Page 7 of Cursed Shadows 5

I stagger to a pause.

Leaning against the stone wall that smells faintly of mildew, I slump in the stagnant, dewy air of the lane—the very same one Taroh attacked me in, a lifetime ago, but just yesterday, too.

Time feels a foreign concept to me now.

Might be the searing, thumping gash on my head that, as I lift my hand to, brings the warmth of blood to my fingertips. I cup the wound at the back of my head for a moment, the faint, distant understanding of my dizziness passing through my sluggish mind.

I need a healer,now.

My chest wavers with my steadying breaths.

I scan the startled, stark faces flooding the road, all a blend of ashy pallor and greenish nausea. Most stare up at the hill I came from, up where Comlar is thundering to its death. Others are reaching up on their toes and scaling shopfronts to better search for their loved ones, probably separated by the force of the entire courtyard fleeing downhill.

A niggle in my mind comes slow, sluggish, and I squint against the intrusion, the sense that I too should be looking for someone, that there is a loved one out there I need to find.

Eamon…

His name strikes me.

I was clawing my way through the crowd to Eamon when the blast stole me, then buried me in rubble and bodies.

My mind is slow, too slow.

I need to find him.

But if I don’t get to a healer now, I’ll crumble right here in the lane. I might die. I might just pass out.

My teeth grit as I tug myself away from my support, the wall. Before my legs wobble a bit more and collapse beneath me, I push into step, my boots scraping over the stone pavers. My shoulder burns with each harsher stumble, the jolts searing through me.

The breaths ribbon out of me, grated, as I throw my gaze around the swamped street. Teeming with fae, but I don’t search their faces. I lock onto the wispy white tents. One over by the bakery, another down by the tavern, and two narrower ones parked up the lane opposite. There must have been more. Some even at Comlar. But the destruction has wiped them out.

The lane across the street is closest. But the rows of wounded fae spill out onto the street, queuing up for medical assistance. The tavern is too far, and the blur of my vision makes me doubt I’ll even reach it before I pass out.

I stumble into the rippling crowd, hooded gaze stuck on the front of the bakery, the sheets of a white tent parted at the doors—and I realise the medical centre has been set up inside the shop.

I advance on it.

Can’t help that my mouth floods. The scent of warm bread, freshly buttered, cakes and tarts…

No. Healer first. And if they feed me as they tend to my wounds, all the better.

That’s if I make it there.

The crowd swells and pulls and pushes and sways, like violent waves on a pebbled shore before a storm.

Bodies slam into bodies; the air is knocked out of me as I’m shoved around like nothing. It steals me back to the river, the strength of the currents sweeping me towards that waterfall, thewaters controlling me, deciding where I go. Only this river is not of water, it’s of fae.

The only thing that stops me from crumpling is that each time I’m barged into, I stagger back into another fae. Keeps me upright.

My hooded eyes are aimed at bodies.

Obstacles.

I have no other way through this rush.

If I drop to the ground, I’ll be trampled.

I can’t climb anywhere, there’s nothing above me but the clotheslines that zigzag between the slanted homes of the town centre.

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