Page 31 of Cursed Shadows 2

“You like him,” I whisper, the realization striking me.

Never before has Eamon actuallylikedanyone, not enough at least for him to consider more than a fling. But that smile is still pressed against my temple, and I know he is guilty of my accusation.

He doesn’t deny it.

“Have you done sex together?” I ask.

“No,” he says then sighs, and his arms come away from me. He leans back on his elbows, his hold dissipating.

I recline until my spine flattens on his chest, and I’m lounging against him like a pile of stacked cushions.

At this angle, I can still see the tree, but I need lower my gaze—almost looking down my body—to watch it rustle in the stagnant breeze, the kind of wind that gathers around but doesn’t quite move, a sort of tense air I’ve only ever felt in the darkness.

“I didn’t know him at home,” he tells me. “Saw him sometimes at the court, but never talked. Now, he flirts with his eyes,often, but not anything more than that.”

I think on it a moment. I think of when Ridge lifted me up from the mud I was slicked in, head to toe, and the black apple he had in his grip as he did it…

“He liked black apples. Every time I saw him, he had one… those filthy ones that come from the Wastelands, and they taste like ink and all things sour?”

White skin, black flesh, these apples make the potent drink viskee, the sort of drink that would have a halfling like me scaling castle walls, hallucinating that armoured goblins were chasing me. Fullbloods only for viskee, and even then, it’s a dark fruit, so better left to the dokkalves.

Still, Ridge always had a black apple in hand.

Eamon hums. He knows the ones I mean.

“They probably sell viskee in some taverns down in Kithe,” I add with a smile, and I sense he smiles too. “In case that information helps you at all.”

But neither of us speak more on it.

In silence, we rest.

I don’t feel the violence of the First Wind protected by all the trees around me.

I don’t relax. I feel more like an extinguished candleflame, or that my body has been muted in existence for a while. My tears dry up, my face slackens, and for a long while, I just watch forest critters skitter around the glade.

I don’t think anything of the Sacrament just around the corner, only three phases from me now.

I don’t do anything but exist—barely.

9

the night Eamon and I went to a bar

††† TWO YEARS EARLIER †††

Fashions in the human realm have changed since I last looted from the storeroom buried deep beneath the High Court.

Chunky necklaces adorn every female’s neck, and I mean every one of them. I wear no necklace. The dresses they wear have an extra layer over them that sticks out over their hips like a lampshade. My plain breeches and cropped top seem too ordinary, too bland, for the dazzle around me. Even those dreadful shoes that the human women have strapped to their feet, stout heels that go on for days, click clacking all around—they are too much, and my flat sneakers are too little.

I take such great care in appearing as human as possible when I visit these lands. So maybe I’m a tad annoyed—and that’s shown in the side-glowers I shoot Eamon every other moment—that my dearest friend blends in better than I do.

He’s not even from human blood, so how dare he fit in with them better than me, in style alone? It’s not fair. All he had to do to blend in with the male humans was tug on a pair of bluejeensand a white t-shirt with a tiny green crocodile stitched onto it.

Tell me how that is fair.

Under my dozenth glower, Eamon’s eyes roll back before he deflates into the wooden chair with a sigh. “Nari, won’t you let it go? It is my duty to know these things about the humans.”

The truth of it does little to loosen the hard set of my mouth. I just fold my arms over my prickled chest—this stupid crop top is much too sheer for the cold winds of the human lands—and tuck my glower down to the wooden table between us.

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