Page 136 of Cursed Shadows 4

I tug my gaze from his boots—and I find a gleam of golden eyes in the dark.

Down the fire, near my boots, Dare watches me.

The flames cast a warmth to his marble complexion, and he looks gently sunkissed. The gold of his eyes darkens to amber.

Dare lifts his hand. Ungloved, slender fingers pinch a strip of raw meat. It’s now that I smell the flesh of a beast swelling in the cave’s suffocating heat. He bites into it with pearly white teeth, a feral grin that he gives before a wink.

Then he lifts his other hand. Pinched between his thumb and finger is a small phial of black powder.

As if I didn’t understand my fatigue, didn’t recognise the silence that keeps me prisoner.

The black powder heals my injuries, from the arrow that speared my shoulder to the shadow’s pull. The sear of my ribs no longer burns my insides; the scream of my leg has silenced to a hum.

The black powder is knitting me back together again.

And these dark warriors have taken cover while I sleep off the effects of the powder.

My head starts to fall.

My cheek presses harder against the stone floor of the cave. Almost feels like someone has their hand to my head and pushes me down and down and down…

But that is no someone.

That is the black powder calling me back to the darkness.

And so into the darkness, I return.

††††††

A fresh weight presses down on me.

Foreign from the fur draped over my limp body, a stranger to the black powder, this weight is an arm hooked around my middle.

I stir to the new sensation, feeling the added pressure of warmth on my side.

Daxeel lies under the fur with me, his chest pressed to my side, arm holding me to him in his slumber, and the warmth of his soft breaths disturbing the hair at my scalp.

Still, I am on my back, my cheek smooshed to the stone floor. And where Dare sat the last time I awoke, is another dark male, one who must hear the shift in my breathing, the alarm that I am awaking.

Yellow cat-eyes hook my drooping gaze.

Rune’s eyes are kinder than Dare’s were. Then again, Rune wasn’t victim to my push-Caius-and-run scheme at the end of the plateau. He didn’t fight and suffer for it.

Dare holds a grudge.

Rune does not.

He pushes up from his hunched position on a sturdy satchel, packed too full that, without magick, I doubt it could be carried up the mountain, even by one as strong as a dark fae.

Rune’s steps are soft as he approaches me.

My gaze follows him, glued to his movements as he lowers himself to a crouch at my side. Then, silently, he brings the mouth of a waterskin to my lips.

I drink.

Fresh springwater is quick to chill my insides.

Greed erupts throughout my numb body.

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