Page 60 of Cursed Shadows 5

He lets his eyes shut on the final thoughts he allows himself, then pushes from the armchair.

Dare’s gilded gaze is hard as metal, misted in his one good eye. The other is stroked with a barbed scar, turning that eye a blue paler than crystals in the light.

Silent, Dare watches Daxeel approach, until he has drawn too close. Then he tugs back into the dim corridor as Daxeel gently shuts the bedchamber door—and as the door clicks, the peace is gone, and the ache is quick to return to his chest. An ache threaded through a hollow pit where Nari once lived.

A bitter twist to his mouth betrays his thoughts. He has spent much of his life attempting to eradicate pain from his soul, and all that he’s accomplished is its enhancement.

Dare reads him too well. “Mother has one twisted sense of humour.”

Daxeel slumps against the closed door. “You didn’t meet me at the dungeon last phase, or the one before.” His gaze lowers to the rug on the floorboards. “Where were you?”

“Around.” Dare flattens his hand on the banister of the staircase, leaning his weight on it. “In Licht.”

It takes some seconds for the words to settle in his mind. But when they do, a frown knits between his eyebrows, drawingthem together, and he lifts his doubtful look to the hybrid watching him.

“For phases, you have been in the light lands?”

There are other questions that flitter through his mind, mostlywhyDare would choose to visit the light, since he avoids it like a plague, ignores all light blood in his body, and turns a cheek to his litalf ancestry.

Dare doesn’t visit the light lands.

So it must be, “An assignment?”

“A personal one,” Dare says, and the bitterness darkens his gilded gaze into a mesh of burnt embers and ash in one eye. “I’ve been hunting the kinta—well,tryingto.”

Daxeel recognises the flare of failure that tenses Dare’s muscles beneath the black leathers, the clench of his sharp jaw.

“You didn’t find her.”

“She’s not in the village of her mother. And she is not in her dwelling in the human realm.”

The human realm…

It will be plagued with darkness and sickness now. It’s been just two weeks since the Cursed Shadows finally tethered to the skies from Daxeel’s sacrifice. But those two weeks iseightweeks in the human world, or two months, and that’s plenty of time to destroy much of the land and the humans before the invasion.

“I tracked her scent to a street of the human town,” he says dully, but to anyone who knows Dare, that dull, uncaring tone is edged. “I lost her scent, as though she simply—” he snaps his fingers “—ceased.”

Still slumped against the door, Daxeel considers it a moment. A frown tugs at him, tired, always tired. “Did she know the dark was coming?”

Dare is as quiet as he is still, a pause drenched in thought. Then he decides, “Eamon must have warned her, and she has gone into hiding. I will find her.”

The determination written all over his face, in the fine lines of unease around his pinched mouth, the creases littering his under-eyes, it’s sheathed with unspoken doubt.

Daxeel has seen Dare in every capacity. Enamoured, enraged, violent, peaceful, disturbed. He has not yet seen him so edged with doubt, not when it comes to his own capabilities.

In true Dare fashion, that exposed vulnerability must be vaulted shut before either of them can address it—and he diverts, fast. “I accepted your father’s offer.”

The distraction works.

Daxeel pushes from the door. “You did?”

Dare aims a lopsided grin at him. “I will join his unit for the invasion.”

Daxeel nods once, unspoken gratitude.

Dare needn’t join any unit. His profession keeps him in Dorcha if he chooses; his birth and home in the Midlands means he can declare neutrality. But Daxeel knows Dare joins Agnar’s unit to be by his side in the invasion.

It wasn’t such a simple choice.

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