Page 112 of Cursed Shadows 4
I blink, frozen in place.
Caius lets a roar of frustration thunder through him before he swerves around the litalf who traced his stare to me, the one whose face alights like it’s the morning of the Sabbat, and his muscles tense as though ready to pounce—
“Target three!” he bellows, and the thunder of his shout threatens to rupture my eardrums.
Caius moves fast, a blur. Swinging the weighted sword, the blade cuts through the litalf’s waist and…
My face twists with a grimace.
The top half of his body slides off. I hear the slicking sound before it thumps to the forest. It takes his legs a moment longer of twitching before they crumple.
The curt breath I release is a cloud at my mouth. But it’s premature, too reminiscent of relief—because I have been realised.
All eyes swerve to me.
Target three.
I guess that’s what I am.
Not Narcissa, not Nari, not one of them.
A target. Not even a high one. Just an easy one.
I shrink back, letting the twigs close over on my face. Better hidden, I crouch behind the bush, but I watch through the gaps in the dead foliage.
Samick throws a glaring look at me, all ice daggers and frozen threats, then he’s lunged the distance to land in front of me.
Back to me, he takes a stance—
Caius, too.
Dare narrows a dark, slitted look over his shoulder at me, it lingers, and I think he might want to kill me himself.
A grimace tightens my face. An unspoken ‘oops’that earns a scoff from Dare before he’s turning his back to me.
The three of them face off with the remaining three litalves. And I do nothing but hide as the shouts erupt and the two walls of fae come crashing together.
I notice, in the dance of war, Samick doesn’t wear gloves. His pale fingers are bare, his skin exposed to the cuts of his throwing stars, but no cuts indent his marble flesh from the expert throws he aims at the litalf closing in on him.
Glint after glint after glint, a procession of three stars strikes the litalf—and he wobbles on the spot, as though stunned, then crumples to his knees. The line of the stars—one embedded in his forehead, another in his chest, and the third right in his… uh…right in the crotch. My teeth bare at the sight, a cringe that has my thighs pressing together.
That’s got to hurt.
And it was no accident. Each strike is precise, it’s expert and mathematical. The stars must be poisoned, because the litalf dies too quickly, and the green sludge that foams out of his mouth is too unlikely from mere wounds.
I blanch at the thought of Samick handling those poisoned stars without gloves, the sheer saturation of trust he has in his skills.
But just as he’s finished with that litalf, the one that crumbles, and he reaches for a dagger fastened to his waist belt, a blur sweeps overhead.
I fall back onto my bum.
My gaze widens and swerves upwards—
Just as a light female swings from the branches above. A newcomer, not one of the warriors I stumbled upon here, but one drawn in by the song of battle.
My screech strangles the clearing.
I should shout a word, a cry for help, but a scream is all that rings through me.
