Page 63 of Cursed Shadows 3

The corners of my mouth dig into my cheeks.

So much for quitting the tonics.

Ahead, Bee leans into Eamon, shouting out her words. I hear what sounds like “vee-eye-pee” but in this under-water pressure, it’s hard to make out much sound at all.

She shoves through the weighted door—

And in that instant, we’re sucked into a whole other world.

Never in my life have I seen anything like this.

Not a bar. Bee called it aclub.

I always thought a club was just a weapon. Suppose this place is named after one because it assaults every sense with loud, booming music that bludgeons me. As do the lights flashing all sorts of colourful flares at me, and the excitable screams that lift from the raging dancefloor. Raging is what it is, I decide. Folk and human alike, jumping and pushing and throwing up their hands. No technique in the way they move. Some sway with the beat, some are standing but surely asleep, and others just… brutalise the air around them.

It’s a strange sight to behold.

Dare takes to watching them move.

He braces his forearms on the gated barrier that separates the podium from the lower floor, and his gaze sweeps from human to fae, from twirl to air-punch.

I draw away from the barrier.

Aleana has plopped herself onto the plush leather bench arched around a table. Daxeel sits some inches further down, an unreadable look on his face, as though carved from bronzed marble. If his patience is a thread, I suspect it has frayed to the point of snapping any moment now.

I avoid his gaze and slide onto the bench beside Aleana.

“You took tonic,” I say, and my words are almost drowned out by the incessant thumping of that grim music. “If you are too sickly, we can return—”

Aleana waves her hand dismissively. “It is worth it,” she shouts out the words over the assault of the music. “I want this…to live!”

My lips part around silence.

I want to live.

I want you to live, too, Aleana.

But that’s not quite what she meant, and I take no trouble in understanding her. These moments, these adventures, are whatto liveis—moments she didn’t have in her poorly life before I came along.

That’s why she reaches out her hand for mine and squeezes my fingers gently, a small smile painted onto her pale lips.

Ridge sits on the high-back of the bench, his boots pressed into the leather seat; a better vantage point of the whole club, and so I suspect he’s on the lookout for Eamon.

After Bee led us to this booth, Eamon left with her. And it’s a while before Ridge straightens his spine, alerting to their return.

I push up from the booth.

My gaze sweeps the edge of the dancefloor before it lands on Eamon, carrying two smoky-glass bottles bigger than any honeywine bottle I’ve ever seen.

Behind him, Bee weaves through the throngs of humans at the edge of the dancefloor. Flat on her hand, she holds a tray of tumblers above her head. Not a single glass wobbles as she makes for the short staircase to this upper podium.

Dare turns to lean back against the gated barrier. He turns his chin to graze his shoulder and watches Bee approach.

I think it peculiar that the human males don’t spare a lingering glance on her. Like she’s merely another face, a simple and plain one, just passing them by. It’s almost as though they don’t quite consider her as pretty as she is, but to us—the fae—she is a beauty. Maybe what is fine to the fae is ordinary to the humans.

I see it.

I see it in them, the humans, watch them through the eyes of the dark ones. How they want more and more, kill themselves and their earth to get it. Carriages and horses into kars and bi-see-kals. Bars into clubs. Lanterns into whatever the hell those blinding colourful lights are above, the ones I want to rip out of the ceiling.

---