Page 62 of Cursed Shadows 2

The hit is instant. A chesty cough jolts me. My face twists against the unusual taste of mud mixed with fire and snow.

Eamon’s curt laugh jolts his chest against my side. “Don’tlike it?”

Shaking my head, I pass it to him.

Daxeel watches the spiralling smoke escape my lips.

Strained, I manage to choke out, “It burns.”

Daxeel lifts his stare to mine and holds. After a long moment—everyone watching, listening—he says, “We’re all going to Kithe.” My heart drops at the reminder that they all leave Comlar. But then he adds, “To the Gloaming.”

I think it’s a tavern of sorts, but I have only heard it mentioned once or twice in passing around Comlar, and so I’m not quite sure if it’s a public house or more of a restaurant.

Daxeel doesn’t elaborate. Doesn’t ask me to join them, because he doesn’t have to. His words are an invitation—maybe more of an indirect order.

I don’t think he would let me reject the offer.

Before I can respond, he’s turning his back on me, headed for Aleana. He helps her stand from the cushion.

Rune finally peels away from his sitter duties, eyes on the grimroot. No hesitation, he makes for us and steals it from Eamon, like he’s been craving a hit of that murky smoke for a while now.

Then I realize. All of them take care to keep the smoke away from Aleana, like it’ll harm her somehow, or even just that she’s too poorly this phase to inhale the vapours.

Eamon tucks his chin to the crown of my head. “It’s a bar.”

A frown pinches my face. Then I understand, the Gloaming is a bar. I spare the name a fleeting thought, a smiled thought that doesn’t reach my face, because thegloamingis that special time where day meets night, ‘dusk’ to the ordinary-tongued folk, but to those who think in poetry, the gloaming is so much more. It is the flurry of special lights in that romantic red and purple sky, it’s the fireflies above, it’s the stillness of the air and when night can betasted—it is light and dark blended as one.

Eamon’s voice rumbles against me. “Will you come?”

In answer, I nod; my cheek rubs against the sliver of warm tawny skin revealed between the undone strings of his blouse. Father will have a fit if he finds out.

But to hell with father.

I’ve never wandered this far from Comlar before. Never walked the pearlescent path beyond the Gilded Glade.

Before this phase, I might have felt the security of Comlar slipping away from me with each step I take further down the hill. Now, it feels like an escape from a cruel prison, a prison where my father and sister are my guards, the ones to keep me in the cage, and the iilra are the wardens.

My mind skips a beat, then stumbles as I try to simply comprehend how much has changed in the short time I have been in the Midlands. Not yet a month, and my life feels like Knife, that little demon of a brownie, has sunk his metallic needle-like teeth into my life then—in a frenzy—torn it to pieces.

I blame Knife.

Still, all this time on from that night, Knife is the one I blame most of all, since he was the one who woke father in the night and led him out to me under the willow with Daxeel.

At the thought of the critter, my mouth twists with a scowl, and I fix it on the throngs of fae we approach. Dark and light, they are littered all over the edges of the path—and they gamble.

On wooden boards, with cards, with names scribbled onto cheap parchment scraps, dice in cups, the dark and light come together and gamble off-grounds where they won’t be penalised for it.

I’m torn at the sight of them. Dozens. The litalves basking under the glow of the moon; the dark ones stalking the shade.

Part of me thinks of gloaming; the other part thinks of that word, that slap in the face, a glossy sheen draped over an ugly, puss and boiled lie—unity.

Some steps ahead, Eamon rips me out of my bitter mind. His breath catches on the grimroot he smokes. I almost think he chokes on a cough. But as I flick my attention to him, his back tenses beneath the flimsy white of his shirt.

And I’m quick to figure out why.

Down the edge of the path, Ridge is planted on a boulder, hunched with his legs spread, hands clasped between his thighs, and his faint grin snagged on the wooden board at his boots.

Another litalf—a female contender whose hair is like fire—sits on the other side of the game board and throws black and white stones onto it.

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