Page 69 of Cursed Shadows 5

The faerie hound… is just a pup. Not a hunched, ready-to-pounce beast tucked away in the shadows. It’s just a pup.

A baffled look steals me.

A slack face staring dumbly at a curious one.

The pup tilts its head. Considers me.

A frown knits into my brow. I stare back at it.

Heartbeats pass between us, each less violent than the last—then, finally, I jolt out of my stupor and slowly drop to my knees.

“Hello…” I speak softly, an uncertain hitch to my tone, but kind and gentle all the same.

Its ears lift. Too big for its little head.

The white fur hasn’t faded to translucence yet, it’s a ball of snow, and so I guess it to be very young, a babe, not a juvenile, weened off its mother very recently.

I start to reach out my hands for it when something bolts through me—

“Nari.”

The broken whisper comes from the darkness of the lounge.

I startle, shoving up from the floorboards. Forgetting all about the faerie hound, I throw my wild glare to the dim room. My boots hit the woodboards with scuffs and clops—then I am frozen in place.

Two weeks, I avoided him.

Two weeks, he avoided me.

But that time is over, because he stands there shrouded in shadows—shadows that don’t curve over his shoulders or lick at his heels, not anymore.

No, now he is separate from the dark.

His ashen sweater stands against the black, not melting into it; his coal-toned breeches and boots to match don’t dissolve into darkness like they once did; the beige hue of his face, that lovely complexion of his; the dimples carved into his cheeks, the inky coils of his hair brushing over the arch of his eyebrows, the pink of his lips—those gleaming cerulean eyes… I can make out all of it in the dim dwelling.

Daxeel…

My heart flings itself through my body.

Breath pinned to my throat, it’s all I can do to just stand here, staring at him. That slack look has returned to my face, stolen my expression; it parts my lips and pries my eyelids open.

Daxeel isn’t frozen in place like me. His muscles don’t bolt to his bones and turn him into an unmoveable statue, like the fright does to me.

The only movement running through me is the sudden choppiness of my breaths trembling my chest.

But Daxeel moves.

He walks towards me.

Slow, patient steps—cautious, almost. Yet there is a tense urgency in him, in the flex and unflex of his hands at his sides, sooted and stained…with ash.

Is he here to burn me?

No that makes no sense. A silly intrusion into my scrambled, numb mind.

Still, he advances, his steps as soft as the look he bestows on me. And like that look, there is trepidation in his approach.

It takes him much too long to close the gap between us, a lifetime to walk the short distance from the lounge to where I stand, stuck, in the kitchen.

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