Page 76 of Cursed Shadows 5

I smile, small. “Be good.”

Dare lets a smile steal his lips. “Never.”

He inclines his head, and I think he knows this is the closest to a thanks he’ll ever get from me, but more than that, I accept hisoffer of family and friendship—so I treat him as I would treat a brother.

Eamon kisses my temple. “I might be gone some phases.”

I aim a quizzical look at him.

Eamon’s mouth tilts. “If we don’t find her in the human realm, I’ll have to go to Licht.”

“It’s not safe for us there.”

“It will be fine. I will be questioned, but that will allow me to move through my web.”

A web of recruiters and officials. Those who know things us ordinary folk don’t.

I give a faint nod, reluctant, but I do understand.

Eamon’s favourite is me. I don’t doubt this. But he does love the kinta, too; a friend, lost.

“Move swiftly,” I tell him, and it’s enough to lure a smile from his tiredness.

I watch them leave.

The dwelling is quick to feel… empty. Unsafe.

For a while, I stand at the windows and study the dark pockets of the alleyways and lanes, thick shadows that a litalf official could be hidden away in.

I watch for a long while before a tall, muscled silhouette steps out of the narrow mouth of a butcher’s lane.

He is shadow, he sunkissed marble, he is ocean eyes.

Daxeel is out there.

He steps out of the dark—to let me know that he is there, watching… perhaps to put me at ease. With Daxeel out there, officials might not be.

I turn my back on the window and return to bed.

I sleep well. So does Hedda.

16

ALASDARE

††††††

To those with more fragile sensibilities, it might be grim to walk through this graveyard.

Dare sees the purpose in it.

A concrete jungle in forever night, once thick with the burning stench of pollution, now breezed with the fresher scent of flowers and trees and dewy soil. The difference is small, the remnants of the world before the dark still lingering in the air, but the progress is undeniable.

Last time he walked these streets, they were bustling with humans, with those rumblingkarsspeeding down the road, blaring with war cries and wheels skidding and screeching. Shop fronts were alight with the colours of the Sabbat, unnatural lights twinkling with inviting winks, the sweet aroma of sugar luring in buyers, but layered with the stench of burning hair and hot iron, that distinct bitterness that warned the humans to stop—stop fuelling the unnatural, stop their wrongdoings.

The earth was pleading with them.

But they didn’t stop.

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