Page 15 of Cursed Shadows 5

Between her fingers is a torn piece of parchment, the same hue as the parchment on the clipboard she’s carrying.

I drop my frown to it.

“I have bed.”

The barbed accent is a wall between us.

It takes me a moment to understand what she tells me. But when I do, my face smooths, frown dissolves, and my mouth twists.

I lift my hand for the parchment.

A name, an address inked and scribbled.

“Husband help you.”

My mouth wobbles.

The wet doesn’t just come from my eyes anymore. It doesn’t only streak my cheeks. I feel it around my mouth, my nose, and in the shuddered breaths that fill me.

I take the parchment and close my fist around it.

“Are… Are you sure?” I ask, then lift my gaze to her.

But she’s gone.

With her back to me, she’s over at another bed, two down from where I stand, and scribbling notes onto the parchment on the clipboard.

I stuff the parchment scrap into my pocket, then worm my way out the bakery.

*

The crowd of waiting fae is dense now, and so I squeeze up against the wall to edge my way outside.

It’s no better out in the street.

In the time I was on the bed in the bakery, the Cursed Shadows did not ease. The darkness only thickens. It has reached Kithe, it fights against the glowjars and the street lanterns and dims them enough that, outside of their gleams, I have to squint my eyes to see an arm’s reach ahead of me.

I don’t know where I am going exactly.

The address on the parchment is unfamiliar to me.

Kithe itself is mostly unfamiliar to me.

I might find a space to breathe, to perhaps source a map, ask a local to point me in the right direction.

Aimless, I push through the crowd.

Shoulders smack into mine, elbows graze my spine, a youngling or two tramples my boots. I rock with the movement, duck as fae shout overhead, lean aside with a hiss as others reach out for folk behind me, and I want them all to disappear. Especially the ones who look at me, who notice me.

The ones that know who I am.

I turn my cheek to those stares. The glowers, the up-and-down sneers, the silent snarls; even the kinder looks, the small smiles, the nods of the heads, and the elder female who has the gall to squeeze my sore shoulder in a patronisingwell donegesture.

I should ask if she knows the way to Hanner Ffordd, the street name on the parchment.

Instead, I snarl at her.

She onlyhmphsin response, and then she’s gone, because I leave her behind, shouldering and staggering my way through the crowd.

---