Page 43 of Cursed Shadows 4

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The closest thing to shelter they could find in minutes was the hollowed root of a tree, far in the opposite direction of the lava fields and the glacier.

Shoulder to shoulder, they are hunched in the deep crevice, shielded by the thick foliage draped at the opening.

Rune studies the silver compass cupped in his gloved hand. “It’s off.”

Daxeel’s mouth turns down at the corner. He shoots the compass a withering look, then grunts.

“There must be natural metals nearby,” Rune murmurs. Still, he tries to read the misguided compass.

And Daxeel understands, he just doesn’t like to be idle—not in the middle of the Mountain of Slumber, not when there are missions and causes to be chased down.

But for two whole hours, the sun will haunt the sky—and so the dark males hide.

“If we spread out,” Rune says, then finally tucks away the compass, “we can herd her—”

“Assuming she’s this far up.”

Rune runs a rag over his face. It muffles his response, “Do you feel her?”

The sheen of his leathers has muted, the icy water of the glacier now only clinging to his damp hair. He’s tugged it out of its ribbon to let it dry down his back.

But the air is cold, and so it stays damp.

Daxeel shakes his head. A dark tendril—dewy from the icy mists—slides over his brow.

He turns his lips inwards and bites down on them.

The silence in his chest is deafening.

A silence he has fought to ignore since landing on the mountain. The last thing he felt in it, in their threaded bond, was an echo of her at Comlar. He watched her sick herself, but the numbness of her face is really what struck him. Everything she felt was a tangled ball to make a fist, then pummel his chest.

He’ll be glad for the relief. Glad to sever the bond—and be free of her pain burrowing inside of him.

Rune runs his knuckles over his jawline. The gleam of his eyes dim as thought drapes his mind.

“The iilra warned you about that,” he says after a beat. “That the mountain will distort everything—anchors and bonds,minds.”

We do not belong here.

The thought springs to Daxeel’s mind. A thought not of his own creation. A thought that is so much like something Nari would say.

Dark fae belong everywhere. Where they can take, where they can conquer, where they can live, they can go.

That includes the Mountain of Slumber.

The place of the gods.

But that thought, of not belonging, it wasn’t his own. He swallows back a lump of relief. A sliver of Nari breaks through the mountain’s distortion.

She’s alive.

Daxeel’s hand finds his chest.

He presses his fingers to the ache swelling there.

“If my mind distorts,” Daxeel starts, then turns his chin to his shoulder, and he looks down at Rune’s hands, folding the rag neatly, “and that endangers her—you must protect her life over mine.”

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