Page 51 of Cursed Shadows 3

I am next to step into the circle—and the moment my boots are flat on the foliage, the ground is swept out from under me.

I fall.

9

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A thick breath traps in my throat.

My heart lunges up into my head, my stomach drops—and I hate it all so much.

It is more than falling, more than plummeting through space and time, than stretching and twisting in this pocket of abyss.

It is a false eternity of nothingness.

And it leaves as fast as it came.

My boots smack down on packed soil.

A grunt is shoved out of me from the impact and a flurry of dead leaves lift up around my ankles.

Without a glance around, I swat a fallen strand of hair from my face and jump out of the way—just in time, too.

The thud of boots comes behind me before I can even right myself, and I know that another has landed where I stood a mere second ago.

I look over my shoulder.

Ridge pushes up from a lethal crouch. He steps aside, but his attention isn’t on Eamon who comes through after him. Instead, he has his hand folded in front of him and he eyes his new human-like nails with much the same interest as Aleana did before we left Hemlock.

My interest drifts from Eamon, from Ridge, and turns down to the moss beneath my boots. I cock my head at the sheer richness of the green, a species of moss I’m certain has been borrowed from the fae lands, too thick, too green, too fragranced.

A huff comes from over my shoulder.

I look over at Aleana, standing beneath the leaves of an ordinary oak tree, tucked in the shade.

I forgot that, if only for a moment. The moonlight, how the dokkalves avoid it, like Daxeel does in leaning against the trunk of the same tree, hidden from the whitish gleam of the night skies above.

“Call me gullible, but I thought the human towns were—” Dare lifts his hand above his head and flattens it. “—taller.” Perched on a mossy boulder, he hikes his knee and studies the lush, cosy gardens with a pursed mouth.

If unimpressed had a face…

Aleana nods. “If I wanted to stand around in a garden, I would have stayed at home,” she huffs and picks at the glitter of her skirt.

I move for her.

And the moment a muscle moves in my body, ocean eyes hook onto me.

I feel the lure of them, but I fight it enough to snub Daxeel.

“It’s the Midhouse,” Eamon says and steps off the moss for the flattened stones littered all over the garden; a disjointed path that leads to the rear porch of the narrow townhouse beyond the oak tree.

The urge to ask ‘what’s a Midhouse’ tickles my tongue.

I bite it down, because a part of me, as stubborn as it is, doesn’t want to let the others know that I’m not entirely versed in this part of the human realm.

Ridge voices my thoughts, “And that is…?”

Eamon arches a brow at his lover, but a small smile plays on his lips. He takes the stone path to the sage-dusted porch. “Midhouses are… a few things.” He pauses to grin something guilty and knowing over his shoulder. “They are sanctuaries and healer homes and trade markets between the realms. This city has three of them.”

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