Page 20 of Cursed Shadows 5

Slowly, I shift into a crouch and look out over the rush of bobbing heads.

Eamon comes up to my side. His arm stretches out into my peripheral sight, and he points at the gap in the crowd. Fae have drawn back, away from whatever caused the scream.

I frown through the thickening darkness and focus on the nearing light as some carry torches closer to the empty circle. The nearer the orange glow gets, the better illuminated the dark lump is—a dark lump of crimson that is crumpled on the road.

“It’s a fae,” Eamon mutters at my ear, his stare unwavering.

And he’s right.

It takes my sight a few seconds to catch up to his, but it does, and I see it for what it is. A body, crumpled in a heap, spilling pools of crimson blood. And it’s utterly unmoving.

“If I had to guess,” a slick, light voice comes from behind me, like a knife’s edge with a glint of blood and smiles, “I’d say that Lord Braxis walked into the wrong blade.”

I know it’s Dare before I turn to look over my shoulder at him, now suddenly sitting on the rear end of the fallen carriage.

But I do turn to look at him—

My face pales with horror.

Dare flashes his pearly white teeth at me in a grin that is all too guilty—but elated, too. He hikes his knee and drapes his arm over it, looking ever the resting, regal beast.

But his face…

The question whispers from me, “What happened?”

“Lord Braxis is dead,” he says with a mocking look over my head at the body.

“No,” I start and reach out to ghost my fingertips over the smear that runs down his face.

It starts above his eyebrow, then drags as textured as a ridge all the way down to his jawline. A smear of burnt red, a mixture between earth and blood.

Dare shrugs a shoulder. “Gives me an edge, don’t you think?”

I understand now. What it is.

A wound. A cut that slashes down his face and even slashes through his eye. Only, it’s not smeared with blood, but rather an ointment of some kind.

Eamon asks, quiet, “It will scar?”

“Sneaky litalf used ateralum,” he says and, again, shrugs a shoulder, as though he couldn’t possibly care less about his disfiguration. “I will wear the souvenir for life. But he is disembowelled at present, so I call that a win.”

I know Dare—and I know he does care.

He masks it.

Eamon cuts a sigh, then looks back at the corpse.

The panic is fading from the crowd, the circle shrinking again as more folk trample around the body.

Then it’s as though fingers click in my head.

Dare’s words really sink in.

“Lord Braxis?”

“If I had to guess,” he says with a wink of his golden eye. The one eye that isn’t smeared in the ointment, the one that isn’t scarred.

Eamon is stiff for a moment, a breath trapped in his chest, then he exhales it with awhoosh. His shoulders slump with the relief ribboning from his body.

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