Page 59 of Cursed Shadows 5

What soothes her?

What eases her stresses, her pains, her fears of the choices she’s made? Is it Eamon? Does he offer words of comfort, or does he simply tease her?

Daxeel’s throat swells.

Nari walks out of view. She’s gone from the faint firelight that flickers through the window.

Daxeel lingers a while longer until the firelight is extinguished, and the dwelling goes dark. It’s only then that he fists his hands around the urge to go to Nari but instead, forces his way through the streets of Kithe to Hemlock House.

The door swings open for him the moment his boot flattens on the bottom porch step.

He is quick to pass the foyer, hands still fisted at his sides. His steps sweep like shadows, brisk and quiet, through the hallways.

He passes Samick and Rune in the dining hall, the latter tossing tavarak-soaked pixies into the other’s mouth. With how drunk they are, most of the tosses miss.

Daxeel doesn’t make himself known.

He heads for Aleana’s bedchamber.

It is unchanged.

The bedsheets are washed and pressed and pulled over the mattress. Smells fresher, less like fever and death.

He sinks into the armchair in the corner of the room, angled to face the bed. For a while, he just sits there in the dark, in the silence of the upper floors of Hemlock House.

His mind is empty.

In the fourteen phases since the Sacrament closed, a week since he properly woke, he has visited Aleana’s chamber a handful of times.

Each time, he has found emptiness.

At first, it came with a pang in the chest. A sorrow too deep, too stirred, that he worried it would call her soul back to this realm.

Now, he seeks out the emptiness.

There is a sort of peace to be found in the quiet of it. A numbness that spreads through him and mutes the pain—the ebbing regret he can’t let himself feel.

So he sits in the silent suffocation, the pressure of nothingness, and stares at the fluffed pillows.

The faintest, near-undetectable shift in the air rouses Daxeel from his trance. He blinks against the dark once, twice, before he senses the swell of leather and blood and fresh coffee.

He doesn’t need to look at the ajar door to know who stands there.

“Trust you to find me when I do not want to be found,” Daxeel mutters the words with an edge of bitterness, because it would only be Dare who would choose to interrupt a moment so private.

The faintest sound of leather shifting comes as Dare leans against the wooden doorframe. He says nothing.

Together, they marinate in it, the horrid silence of Aleana’s absence from this world.

Their customs tell them not to grieve, for the pain calls out to the souls of the dead and snares them back into this world—a suffering for resting souls.

Still, they grieve.

It cannot be helped. The suppression of sorrow is just that,suppression.

Daxeel wonders why he cannot feel her soul come to him in the pain. He wonders if her soul is restless as it waits for her other half, the evate in this life who never found her, or if that male died already and their souls have joined to become one, and their slumber is so deep in the beyond that not even a brother’s grief can rouse her from her eternal rest.

Daxeel wonders so much—too much.

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