Page 35 of Cursed Shadows 4 (The Dark Fae)

There is no question about that look Daxeel pins me with. Standing on the border of the smog, spattered in blood, his hands slicked crimson, and his chest heaving, that feral edge to his stare is nothing short of a standoff.

I don’t back down.

Slowly, I lean onto my boots, then rise up.

His lashes lower over his kohled cobalt eyes.

My hands fist at my sides.

His jaw tightens.

We face each other, once together, now apart. Opponents. Natural enemies, as it should be.

The cerulean of his gaze burns through the smoulder of the mist, sizing me up.

The circle around me is as rigid as a vault. There is no getting through this barricade of dokkalf warriors, not until the litalves attack—and then I will have my chance.

That moment doesn’t come, not yet.

The litalves have paused their advance, the dokkalves keep their backs to me, shields of protection, but my prison guards, too.

Just as Daxeel and I do, the warriors are locked in a beat of assessment, sizing one another up, minds whirling for their most favourable schemes.

It’s Ronan who shatters the tense pause. I recognise his voice, even in a shout, “For the light!”

I throw a startled look over my shoulder—and between the two arms of dokkalves, I catch sight of Ronan, barely, as he lifts his sword high and his face twists with a war cry.

In a blink, chaos erupts all around me. Faster, deadlier than the explosions, the final stand breaks out.

The shouts and cries of war thunder in my ears, lashing at me from all angles. I blanch against it, my vision blurred by the sudden surge of rushing leathers, of black and brown, of armours of gold and silver, of ateralum and steel.

The backs of the dokkalves leave me.

No longer shielded in a circle, I stand alone in the snow, a mist of it kicked up from the ground.

I fling my gaze back to Daxeel.

My eyes narrow on him.

He has moved.

Not towards me, but towards the Mother Stone.

Some arm’s reaches from the line of smoke, he throws up his fisted daggers, a braced defence against an onslaught of lashes. A litalf advances on him, bringing down a razored whip over and over—and Daxeel is throwing up his blades to block each strike.

My gaze flickers to the smoke behind Daxeel.

Red creeps through the grey like a river of fire. At first, I think it might be the lingering flames of the explosions.

But then…

A litalf, sheathed in black and crimson, the blood of the battle, creeps out from the smoke—and he lifts his fiery eyes to Daxeel’s back.

A breath catches in my throat—as though I make to shout for Daxeel to look behind him.

But I don’t.

I let the litalf advance. I tell Daxeel nothing about the light warrior sneaking up to his back.

I should run now for the Mother Stone. But even with the circle of defence disbanded around me, the battle bleeding out across the snowfield, I am still surrounded.

Too many litalves charging at the dark warriors around me, to cut their way through them—to get to me.

This isn’t the moment to run for Mother.

I wait.

And my gaze flings back to Daxeel.

He snatches the whip coming down on him. His eyes flare with a dormant rage, of memories stirred, then he yanks the whip from the litalf’s grip.

The light warrior staggers just two steps before Daxeel has whirled a knife through the air—and it strikes into the light male’s temple.

Daxeel’s gaze flips back up to me.

My breath hitches.

The shadows of his dimples darken. He takes a step closer to the battle—closer to the Mother Stone.

I do, too. My boots slide backwards, deeper in the battle surrounding me.

Then my shoulders jerk as a blur of black sweeps by me.

Dare throws himself into a forward flip and lands on the other side of two litalves I didn’t even know were charging at me. He cuts through their spinal cords in one, swift move, a move that might be considered elegant by my dancer mind.

I stumble around, searching the battles for a gap to rush through.

I find Mika, fighting off a burly litalf who looks like he might be absorbing the muscle mass of the dokkalves he takes down. I don’t like her chances. I won’t go near that.

I look to Rune—just as he hits the snow, hard, on his knees. A light female is curved over him, two daggers in her grip and both stabbed deep into the bones of his shoulders.

His shout is hollow.

Samick rushes for him, shuddering through the mist—and I swerve a final glance at Daxeel.

But he doesn’t watch me anymore.

