Page 107 of Cursed Shadows 4

I chew softly. Quietly. Feels like a quiet moment.

A grim twist to his mouth betrays a sadness in him.

I watch it as closely as I did the faerie hound.

There’s just something about Dare that perplexes me.

He hikes his knee, boot pressed into the earth, then drapes his arm over his knee. “Each phase,” he tells me, his meal forgotten beside him, “the pull faded… until it became nothing but a memory.”

A frown turns down my mouth.

My mind flickers to false evate. When the beast stirs for a potential mate, a female that has roused it with enough interest—but interest that can’t sustain. The beast knows that this female is not his.

So the beast goes back to sleep.

Maybe this maid was merely a false one.

Maybe they will all be false, for he is hybrid, and that is unpredictable in every conceivable way.

“That’s what you feel with Bee?” I ask, then toss the finished, oily parchment into the flames. “The pull?”

“She captured me with her looks.” His mouth tugs upwards, into a smirk. “At her dwellings, she forced me to listen to her music on arek-ordplayer.”

I do not know what that is, but I hum all the same, then lean onto my side. I curl up on the log, feeling the flames heat through the dried threads of my sweater, now warming my prickled flesh.

It’s a lulling feel, a full belly, the hum of conversation, and a fire to keep me warm.

This is the best I have had it since I went through the portal.

My voice is sleepy, “What else did you do?”

Something flickers over him. I can’t quite place it. Something of an ease unwinding in his shoulders, but a clench of his fist, too.

“We ate cakes and sweets in the kitchen,” he says after a moment. “A man brought food to her door in exchange for currency.Chime Ease. It was too salty,” he says and my nose crinkles with a distant disgust. “But I ate it. Then I had her for dessert.”

It takes a moment before I’m flooded with images of the kinta’s legs draped over Dare’s shoulders—and I bludgeon the thoughts down.

“But you didn’t have the sex,” I say, because he was mocked ruthlessly for that detail in the kitchens of Hemlock.

Dare shakes his head.

And I understand his fear now.

If he beds Bee, Dare knows he will lose all interest—and he will be cursed to trek through his life once more without anything beyond fleeting fancies and conquests.

At least with Bee, and her slight against him, and his thirst for revenge… he feels something.

Dare would rather feel something for a while than nothing for too long.

I wonder if his friends figure him out as well as I do.

I wonder if they know his pain.

“Take it from me,” I say with a sigh, my lashes heavy over my eyes. “Evate is a fucking trap—and everyone in it is miserable. It isn’t something you should wish for. To be in evate is to be in abyss.”

His gaze flickers to me.

For a moment, he watches me.

---