Page 2 of Cursed Shadows 4
The coach-rider clears his throat.
Eamon’s jaw rolls before he turns and jumps into the carriage.
Morticia sweeps in behind him.
The rider doesn’t give them a moment to speak, not a moment for a goodbye to Melantha before he slams the door shut so hard that the wood rattles all around them.
Time is too precious, too sparse.
And so the only farewell they have with Melantha is Morticia reaching for the curtain to tug it back.
Before she can, the rider has scrambled up to the seat and grabbed the reins. The coach sways and teeters under the shifting weight.
The rider’s call splits the carriage air. “Ha!”
The rocky sway of the coach is quick to turn turbulent. The carriage jolts into an urgent race, and the clocking of hooves rains down on the road like fist-sized balls of hail.
Eamon sinks into the wooden back of the carriage seat. The ache blooming on his spine pins him in reality.
Fleetingly, he has the thought, the memories of Bee, how she would dig her own fingernails into the meat of her palms, or tug and scratch at her own flesh whenever she stood alone at village parties and ceremonies.
There is something grounding about it, Eamon decides.
Opposite him, Morticia snatches the leather grip above her head. She fists her hand onto it, then tenses her arm, an attempt to better navigate the rocky violence of the carriage thundering through the upper streets of Kithe.
“Have you a sword?” she whispers as though her voice might somehow overpower the punishing pace of the kelpie steeds if she speaks a note too loud.
Eamon turns a frown on his mother.
A single braid is draped over her shoulder, hair of ink like her sister, but threaded with strands of white, just like her dark eyes, speckled with ivory flakes.
Her words don’t quite sink into his tangled mind for a heartbeat.
Reaching over her shoulder, she draws a bow seemingly from nowhere. Bleached bone and ateralum string. It’s only now he notices that she has a quiver fastened to her back.
Her fingers are tight on the feathered flick of the arrow, but she rests the green tip on her knee—dipped in poison.
That gesture alone reminds him of her question.
‘Have you a sword?’
His mouth flattens into a line.
He shakes his head, then—reaching around for the rear of his waistband—he glides out the silver of a dagger. Its polishedblade is longer than his forearm, the ribbed handle a decent grip in bloody battle.
But the problem isn’t the weapon.
The problem is them.
Eamon never took to warriorship in Licht.
For the most part, Morticia raised him as a light male. And she nurtured parts of him that yearned for no violence at all, parties and smiles and pretty folk.
Always, he’s been passive in it, in the violence of their kinds, both light and dark.
He collects humans from their realm, lures them in to light lands, then simply hands them over to the High Court. He doesn’t torment them himself, torture them, harm them.
There’s always been that distance in him, the reluctance to shed blood the way so many others hunger to do.
