Page 115 of Cursed Shadows 4

Samick turns back to the water, his chin leaving the groove of his shoulder.

I don’t dare move an inch.

Stuck on two rocks, hands out at my sides, I am now like him—an ice-statue.

I have little to do but watch as he hunts.

Turquoise waters ripple around his calves, glistening the leathers clinging to his muscles. Just some steps from the rocky shore, Samick stays crouched and utterly still. Even his face is frozen in time, and all I can do is watch and wait.

I fight the urge to move, to shift my weight from one foot to the other, to release a weary sigh, to blink too loud. Any one of those mistakes might get me a throwing star in the thigh if Samick’s arctic glare was anything to go by.

So I’m silent as he pierces his seafoam stare into the waters, as though the gentle current isn’t there at all, and he can see all the way down to the individual tiny stones and pebbles and debris of the bed.

Samick reaches out his ungloved, pale hand, as white as the frost of the trees on the West’s end of the lake. The dusting of snow that covers the shore miles up.

His movements are glacier.

His fingertips dip into the water—

And my eyes widen.

My lips part with a silent gasp.

Because, at his touch, the water starts to frost.

Miniscule spears of ice crack over the surface of the lake.

The deeper his reach, the more of these motionless snowflakes that form in front of my very eyes.

Muscles are bolted to my bones. My eyes are as wide as plates and utterly glued to the depths of his hand in the water.

He turns his palm to the current and—

Water freezes.

In front of him, like a block of ice forming faster than nature could ever achieve, ice spears ahead and cracks and crinkles its way over the incoming rush of blackfish.

I watch as Samick clasps his hand like a fist over a string of ice. Then he pushes up from his crouched position and lifts a block of ice with him—a block littered with eight blackfish entirely frozen.

I aim my frown at him, the gape of my mouth as stunned as the stupefied expression of the caught fish.

Samick doesn’t spare me a glance before he’s trekking out of the lake, the string firm in his grip and the hunk of ice dragging over the rocky shore.

What the fuck was that?

Those words hum in my mind. The words nipping at my tongue. The words he expects as, when he passes me, he throws me a withering look.

Samick is different.

That, I know.

But differenthow?

That’s what I wonder as I turn my back on the lake and follow him up the flat rocks to the small camp we built in the clearing tucked between curtains of willows.

My mind is stuck on Samick as I dip under the dewy cold of the willow and closer to the hot perimeter of the simmering fire.

I follow the warmth, the crackle of kindling, the song of a blade being sharpened as Dare sits on a log and looks down the perfection of his black blade speckled with gold.

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