Page 29 of Cursed Shadows 5

A wooden crutch is propped under his armpit. It creaks with the lean of his weight and lures my attention.

The trouser leg is stitched less than an inch from his crotch, but the other covers the length of his leg.

An amputee.

My mouth thins before I look up and find his yellow eyes boring into me. Yellow, like Rune’s, and the slash of black down their centres. Cat eyes.

If Dare hadn’t told me of their relation, I would figure it out on my own. The same eyes, plucked from one head and shoved into another; the same hair, long and yellow, not pale, not blond, not golden, but canary yellow.

The difference in Rune and Forranach is size.

Male fae have a natural lean towards muscle mass. It grows easier, larger, stronger than, say, in a human. That is doubly true for male dokkalves with all that natural testosterone fuelling them.

Even still, this male surprises me.

Every part of him is bulked. Above the collar of his sweater, his neck is thick with muscle, and he’s so wide that, if he opened the door all the way, he would swallow up the entire threshold.

His head tilts to the side as he scans the parchment.

He lifts his unkind gaze to me. “Why?” His voice is little more than a grunt, thick with a garbled accent.

Rune’s accent, like most other dark ones I have met, is barbed. It isn’t nearly as smooth as the litalf tongues. But this male speaks in thickness, in grated, throaty sounds that feel otherworldly.

Niamh’s was totally different, an accent and broken tongue that I have never heard before.

“Why?” I echo his question in an uncertain whisper. “Why did she send me?”

Again, he grunts.

“I don’t know.” My shoulder lifts with a lame shrug of my good shoulder. “I… I have nowhere to go. She might have sent me because I am familiar with Rune.”

Friends, maybe.

Sometimes it feels like that.

Most often with Dare. But that will change now, I suspect. And so why won’t it change with Rune?

The male shakes his head, a curtno.

No, that isn’t the right answer.

She didn’t send me on account of Rune or that I am displaced from home.

My shoulders sag.

I’m not sure how much hope I had pinned on this little piece of parchment, but I am certain of the hollow feeling carving into my gut now that the hope fades.

“I should not have disturbed you,” I say and, sliding a boot back, I incline my head. “Good phase.”

I make to turn my back and leave, to head out into the rain that batters the streets and wander around for shelter of some kind, but the male stops me with a single word:

“Halfbreed.”

My face wrinkles with a frown. “I am half.”

“The halfbreed from the Sacrament.”

I nod, faint.

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