Page 102 of Cursed Shadows 2

The closer to the cliffside, the more contenders there are, the more battles that break out.

Unity.

It’s what we’ve lived with this past month. Friendships blossoming between light and dark. But that illusion was vanished the moment they took the portal, and the divide is back to the one I’ve known my whole life.

Dokkalves are the enemy.

The one plain truth I was raised with, the truth above all others, the one that carved out an innate fear in me for their kind.

A well-founded fear, and I watch just one dark warrior take on three litalves, my eyes wide as he ducks with a swing of his short ateralum sword, and it gashes deep into a litalf’s belly. Before the guts even hit the rocky shore, the dokkalf has found a paused stance behind another contender, and he rams the sword through the back of his head. It comes out his mouth, like he’s gasping a bloody blade.

Just like that, in that one fluid move like a choreographeddance, he’s taken two of them down.

He doesn’t get the chance to move for the third and final light warrior, not before another dokkalf has run up to the battle—and with hisbare fucking teeth, rips out the litalf’s throat.

My face twists with the disgust coiling in the pit of my stomach.

To think I might have been there…

If Daxeel hadn’t protected me with a bargain, it might have been my throat bitten out by a dokkalf.

I think I might be sick.

As I cringe from the violence of it all, an extremity I’m not comfortable with, Aleana follows.

Stealing her hand out of my grip, she hunches over and slaps her hand to her mouth. I think she’s ill at the sight of it all, too. But then a hacking sound jolts through her, muffled by the firm press of her palm to her mouth.

I smell it, instantly.

Blood. Not from the black pool, but fresh blood at my side.

I frown as Aleana peels her hand from her mouth. And her palm is speckled with black spots.

She avoids my gaze as she uncorks the small phial in her other hand, then downs the rest of the tonic.

Melantha doesn’t so much as shoot me a glare as she leans into Aleana, then offers her daughter a teal handkerchief, the kind that costs a gold piece because—as I recognize by the shine of the cotton—it’s been enchanted with a soothing minty lotion.

With the handkerchief, Aleana wipes the blood from her lips and hand.

I push it out of mind and return my stare to the black pool.

Bloodbaths smeared all over it.

My gaze lands on a slender litalf who drops from the high branches of a tree, then lands on the shoulders of an unsuspecting dokkalf. In less than a heartbeat, he’s coiled a rope of vine around his neck, then yanked—hard enough to snack the dark one’s spine.

It is that same scene all over, just different ways of killing.

And here, in the safety of Comlar, the silence cracks. Hums of approval shudder through the grandstands, wood creaks beneath shifted weight as spectators inch closer as if to get a better look at the violence they thrive off.

Some rows down, General Caspan nods in answer to something Bracken murmurs in his ear.

Whatever battle they watched on the tarry pool, it piqued their interest enough for Bracken to scribble notes onto a stack of parchment.

On either side of me, Aleana and Eamon are both as stiff as I am. Their gazes sharp and flickering. Like me, they search leathers after leathers, weapons, moving bodies and spatters of blood—crimson and black. We search for him.

But I find another instead.

Ronan’s familiar sharp features flicker down the bottom edge of the window. I spare him a lingering look, and wonder how desperately Pandora watches her husband now, how it’ll cut deep into her heart when the window flickers to someone else and steals the view of him.

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