Page 54 of Cursed Shadows 5

The hilt of a knife protruding from the stranger’s mop of sandy hair, right at the back of his head. Melantha’s stance at the open doorway, and the way she’s watching me isn’t to consider me like I first thought, but to wait for my thanks, my expressed gratitude.

A thanks is an unpaid debt.

The moment the words escape my lips, I acknowledge Melantha’s deed and she can collect on it whenever and whichever way she pleases.

I don’t please.

So I turn a long look to Eamon and the meaning isn’t lost on Melantha, who I’m certain is sharper than her own knives.

I toss aside her act of protection, not for me but for Eamon. Her nephew. Of course she helped him.

I’m merely in the way.

Eamon pushes up from the floor, a sour look wrinkling his face. He aims it at the attacker and, after he rubs his temple a moment, he strides three steps before he boots at the unmoving legs.

As dead as the corpses of the Sacrament.

I huff a weighted breath and look at Eamon. “What the fuck was that?”

The expression he aims at me is grim. “Lord Braxis returning from the dead.” He turns his chin to his shoulder—and touches a frown to Melantha. “What are you doing here?”

An eyebrow slowly lifts above a glittering black eye. “Are you not grateful?” Her tone might be gravelled, a threat, but she can’t mute the gleam in her spilled ink eyes, the thrill of murder alighting them with whitish glows from the jars. “I saw that one peeking through the windows before he worked up the nerve to come inside.”

Strange he was nervous, if what she says is true. The packed muscle on this stranger, though dead, seems all too lethal. So why would he be wrapped in so much hesitation before coming to finish his bargain with the dead?

Eamon answers my silent question, “Daxeel.”

I throw him a furrowed look, my mouth slanted.

He doesn’t look at me as he presses a folded cloth to his temple. “Even with your rift, how can anyone know for certain that his protection is gone?”

With a huff, he considers the broken table he’d planned on sanding down, then painting a soft blueish shade. Unless those fragments glue together nicely, that plan is to be tossed aside now.

Melantha takes two steps, the leather of her boots soft on the oak floorboards, careful, as she fights the soapy slip. She moves like a drop of ink down a wall, a trail of darkness, all black breeches and blouses and boots and hair—and those onyx eyes of hers searching the body with a sweeping glare.

It takes everything in me not to steel my shoulders or let my upper lip curl over my teeth.

Melantha has always set me on edge, but this phase the instincts whispering and skittering through my body are telling me to keep away from her.

I haven’t seen her since the second passage began, and foolishly I was hoping to avoid her for the rest of my life.

She might, after all, blame me for Caius’s death in some form of tangled thought process, of delusion and manipulation of the facts. But of course, hatred rarely allows for facts.

If she doesn’t blame me for Caius, she did watch me plunge a blade into her only surviving child—and that might be enough to put my life in danger.

But there is no avoiding her now—not when she’s right in front of me, a corpse between us.

“Daxeel, and everyone else,” Melantha doesn’t mutter the words as a passing insult; rather she lifts her chin and looks me dead on, wanting me to see her, wanting me to hear her, hear the unspoken insult that I need everyone to protect me.

I narrow my eyes on her. “I did just fine on my own. Maybe he was nervous after hearing about all the ways I managed to kill others on the mountain.”

The smile she answers with is not quite a smile, but a fleeting, smarmy look she softens as she turns on Eamon. “You must come visit Hemlock. There are family matters to be discussed.”

A shutter of hesitation steals Eamon. He swerves his alight gaze to me, embers gleaming from behind a honey glaze.

“I will see she returns home safe.” Melantha sounds as pleased about escorting me home as I feel.

My mouth puckers with the blatant annoyance of it all.

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