His shadows are curled, tight around the wrists of the redheaded litalf, the one formed of fire and blood who snuck out from the smog.

Daxeel cracks his head into the litalf’s face, over and over and over, each strike spraying more and more blood, more and more fragments of bone.

Distracted, all of them.

Now .

The movement strikes through me like lightning bolts from the storm. I turn on my heels and shove my weight into a run, a chase so violent that, as a pair of fighting, stabbing, shouting fae fall into my path, I trample them.

I don’t break pace, I don’t let hesitation trip me up.

Get in my way now, and I will trample.

The urgency won’t let me slow down.

That same urgency strikes Daxeel.

His shout is a roar in my bones. It tears through the echo of our bond and claws at my insides.

I grit my teeth against the clawing sensation, the rage and panic that blasts from him.

I don’t need to look over my shoulder to know that he has finished the litalf who stormed at him—and is now charging after me.

We race to Mother, not as evates, not as lovers, but as the enemies we were born to be.

Light versus dark.

My boots dig into the crunch of snow.

I skid to my side, dodging a litalf who staggers back from the blow that a warrior kicked into his middle.

He loses his footing right in front of me, but not before I’ve skidded to the side, then flipped myself over him.

I land in a kneeling position, my hand splayed on the snow, then a grunt catches in my chest as I shove myself forward—and race for the Mother Stone.

Hair whips my snow-burned cheeks. My lips dampen with falling snowflakes and spatters of blood. My legs are screaming with the force of my relentless run, and my lungs feel as though they have been grated inside and out.

But I don’t stop, because with the battle left behind, Daxeel is closing in on the Mother Stone before me. He’s advancing, fast, too fast, and my ragged breaths are threatening to slow me down.

I don’t let them.

Daxeel staggers for the Stone, his chin lifted. His words carry on the snowy breeze, “Mother, I—”

His prayer to Mother is cut short.

I smack into him hard enough to send us both tumbling.

The air is knocked clean out of me, my lungs empty and screaming—then my back hits the boulders lining the foot of the Mother Stone.

Daxeel cracks into those same boulders, hard enough that I hear the crunch of his skull.

I spare him no look at all before I’m moving.

“Mother,” I rasp and flip onto my front. My hands smack down on the scattered boulders and I arch my neck to look up, and up, and up. “ Aghhh !”

Daxeel snatches my ankle and yanks me off the boulders. One knocks my cheekbone, it chips beneath my skin.

I twist and, lifting my other leg, boot out at him.

A growl snarls through him as he reaches for my throat… to silence me, I know it.

And so I know, I’m onto something.

This is a true risk for him. Our evate bond, our soul bond—it means I can talk to Mother as well as he can.

I throw my arms up to protect my neck from his grip. My head smacks back into the thick snow, and I scream up at the Mother Stone with every ounce of breath I have in me, “Protect the light! Mother, please!”

My hands are whacked from my front with such force that they slam into the ground.

Daxeel is quick to straddle me. His eyes are wild and feral, the shadows writhing around him, distressed.

Daxeel looks down at me. His hand is gripped firm around my neck, enough pressure to silence me, to freeze my voice in time. But his face…

He blinks, and a gradual look of shock steals him.

Hesitation blanks his eyes, panic parts his lips.

Slowly, he looks up at the Mother Stone.

A puff of misty air gathers at his mouth. He exhales a curt sigh, then clenches his jaw.

I writhe beneath him, my middle stuck between his knelt legs, my neck pinned to the cold kiss of snow by his unyielding grip.

Daxeel drops his gaze to mine. “I offer the bond…” His voice is a rasping sound, worsened by the stream of blood falling down his face and leaking into his eye, “…of my evate.”

Grip tight on my windpipe, he slips his other hand to the seam of his boot. There, he fishes out the blade of a chalky dagger and fists it in his grip.

My cries are strangled, as wild as the thrashing of my legs kicking over the snowy floor, but as silenced as Mother’s nonresponses.

I spoke to her.

She did not answer. Did not speak to me.

Daxeel, it appears, she does speak to.

He lifts the dagger.

