Page 101 of Cursed Shadows 4

“Where’s Daxeel?” I rasp out the question with what feels like the last of my breath.

Dare cares nothing about the harshness of my breaths, the panic fluttering in my chest that still thrives, or even the blood and mud spattered all over me.

My quads tremble under my skin. My glutes burn in my ass. And that sickly twist in my empty stomach is singing up my windpipe with promises of more bile to come.

“Maybe with the rest of our folk,” Dare says, quiet.

Our folk.

Not litalves, not dokkalves, not folk of Kithe.

Us.

The way he so easily includes me in that group of close-knit friends, it ignites an entirely new ache in my chest.

Aleana…

I stomp out the embers of her memory before they can take flame in my mind.

Now is not the time nor the place to let her haunt me.

I fight for another focus, another means to distract myself from the silence of the dead woods surrounding us, the grated breaths heaving through me.

“Have you ever loved someone?”

The bluntness of the question startles him.

Dare throws a look over his shoulder at me. His eyes flash just once before he settles on a frown.

He considers me for a moment, then, “There was a time…” He turns his back on me and climbs. “I had a lovely crush.”

I arch my neck to squint up at him. The shine of his inky waves glares at me.

I have questions. Mountains of them.

‘Who was it?’

‘What happened to her?’

‘What was your romance—was it leaving decapitated heads on her doorstep?’

But he cuts through anything I might ask—

“Think you can shut up a while? You’re louder than a wild boar caught in a trap.”

My answer is silence.

Don’t so much as have the energy to scowl at his back.

I fall onto my hands and knees—and I crawl up the hill.

23

††††††

For the first time since I fell through the portal to the Mountain of Slumber, I feel a sense of security. Notsafeexactly, but enough of an ease that I finally wash the blood and dirt from my body.

It takes a while.

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