Page 181 of Cursed Shadows 4

Tree bark.

Gold.

Warmth and cinnamon and butter.

His name is a whisper from my lips, “Eamon…”

In a fluttering heartbeat, I propel myself forward.

I charge through the throngs of spectators and iilra and battered contenders towards my brother of the soul. My one true beloved. My one true family.

Eamon shoulders through the other side, the gleam of his gaze fixed on me, as though to look away would mean to lose me entirely.

But a violent tide of movement swells as a gasp ripples over the crowd, and not a blink later, the sea of bodies pushes against us.

I falter.

Eamon hesitates.

Distance between us, eyes widening with shared fear—

The sudden thunder bellows from above and the portal twists with screams. The stone ground shudders beneath my boots. The stands rattle, violent, too violent.

A ripple of tension washes over the courtyard, murmurs hushed, whistled gasps of fright.

Heads snap to the side all over, until every pair of eyes has landed on the circle of black-hooded iilra. Huddled around the tarry black mirror, the portal itself, their hands are raised, bony and white and dark and sickly…

Bile crawls up my throat.

I swallow down the burn in an audible gulp.

Whispered murmurs circle the iilra, whirl around them in a thrum of chants I don’t understand. Their hands lift higher and higher, as if reaching to the skies, to the Cursed Shadows, but it’s what they surround that has me stumbling back a step.

It is what they circle that drains the colour from my face.

Daxeel kneels in the tarry residue of the portal.

His fists are pressed into the stone ground, his head is bowed, black blood spills out from nose, his mouth, his ears, his head… but his eyes are open.

They are blazing blue oceans.

He is very much alive.

His mouth twists as ribbons of darkness arepeeledfrom him, like flesh. Layers of dark peeling back and back from his shoulders, his arms, his spine. Whatever it is the chanting iilra are doing, it’s hurting him.

He grimaces against it, his hands fist deeper into the stone that cracks under him.

The violent rumbles of the stands look ready to collapse, and the shuddering quake of the ground, it urges me to abandon this wretched ceremony, it tells merun, don’t watch.

I turn my back on Daxeel and the Cursed Shadows and the iilra. And I rush through the crowd towards Eamon.

I don’t get more than few steps before a cloud of debris blasts through the courtyard and throws me clean off my feet.

My body whacks into hard muscle.

Fae tumble. Screams lift from the courtyard and the crumbling stands. The cry of a child scrapes down me like talons over my flesh.

I land in a heap of limbs and chokes, tangled with a half-dozen fae.

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