His jaw twitches, once, twice, then he steels himself. “In exchange for the Cursed Shadows to be restored to your children of the dark, to return the power—not to the Sgail line, but—to the iilra.”

Blood is pooling in my face. The throbbing pulses of my blood wave through my ears.

His fist firms on the hilt.

A silenced scream rips through me.

My legs kick the frosty air.

But that dagger…

It comes down on me all the same.

Daxeel plunges the blade into my chest.

I stiffen.

Toes curled in my boots, lips parted around a shuddering breath, eyes wide and filled with horror—

I wait for the eruption of pain to come before my inevitable death.

I could have asked Mother to spare me, to save my life. Instead, I chose to save the light. The light is more than I am, it is everything and all that exists beyond.

I never thought I would sacrifice myself for anything, anything at all. And now that my evate is knelt over me, his hand clutching the hilt of a dagger, that dagger pressing into my breastbone—I decide it is a good thing to die for.

The light.

And still… I do not die.

Slowly, Daxeel brings his face to mine. Strands of dark hair tickle my brow as he brushes his nose against mine, softly, tenderly—and he murmurs, “Goodbye, evate.”

I blink on his words.

And still, I wait for the pain to tear through me, for Mother to reach out from the mountainside and snatch me up. I wait for death to come.

Daxeel plants a boot into the snow before he starts to draw away from me. As he rises, he takes the dagger with him.

I should feel the blade slide out from my insides, my heart, my bones, my flesh. Instead, it feels like… warmth, then a slight fuzz on my skin… then nothing at all.

Daxeel towers over me. The dagger is loose in his grip, merely tinted with a faint smear of crimson at the tip. But the rest of the blade is clean.

His breaths are charged, his shoulders rising and falling with them, but there is a fatigue weighing him down. A mild frown of regret.

He stares down at me. “I will destroy you,” he rasps, soft. “I’ll see you on your knees, and you will weep at my feet. You will beg.” He scoffs a bitter sound, and I faintly understand these words to have been spoken before, promised to me back at Comlar. “And when all that is done,” he adds, his mouth twisting into something grim, “you will meet my dagger.”

‘That is a fae’s promise…’

He pushes back a step. “I never did specify which dagger you would meet.”

My eyes threaten to bulge right out of my head.

A panicked sound rushes between my parted lips. I suck on a gasp and look down my body at where he plunged the dagger. My chin presses to my clavicle. All I see is a fine line of crimson. One little flecked line.

A dupe dagger.

He stabbed me with a dupe dagger…

My lashes flutter on the stunned truth.

Daxeel has forgotten me, left me here, frozen somewhere between a fright in death and a slow understanding.

He walks towards the Mother Stone.

“Take the bond of evate,” Daxeel whispers the words like a prayer he doesn’t feel, one he knows by heart, and recites from need, not want. His jaw tenses and he shuts his lashes on the rest, “and deliver the Cursed Shadows to the iilra.”

He drops to his knees—and lets the dupe dagger hit the snow. His head bows… and he waits.

My mind whirls behind my panicked eyes.

I press my cheek to the snow and look down at the battle. Some fights still rage on, but most have stilled. Gone stagnant. Warriors have broken apart—and gape up at us, at the Mother Stone, frown at me and wait for my death, blink their tears of disappointment.

So many think I am seconds from death. But each one of them understands that Daxeel got what he wanted. He made the wish—and offered the sacrifice.

Now, it’s Mother’s move.

My throat bobs.

Still time…

There is still time… right?

If Mother hasn’t answered him yet, and the mountain hasn’t yet been struck with the avalanche and the quake, and the iilra haven’t pulled us out—then that means Mother hasn’t yet granted Daxeel’s wish.

We wait for Mother…

But does Mother wait for me?

The thought has my heart slingshotting through me.

Slowly, I roll onto my side and crouch. My knees dig into the snow.

The glare I aim at Daxeel’s back is a swift one. He doesn’t look over at me, doesn’t break the constant murmur of his prayer, the wish and offer that he repeats over and over… until he gets an answer.

Hair falls into my face, torn from the braid, as I fold over myself, a bow so deep that my forehead grazes the snow.

