Page 113 of Cursed Shadows 4

Caius swerves his murderous gaze to me.

First, he looks to the ankle of my boot, caught in the shrubbery, but that fleeting moment passes quickly, and he’s watching the female above land on the tip of the arched tree.

He drops the sword and lunges for the seam of the arch.

Just as brown boots thump onto the bark right above my head, Caius is a swinging boulder that crashes right into her. His legs-for-arms hook around her, like an embrace, but a deadly one.

His hold tightens.

I turn my cheek just in time—a mere moment before the litalf is crushed in Caius’s hold.

A burn of sick itches at my throat.

I don’t look.

Not even after Caius releases the definitely dead corpse that slaps to the soil, all limp and loose from shattered bones.

If I look, I might be sick. That’s too much for me.

But as I fast realise, squinting up at Samick as he moves like mist around a light male, and when he’s passed him, he holds his fucking throat in his hands, I realise it’salltoo much for me.

One left standing. I blink a weary, dazed look on her.

Dare moves for her, slow and predatory steps.

Run, I tell her, a whisper in my mind, a plea in my glare.

I don’t want my own folk to die.

I don’t want any of them to die.

And maybe… seeing this… seeing the brutality of the dokkalves, it’s that wakeup song I needed to be afraid of them, to find that dormant fear I once had—and pin it on my so-called allies.

A ball lumps in my throat.

Her fiery gaze swerves between us, lingers over me with a frown, as though she reads the panic in my gaze, the panic I have for her.

She reads it well.

Her backstep is an obvious sign of retreat.

She means to run.

Dare doesn’t let her.

He swirls around just once, and his arm moves with a sudden fling of a blade. It winks through the air.

And it plunges right into her forehead.

A quick death. One of mercy, I might suspect.

But a death all the same, and she drops like a sack of grain.

Dare closes the distance in three strides, then yanks his dagger out of her skull. It’s only with the loss of the blade that the blood spills out of her, as though the dagger was a plug—

A retch jolts me.

The others move into motion. Picking up their weapons, cleaning them off with rags, and Caius loots through the bags of the dead.

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