Page 47 of Cursed Shadows 5

Daxeel’s mind is bogged down by the residue of the powder. So it takes him a moment of silence to calculate the phases and the weeks.

Tris said it has been four phases since the Sacrament ended. Another three weeks will pass before each of them must leave the Midlands for Dorcha to meet their units.

But before duty calls, the Sabbat will dance through the lands, Dorcha, Licht, the Midlands, and the celebration of the dead comes with it.

“Samick means to tend to his dwelling,” Rune says. “And you know how Dare is with his mother.”

Daxeel nods, faint.

“What more has Samick to do to the dwelling, I don’t know,” Rune goes on. “He’s been tending to it for years with no end in sight. Pipe problems, so he says,” Rune adds with a roll of the eyes. Last year it was the windows. The year before, the roof.”

Daxeel hums a faint sound.

A silence flickers between them.

Daxeel feels the sensation on his cheek, the force of a stare. Without a glance at him, he enunciates the word with a hint of warning; “What?”

Rune’s gaze rediscovers the light of Kithe, dimmer now, so much dimmer now. “If I had information on Nari, would you want it?”

Daxeel is quiet for a beat. “What sort of information?”

“Nothing nefarious. Merely updates. She is still in Kithe, did you know that?”

Yes.

No one has told him, not since a flickering moment of awareness with Eamon, though the words exchanged are obscure in memory.

He doesn’t know how he is certain Nari is here, in this town… he just is.

“She is boarding with Forranach.”

A flash of surprise alights Daxeel’s eyes. He swerves his furrowed, baffled gaze to Rune.

Rune gives a tight expression in return, an unspoken ‘I know.’

How did that happen?

The only question thrumming in his quiet, dazed mind. The exhaustion of the black powder is gone, but the malaise remains. Something of a muted presence draped over his mind.

Rune explains, “I talked to Niamh. She’s been tending to Nari. She sent her to Forranach. Took pity on her.”

Daxeel murmurs, “Perhaps your friendship with Nari was a motivation in Niamh’s pity.”

Rune considers him for a moment before he grunts a curt sound. “She grew on us. Not Samick, of course, but Dare and I? Yes.”

Friendship was not a threat Daxeel ever considered when he lured Nari into his home of traps.

Rune, a cutthroat dark male with ambitions that reach all the way to the rank of a general, one whose heart was severed with the loss of his evate; and Dare, the hybrid without a heart at all, but the illusion of one with his charm and fleeting fixations.

Daxeel didn’t have the mind to consider either of those two warming to Nari over time. But they did. Dare with his eagerness to stop Dax from fulfilling the will of Dorcha at great personal cost, Dare in his ear phase after phase, ‘do you really want to do this?’ over and over; Rune in Nari’s ear, whispering words ofencouragement, and feeling the loss of Aleana with her, simply sitting beside Nari, holding her hand—and the sight of that almost threw Daxeel off balance when he left the room of death.

“How are you?”

The bluntness of Rune’s question is a spear to Daxeel’s gut. His jaw tenses, hands firm on the barrier.

No one has asked that. For good reason. Daxeel doesn’t relish the idea of folk, even brother, prodding around in hisfeelings.

But he gives an answer, “I don’t yet know. The fatigue of the powder is… distorting.”

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