Page 32 of Cursed Shadows 2

I eye the empty beer bottles and decide that my next drink will be something sweeter than this ghastly stuff that reminds me too much of ale and mead.

“I’m a recruiter,” Eamon goes on, his tone dull, his gaze wandering the terrace around us—the outdoor terrace of the bar he’s taken me to. “I must keep track of their fashions, their music, their slang, even their dreams. If I knew you were going to be stuck in a foul mood, I would not have brought you.”

The scowl digs deeper into my face.

Eamon snatched me through a bridge closer to his home in the Light Court. I won’t lie, I was speechless for the first while in this bustling town… maybe a city? I’m not so certain of its title, but I’m sure that it is so wildly out of my league that I wouldn’t dare come here alone, like Eamon does when he needs to recruit humans for the Queen’s Court. Whether those humans are to be thrown into the Eternal Dance, given to the unseelies, or used to fuel the magick of the High Court with their Forever Slumbers in the dungeons, it doesn’t matter. The humans that the recruiters take have a grim fate.

This night, he is not to recruit. He is only here to observe, to learn, and apparently to drink a lot of beer since he snatches up his fifth bottle.

My mouth puckers on my silence and I turn my gaze around the terrace.

Only some of these square tables have humans hunched around, drinking beers. Over the other side, beyond a stack of metal barrels, there’s a sticky and creaky door that leads into the bar. That’s where the booming comes from, a bass so thunderous that it aches my ears and shudders the floorboards under my boots.

I watch as a girl, maybe just nineteen, leans over a bush and sicks up whatever she’s had to drink so far. A friend—who can barely keep her own balance on gigantic heeled shoes—holds her hair back and I think it’s sort of sweet that she does this.

This place is a lot. Too much, maybe.

I think if I had brought Daxeel here, not the quieter town he followed me to some years ago now, then the dark male wouldhave just set the whole place alight.

“It’s very loud,” I say and drag my attention back to Eamon.

The sight of him startles me only a little, for only a moment. A glamour, one done by Prince Angus himself, and a glamour strong enough that it will last a full day and night, unlike my own that I’m sure has just some hours left in it.

Still, to see my Eamon with his bronzed eyes a dimmed brown, a dullness to his usually glistening golden skin, rounded tips of his ears, all those sharp teeth gone—to see him muted like this is a startling thing.

Some of his fine braids rustle over his shoulder as he nods. He keeps the other side of his head freshly shaven, and I think he must be one of the most beautiful males I have seen, even in human glamour.

“It’s not so bad.” He lifts the beer bottle in his loose grip, then gestures it around. “I might like a place like this one day.”

My eyebrows lift to my hairline, all the chestnut waves pulled back into a limp bun atop my head. “A tavern?”

“It’s not quite a tavern, is it?” His gaze drags around the terrace, lingering over the few humans who can brace the icy air out here as well as we do. “Not quite a bar, either. And that—” He flicks his gaze up to a flag painted the colours of the rainbow, the flag that flaps loudly in the breeze. “—means that same lovers are welcome here.”

Same lovers, like Eamon. Males who bed males, females who bed females, the ones who like both.

“It means,” he adds and pushes aside his now-empty bottle, “that this place is for them. Ones like you are mere guests.”

“Oh.” I blink on it, the surprise slackening my face as my thoughts whirl. A tavern-bar-party place, but for same lovers.

I find it like it.

I like it enough that a smile tugs my lips. “You should have a place like this,” I agree. “And call it Nari’s. Oh, Nari’sHaven. No,” I make a face and shake my head. “Nari’s. Just Nari’s.”

Eamon’s grin splits before the chuckle rumbles deep in his chest. The adoration that glitters in his eyes isn’t lost on me. “There you are,” he sighs softly.

But I don’t care to talk about me now, I want to talk only about Nari’s Tavern. Folding my arms on the edge of the table, I lean closer to him, and feel the life alighting my eyes. “You could have quarters above the bar and live there. I could help recruit you some dancers! Oh, yes, dancers—you should have those.”

His smile fades on the dream. “If your husband lets you help.”

My face crumples. “Husband,” I echo the word like it’s unknown to me, foreign—because I am so far from one. Daxeel left Licht some years ago, ignored all my letters and hates me from a distance. Taroh has thankfully abandoned my contract, and so now I am left with no threads of a future in a husband. “Maybe that isn’t in my future.”

Although I’m not sure what I will do if I don’t get a husband. It’s what I have been raised for. Birthed for. This is my purpose.

It would disappoint father if I did not marry.

Eamon is quiet in answer, a pensive and distant grim set to his firmed expression.

“Would you like to marry?” I ask him in a hushed voice. “A male, of course. If you could.”

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