Page 147 of Cursed Shadows 4

I think of that red spaghetti I order in the human realm sometimes. I’m still not entirely sure what the food is, but it’s what I think of as I dangle. A limp strand of spaghetti, red with the crimson blood oozing from my thigh.

For a long while, he hikes without complaint, my weight dragging him down. Longer than I expected.

And longer, still.

Then he flips me over to Rune, who at least carries me like a cradled babe. It gives relief to my dizzied, blood-pooled head, to the bite of pain in my midsection.

I drift off at some point.

When I come to, Rune is setting me down on tufts of grass. With a quick, puffy-eyed glance around, I understand we have taken pause in a clearing. A clearing that, however small, is too close to the Mother Stone.

I can’t see it, but Ifeelit.

It is ice burrowing into my bones, like each crisp blossom of snowflake forming along my muscle, like icicle-fingers creeping over my shoulders.

I do not belong here,

I do not belong here,

I do not belong here.

I shudder away the wretched sensations haunting me, then scoot backwards to recline against a tree trunk.

I sit alone, silent.

Others move into action.

I watch Samick snatch a waterskin and disappear through the treeline ahead. Aled shadows him.

With a cloth pouch of nuts and dried-meat strips, Rune climbs up a sturdier trunk, I guess for lookout.

Dare starts collecting firewood.

Dropping his satchel to the ground, Daxeel turns his back on Mika, whose murmurs are too soft for me to make out.

Without a word, Daxeel advances on me.

Mika is left silenced.

There’s a distant pang in my chest, stirred by the falter of her expression. Being female in her world, in her career, it can’t be easy. Guess that’s not the first time a fellow warrior has stalked off while she was in the middle of speaking.

Her face hardens, quick, as though nothing happened. And she turns her back on us before she takes to climbing the tree opposite Rune’s.

They sit on watch.

I lift my gaze to Daxeel.

He extends his ungloved hand, palm facing up to the sky, and there on the pad of his finger is a smear of black powder. “I can’t give you more than this.”

Just a sprinkle.

I frown. “Is it enough?”

“Yes. But it will work slower.”

I know why he won’t give me more and heal my wound faster. He can, but he won’t. More black powder might mean a faster heal, and better, but it will knock me out for too long and he doesn’t want to waste the time.

Not when he is this close.

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