Page 28 of Cursed Shadows 5

If I had anywhere else to go, anywhere, I would turn around—and leave.

I loathe this. To stand at a stranger’s door, looking for a bed to rest on.

I have had a sheltered life, I know this. Even if the greater plan waiting for me, created by my father, was not so pleasant, I was kept out of that knowledge for much of my life.

Lack of home is not a concept I understood very well. There is so little of that in Licht, especially in the Queen’s Court.

Now, I am of no home.

And I am the beggar.

I knock, soft, but a total of six knocks of my knuckles on wood.

Then I still.

I wait.

I listen.

Beyond the door, there is an inconvenienced grunt followed by a slamming and thudding.

The thudding is undoubtedly heavy bootsteps coming to the door. But the slamming sounds something like a pair of canes, hobbled between each step.

Then it stops.

The door rattles once, a chain clinks, then it’s yanked open. The groan shudders through the frame and sets my shoulders on edge.

I slide a small step back.

The door doesn’t open all the way. Just a wedge of light from the dwelling inside reaches over the old, rotted floorboards and brushes the toes of my boots.

My throat bobs.

The light is faint in the musky corridor. Of three lanterns bolted to the wall, only two are illuminated with fireflies buzzing, smacking into the glass over and over. The other is dead, as are the fireflies in it.

Takes my eyes a moment to adjust to the flood of light wedging out of the dwelling, through the door, orange like firelight.

Obstructing the light is a large, broad hunched figure peering out at me. He has a head of yellow hair, thrown up into a loose bun that sags to the left.

There’s a weathered look to this dark male. Dokkalf. His size gives him away, his width and bulk, but also the cutting point of his ears, the tips of sharp teeth I can faintly make out, and the instinctual sensation that shudders through me.

Even after all this time of being around dark fae, of befriending them, of bedding one, that natural echo whispers through my bones like a morning chill.

Run, run, run.

Danger, danger, danger.

He parts his twisted mouth.

“Hel—” The lameness of my greeting is enough to flush my cheeks. I pause to clear my throat. “Hello.”

My pitifulness does nothing to ease the sneer warping this male’s face, and I don’t need him to tell me he isn’t pleased that I have darkened his doorstep, his face says it all.

“I am Narcissa Elmfield.” I extend my hand, the parchment pinched between my fingertips. “I was sent.” My mind stumbles into what Dare said, the name he used for the healer, and I rush to add it, “Niamh sent me.”

The male’s furrowed brow is thick over his eyes. He stares into my damn soul for too long before he drops his attention to the scrap paper.

He snatches it.

---