“Mother, please,” I whisper, soft, and I yearn out my heart, my soul’s hand—for her. I lure her into my words, my offer, with faith. “I will give you my womb, I will give you my evate as he gives me… But not for my selfish needs or wants. Not for victory, not for conquering. But to save the light, as she is your child, too.”

I am not greeted with silence.

Mother was waiting for me—I know that the moment her swift whisper plagues me, scrapes through my insides and sets my teeth on edge.

‘Kill…’

I blink on fresh tears.

‘Kill…’

Kill him.

‘Kill…’

Kill Daxeel.

I lift my chin and bring my watery gaze to his back.

Far behind me, back where the battles have paused, perhaps ended completely, stares follow my slow, careful movements.

I am slow to rise up, but I am careful to sneak the hidden blade out from the thigh of my boot as I do.

There is no doubt in me that those watching will include enough of Daxeel’s allies, and if they see me draw a weapon and advance on him, they will call out, alert him.

No, I need them confused.

I need their minds scrambling to figure out what is going on up here at the base of the Mother Stone, at the torn earth that’s split apart and collapses into an abyss.

I bring my hand around to my front. It fists around the hilt of the short blade.

I approach Daxeel, his slumped body, his murmured prayer—and so, Mother has not spoken to him yet, has not answered his prayers.

She answered mine.

Kill him…

And the light can be spared.

My throat is thick with the tears wavering me. I feel them streak down my cheeks, gather at my damp mouth—but my steps don’t slow.

I loosen a shuddering breath…

And Daxeel stiffens.

He senses me.

I deflect the threat I have become. “She isn’t answering? Am I not enough of a sacrifice? Or do you have to truly kill me?”

Daxeel’s shoulders soften. Still, he doesn’t turn to look at me. But now, his murmurs have stopped.

If he thinks on it, considers the alternative of truly ending me, I don’t give him the chance before I lift the blade and clutch the hilt with two hands.

And I bring it down on him just as an eruption of shouts blast from the battlefield.

Daxeel swerves aside—and the blade sinks into his shoulder.

I rip it out with a feral shout, then lunge at him.

Daxeel falls onto his back, eyes wide, stunned .

He just watches as I come down on him, the black-slicked blade aiming at his chest.

He twists a moment before the strike. Still, the blade sinks into his chest, right at the curve of his pec—but on the wrong fucking side.

My shout is a throaty sound, a flare of frustration, of tears streaming through me, and I tear out the blade once more.

I don’t get the chance to bring it down again, not before Daxeel throws out his fist, and the impact thuds into my head. My temple blasts with the assault—and I am thrown off his body.

I land on the snow in a heap.

A daze is quick to steal me.

Distantly, I am aware of my legs writhing, as though instinct is trying to push me up, get me onto my feet—but all I can do is lie here on my side.

Daxeel turns his cheek to press into the snow.

Streams of black, oozing out of his fresh wounds, drip onto the snow and melt it away.

He blinks his heavy lashes over wet eyes.

My insides thrash at the sight of it, the tears gathered like mists.

He just… looks at me.

My face twists with the wave of tears.

He is wounded. Badly.

But not dead.

Mother receives no death…

And yet, her answer comes.

‘Four… Five…’

A shudder rattles the mountain under my back—and I know Mother is rolling over in the abyss, ready to find her slumber again.

‘Four… Five…’

It happens so fast I can hardly understand what I am seeing.

A gust of darkness, of pure inky shadows, barrels through Daxeel with enough force to throw him off the ground. His body spirals up through the air—but he is deadweight, utterly limp.

My breath hitches into a cry as the shadows blast… and Daxeel plummets down to the snow.

He hits the ground, hard. And still, the shadows are pummelling him, coursing through him, trying to break free from him.

He doesn’t writhe or grunt or fall to his knees. Those shadows he’s kept with him since the first passage, they are thicker and more now, a cloud.

‘Four… Five…’

I clammer onto my hands and knees.

The strain of my thundering head, it’s enough to blur my sight. I squint through the quaking earth and disturbed mist to the snowfield.

