Page 77 of Cursed Shadows 5

So the darkness came.

The iilra touched the Cursed Shadows with poison, a sickness to spread throughout the human realm.

Those who didn’t die in the panic and chaos of the darkness invading their world will have suffered the sickness, the disease that festers in the body, and even fewer will survive that.

The result is obvious as he walks these dead streets.

Now, the silence in this once-bustling town is deafening. The silence is reminiscent of the woods when a predator prowls, it is the sudden quiet of the birds, and it presses down on the lifeless streets with the same unease that comes before that predator strikes its prey—the kill strike.

That’s what will come to the human lands.

The kill strike from the dark fae.

Any survivors who hide out in these dwellings reaching up to the skies in a mass of brick and concrete and metal will fall when the dark fae bring their swords, their war.

Dare’s steps keep to the silence.

He is the predator in those silent woods.

He prowls around the abandoned kars piled along the road, some collided together to merge, others toppled over; he side-steps the open doors and the fallen bags and tumbled carts; avoids the puddles of blood and rainwater, the streams of crimson that run fresh from the mangled corpses that have obviously been either hit the kars or trampled by the boots of fellow humans.

Dare walks the dead streets, but his gaze flickers over the windows high above in the ugly tower dwellings.

In his focus, he catches the occasional flurry of a heartbeat or a breath that’s exhaled too loud.

Survivors of the darkness.

Perhaps some are sick, ailing into death, and others were untouched. They think themselves lucky, perhaps, to have avoided death.

Dare could kill them now. Hunt them, chase up the towers, then head down and flush them out.

He could… but he is not here to start the invasion.

He is here for the kinta.

So he passes the hiding survivors, the ones who haven’t the faintest clue what lurks in the streets below, or what’s to come for them, and he makes his way through the graveyard of kars.

Eamon trails behind him. Steps as soft as his breaths, he keeps Dare’s practiced pace all the way to the leafier streets where there are no tower dwellings, less kars, narrower roads, and more gardens—

Until Dare comes to a stop.

His chin lifts and the piercing glare of his gaze is aimed up at the brown brick face of the box-like dwelling.

Uglyis the first word to spring to his mind, the same thought he had when he first came to this building.

Dare’s tone is soft, “Fifth floor.”

Eamon looks up at a row of old, sliding windows lined with a grey metal.

In the thick darkness draped over the streets of London, both Eamon and Dare see as clearly as they do in the light of dusk. The dokkalf blood that courses through them sharpens their sight and melts them into the dark.

Eamon tilts his head. “This is where she lives?”

Dare nods once.

Eamon fishes out the small black fone from his back pocket. “I’ll try again.”

It is useless.

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