always warned me. The beasts of the fae.”

The stillness from the males ahead brings silence, so I know they watch us, listen, but don’t intervene.

Daxeel just blinks at me before a frown knits his brow.

I push up on my toes and the words come sheathed in a hiss, “There is no need to beat the corpse, Daxeel. You have already killed me.”

He has done so much, too much.

It has left me in fragments. A death, in a way.

Still, he just looks at me.

Dark tendrils fall into his face, the oceans of his eyes burning like cobalt blazes, and those three little creases between his brows.

And he does nothing but look down at me.

Once, I might have felt like a mere rodent challenging a wolf. A human to a faerie hound. I might have cried. I might have played a game with him, lured him into me.

But in this moment, with snowfall misting around me and the ripple of Daxeel’s ocean eyes stirring aches in my chest, I take a purposeful step back, then let my gaze run him over with all the disdain I feel twisting my face.

I spit at his boots. “Vile beast.”

A shudder runs up his chest, and not the kind I once sought from him. It’s the kind that has his leathered hand fisting at his side, as though he fights the urge to lunge—and attack.

I keep my chin raised.

You left me in pieces.

You broke me, Daxeel.

You killed me.

Yet…

Those fragments of myself… they are different to what the whole person once was. I sense it in myself, a shift as I have started to pick up those shattered pieces and at least attempt to glue them back together again. But they have come together different, maybe wrong, but different all the same.

I feel different.

I am.

I’m not so sure that’s so terrible.

“You know nothing about the true horror of evate,” Daxeel growls. “I watched my father torment his evate, my mother.” He takes a step closer to me, the disgust of me curling his upper lip. “The slightest wrong look at another male that father misread meant phases in the dungeons. I wear the same scars that my mother does, from the same male who inflicted them. I never wanted that for myself—or for you.” The frown deepens on his honeyed complexion. “I always wanted our love to be mutual. Isn’t there less pain in that existence?”

His hand shoots out and snatches me by the chin.

A grunt catches in my throat.

Bringing his face to mine, his softly spoken tone is not sweet, but a warning, “I chose to be the suitor you wanted. But that has fooled you to underestimate my true nature. I am what I am, and I am capable of the worst tortures imaginable. I fight for my choice not to harm you. Even when you push me to the edge,” he snarls against my mouth, “every waking moment, you exist to make me suffer.”

My whisper is anything but subdued, I speak it like a threat, right back at him, “And you, I.”

I don’t waver in our locked stares, the challenge that sears his eyes into my soul. I don’t baulk.

For a long moment, we stare each other down like predators locked in open territory, waiting for the other to move, to flee, to fight.

That’s what I see in the ripples of his eyes. He expects me to back down.

They all do, I’m sure, the males watching us like we are their little source of entertainment on this mountainside, as I suspect the audience at Comlar does.

Let me entertain you, then.

Let me dance. Let me paint.

Let me perform.

My upper lip curls around the dagger I prepare for him. “I do not love you anymore.”

Lashes flutter over cobalt eyes.

“And if what you say is true, that you were not yourself when you courted me,” I say, smiling wretchedly around my words, “then I never did love you.”

Muscle by muscle, his face turns to stone. Dimples carve deep into his cheeks with shadows like inked paintbrushes swiped at him.

He drops his hand from my chin and draws back a step. I hear the shudder of his breath. His shadows skitter around his shoulders—disturbed from their slumber deep in his leathers.

And the still silence up the slope has thickened into a tension that I feel as freshly as the cold.

Still, I want to hurt him.

I want Daxeel to suffer the heartache I do.

If he’s to blame me for it, kill me for it, then let me fulfil it to my greatest potential.

“Daxeel… To me, you mean nothing. Nothing more than a persistent headache.”

Those fragments just don’t fit right anymore. I’ve rebuilt something of an echo, a shadow of myself, and I do not regret it.

A growl shudders his chest. “Come, or I will break your ankle and drag you to the summit.”

His threat runs cold and true.

My shoulders tense.

Daxeel turns and stalks up the incline.

My furious glare follows him for a heartbeat.

Then I hike after him.

I don’t meet anyone’s intent gaze, all three stares alight, and swerving between us both, before they each resume the climb.

I hide my smile.

I bite down on the insides of my cheeks.

Not just my victory that has me flooded with a sense of renewal. But this… That I am the last in the line hiking uphill.

Now, there’s a distance between us. Daxeel sticks ahead at the front, just to be alone in his pain. The others are too wary to stick close to either one of us.

I have a little space.

Enough space that, when we reach the thicker trees with draping lilac leaves and branches that remind me so much of my beloved willows, there is enough distance that I might just make it.

I turn for the curtained trees.

And I run.