Daxeel is limp on the ground between me and the warriors, the warriors who run around in a shambles, some away from the summit, others towards us.

It takes my dazed mind a moment to understand…

The trees and rocks and snow— all start crumbling .

And Daxeel is not moving.

‘Four… Five…’

I slap my hand onto the snow and start to crawl for him.

The sobs that rattle me are as coarse as my grated lungs. The pull of my mouth as it stretches around my ugly cries aches my cheeks.

I crawl for the male I might have killed, the male I… I loved.

I make it two paces before the shadows erupt from him, and their thunderous darkness blasts over the entire fucking summit.

The scream that splits me is hollow.

Shadows whirl all around me, thicker than the snow and the debris and the blood coating the battlefield. I can only make out Daxeel’s silhouette as the Cursed Shadows course through his body like smoke from a funnel.

The sound is as thunderous and rumbling as the black tornado in the courtyard at Comlar. I can hardly hear the shouts from the battlefield over the deafening pulses of the Cursed Shadows.

Gritting my teeth, I crawl my way through the thunderous assault. But the closer I get to Daxeel, the better I see the battlefield—and what has become of it.

Fae are swept from the snow and whirled through the air. Some are snatched straight from the mountain, others collide and spiral in all directions.

Screams lift up higher than the mists.

I cringe as a body flies overhead.

I throw my wild gaze upwards and watch it—a female dokkalf—getting sucked through the air. Then she’s gone. Vanished behind the wall of eternal mist stuck to the mountain.

A cry splits me.

I stare, stunned, at the sudden blast of darkness…

The Cursed Shadows… they rip free of Daxeel’s body and soar up to the skies.

Their pulsations thrum against my ears.

I blink on erupting darkness; I blink on Daxeel who’s as limp as a fresh corpse, inky blood trailing out from his ears and nose; I blink on the battlefield, half the warriors gone already, and I watch as Samick is snatched from the mountain like an invisible hand, a hand of a god, steals him away. But not a flicker of panic warps his face, not as he is lifted from the ground with a sudden wind of force, then he is pulled back through the air—and gone.

The portal is stealing everyone back home.

The gods have dismissed us.

Mother has returned to her slumber.

And so the iilra steal us home.

I turn back to Daxeel, but not before I see Rune swept away from the mountain.

I crawl for Daxeel.

Dare runs for us. I almost don’t recognise him, not through all the blood smeared all over his face… spilling freely down his front. Blood, a reddish brown… His, I fleetingly realise.

But then he’s gone.

A watery blink, and he’s swept away in a gust of shadowy winds.

A scream rattles me—and I propel myself through the rushing air.

I just manage to throw my body on top of Daxeel’s, as though I can protect him from the gathering of shadows high above, the shadows that slither and skitter like morke—

A scream rips through me.

The portal has its talons digging into me.

My hand clutches Daxeel’s wrist just as I’m yanked from the snow. I reach out my other, my scream lowering into a gravelly groan as I strain to grab onto his belt.

Lashes shut on his eyes, he is utterly gone from the realm of the awake, deeply lost in unconsciousness.

My fingers loop around his belt. Barely.

The strain is shown in my bared teeth, the hollow, gravelled sound clawing through me as I try to grab a fistful of the belt.

The pull of the portal drags at me, stretches my muscles and has my legs screaming in protest.

I could let go of Daxeel and be swept away.

But I am not so sure he is alive, that he will follow—and I can’t leave him here. After what I did, even if it was for the light, even if I don’t regret it… I can’t just let him stay here to rot on the mountain.

My fingers curl around the belt.

I get a grip, not a solid one, but enough that I can hold on.

My legs are lifted now, all the way, my head pooling with blood as the portal yanks and yanks and yanks at me.

Packed with pure muscle, Daxeel doesn’t so much as lift an inch off the snow. He’s impossibly heavy, even just to keep a hold onto. His dead weight pulls my arms like taffy, and a horrid cry warps my insides as my fingers slip from his belt…

The cuff of his sleeve catches on my palm. The ribbing slides over my hand like a wet rock, and I cry out just as the portal wrenches me away—

Away from Daxeel.