Page 109 of Cursed Shadows 4

I aim to be far from the summit for when they fail, when they hurl us back to Comlar, and I make it home unscathed.

As it is, Dare is convenient—for now.

There is a clock on our alliance.

I can’t risk Daxeel finding us. With Daxeel around, I doubt I’ll make it very far in the other direction.

An icy trickle falls down my chest.

I bring my hand to my breastbone and add pressure, as though to ease the ache, the prickling pain.

Daxeel.

I haven’t felt him.

I shouldn’t care.

Yet I do.

“You said you don’t know where he is.” I don’t have to specify who I mean.

Dare cuts a side-glance at me.

“Have you seen him?” I ask.

Mute, he shakes his head.

“You haven’t seen him at all on the mountain?”

“No.”

My shoulders slump. “I haven’t felt him.”

Maybe I felt a glimmer once, when I was drifting to sleep, but it was such a faint flicker that I question if it was at all real or mere delusion.

Dare considers me. “Do you want to feel him?”

My face crumples into a scowl. “No.”

If Daxeel can feel me in his soul, then maybe he can close the distance between us, track me down—and all the easier it will be for him to deliver me to death.

And still, my tongue prickles with the lie. I start to chew on it.

Dare rolls his eyes back. “You two are something of a headache. A hammer to the skull, if you like.”

I throw my scowl at him.

“He picks you, you slight him. You pick him, he slights you,” he drones the words with such tedium, the same monotony in his sidesteps of the boulders and the trees. “He makes to pick you—and you slight him. On and on, I wonder if this will last an eternity, if I am to suffer your wretched love for the rest of my days.”

“Only until the summit, then he will kill me, and you will be free of the burden that I apparently am.”

Dare chuckles something dry. “Are you so sure? I am sure you broke his dark little heart at Hemlock—but then you did something extraordinary.” He turns his grin on me, but there’s no sincerity to it, and it looks so much like a bared teeth warning. “You filled him with regret.”

My words are a huff, “He feels no regret.”

“That loneliness is what you deserve,” Dare echoes the very words I spoke to Daxeel. “Quite the knife in the gut.”

My nostrils flare. I scramble some steps to reach his side. Then I shove his arm, hard. “He told you what I said?”

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