Page 54 of Cursed Shadows 3

He has wandered out beyond the Midhouse border to the black, gravelled road. He pauses to look down at a grate across the way, then inspects a green bi-see-kal like it’s the most fascinating invention he’s ever seen and he just has to know how to destroy it.

I notice no kars in sight, but this road is narrow, and there are black posts dotted all around it, so I doubt any kars could squeeze through.

Aleana folds her arms over her chest and deflates against the fence. Boredom has set into her already, in the dead gaze she slides around the ordinary street, rowed with townhouses and a mere road.

I nudge her with my arm. “It’s better than this.”

She turns her tired eyes on me.

The disappointment she wears doesn’t sag her, but it tenses her, tightens her mouth and scrunches her brow. “It’s just some homes. Kithe is prettier.”

“I promise there is more. So much more,” I say with a smile. “You will glide. You will float.”

Aleana’s expression softens, but the rigid tension in her bones doesn’t relax. Still, she slides a step closer to me, until her arm is pressed up against mine—and so I know she hangs onto my words. Because this isn’t just any promise I am making. This is fulfilling a deathbed wish.

I lean into her, our temples rested together. I add in a whisper, “You will be light as a feather.”

I deliver on my promise.

It takes twenty minutes of walking—from the Midhouse, down some ordinary, narrow streets without proper roads where kars can drive through—before we reach the town I remember.

Just once, I visited with Eamon. Smaller towns are the ones I prefer. This one feels like a beast to be battled, a monster in a ballad that must be overcome. Tall enough to graze the murky clouds, metal like Knife’s mouth.

This one is called Lun-dun.

And I sort of hate it. But I’m sort of intrigued by it, too.

Our walk slows to a wander as we reach the wider, busier roads, the ones packed with kars that crawl, the ones with the humans dressed in peculiar black clothes with firm shouldered jackets and who talk into fones or tap them with a touchof urgent aggression. They bump into one another, shoulders smacking off shoulders, muttered apologies, shouted curses—but no one bumps into any of us.

The humans don’t need to even lift their gazes from their captivating fones for their instincts to avoid us.

I always thought it a funny thing, how we lure them in but repel them at the same time. A poison they ache to taste, all the while knowing that it will ruin them.

No one tastes our poison this night.

And we make it to the place of ice before Aleana’s mood can further sour.

The ice-floors I’ve seen before weren’t like this one. The ones I saw, the ones I indulged in a handful of times, were outside. No walls to encompass the flat ice, and they came only in the season of winter. But this one is within the enclosure of a building larger than the High Court. Duller, but larger.

And it’s enough to brighten the life back into Aleana.

Maybe it’s the grand size of the flattened, smooth ice, or that Eamon brings us boots with metal razors wedged into the soles, or that there are bright lights of red and blue and yellow swerving all over, or even that some ghastly thumping music screeches from all angles—whatever it is exactly, a grin is pinned to her face from the moment she wobbles onto the ice.

I keep my balance on those metal razors just fine. It’s not that I’ve done this so many times before and therefore I have skill from practice. It’s fae nature, a natural talent I’m born with—as is Aleana.

So when she reaches out her trembling hands for mine, as though if I don’t hold onto her, she’ll crack hard onto the icy ground, I smile something small at the faith she doesn’t have in herself but should.

Even poorly, she will glide better than any human who has ever skated on ice.

Still, I take her hands in mine.

The strength in her slender fingers is something of a surprise, because she’s crushing my fucking bones as I push myself back—and as I start to float, she’s pulled with me…

And she glides.

Her lashes flutter over crystalline eyes.

Her grip is still tight on my hands, but her shoulders loosen the tension she’s carried with her since we arrived in the human realm.

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