Page 110 of Cursed Shadows 2

I watch him.

Daxeel.

Kneeling on the stone floor, hand splayed and pressed onto the ground, he keeps his head bowed. Lashes of darkness coilaround him—his arms, his ankles, rolling over his shoulders. And I know whatever darkness sticks to him is unlike any I’ve ever seen before, unlike any that is meant to exist.

Whatever this is, it is alive.

The way it’s separate from the darkness all around, these shadows curve over Daxeel likeshields, like beasts returned home to their master.

A part of him.

Pushing his weight onto his hand, Daxeel shoves himself up in one strong move. He stands, cobalt eyes gleaming from the thickest black I’ve ever seen, so dark that it’ll take a hundred more fire torches and light jars to illuminate the courtyard again.

I can hardly see at all beyond the pockets of dim torchlight. But Daxeel’s eyes are deep blue lights flickering from behind shadows—

He looks right at me, and black blood shines on his lips.

He holds my stare, turns his chin to the side, then spits out a glittering spray of glass. Slowly, he grins—all toothy, red and black blood glistening on his lips—and my guts rinses me inside out.

There’s nothing about that grin that makes a smile.

That is a fucking threat.

My heart is an iron ball. So unwelcome in my body, it burns and it aches and it plummets to my gut with crushing weight.

Sweat glistens on my brow and sticks wind-wild hair to my temples. My lips are swollen from the quiet tears shuddering through me. And my wrist aches from the grip Eamon keeps on me as he rushes through the crowd.

Hundreds are dead now. Contenders who lost their lives in the first passage. And yet it somehow feels like more fae have been crammed into the courtyard than before the passage started. It’s never seemed busier, sounded louder, felt hotter—or more dangerous.

All because ofthat: The black coil.

That spiral of darkness hasn’t faltered. It keeps a calm and steady pace up into the black sky from the heart of where the portal once was but has now returned to a stone ground.

It’s stone we walk on.

Hand fierce on my wrist, Eamon snatched me up thirty minutes ago from the seats and, leaving Daxeel’s family behind, stole me onto the steps of the stands. It took us that long to get down the stairs to the courtyard, to push through the scrambling spectators; all those who rush to see their loved ones or check the corpses for familiar faces, and even the military fae who assess the dead for their recruitment favourites to cross off their names from the parchments.

“Cursed Shadows,” a litalf hisses the words, not with purpose or rage, but with icy fear. “Not the first time I’ve seen them, but they have never been this powerful before.”

And I hear it again and again as my boots scrape over the courtyard, unwillingly dragged through the trove of corpses and bloody contenders.

Cursed Shadows.

Cursed Shadows.

Cursed Shadows.

Those words echo in my mind, a voice whispered down a long, empty cave, but I don’t fully grasp them. Maybe this is what it means to be in shock, I’m not sure, but I feel not quite myself, not quite in my body. It feels so much like my soul being peeled off my bones at a glacier pace.

Eamon yanks me through a knitted group of iilra. His shoulder smacks, hard, into one of the black-robed fae, but she doesn’t stagger. I never see them lose their balance—but I have no thoughts of that once Eamon’s grip tightens and he pulls me to his side.

I stare at the dark male the iilra were whispering to, always whispering in their ghostly voices, voices that sound like they come from other worlds and speak only through layers of veils.

But there’s no veil standing between me and Daxeel.

Daxeel tilts his head but not in a gesture of greeting. Hebows, as though to get a better look at me, to lock me in his sights like prey.

Tendrils of inky hair fall into his eyes.

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