Page 155 of Secrets of Graves and Gold

I don’t have time to figure out what’s happened. He isn’t looking at me—his knife hand is flailing aimlessly.

I spring forward, snatch his wrist, and wrench his arm around.

With a sickening sound, his own blade drives into the flesh at the base of his throat.

Borys’s body spasms in front of me. I dodge backward as he crumples over, spewing blood from his neck and lips.

He sputters something as if he’s trying to speak, but not with any words I can decipher. His hands fumble across the floor and drift to a halt.

His body sags, his head lolling to the side. The one eye I can see stares blankly at the wall.

Blood courses across the dusty floor in a steady current.

I got my gash, just like I wanted.

I suck in a shaky breath. “Julita? We did it. He’s dead.”

No one answers. And all at once, I realize I can’t feel her—not the familiar prickle at the back of my skull, not the faint trace of a tingle that lingers even when she pulls herself as deep as her presence can go.

She must have flung herself right out of me to smack Borys in the face with whatever presence she did have left.

She’s what he was clawing at, what distracted him enough that I could attack.

And now she’s gone.

Forty-Three

Ivy

Iwake up to a cool breeze tugging at my hair and a warm hand on my cheek. When I blink, Casimir’s gorgeous face comes into focus in the pale light, framed by looming trees.

A smile curves his lips. “There’s our woman.” He strokes my hair back from my temple. “How are you doing, Kindness?”

“I—” The first word comes out as a croak. I clear my throat and try again. “What happened? Where are we?”

The last thing I remember is the hall in the farmhouse, Borys bleeding across the floor, my head unnervingly vacant for the first time in?—

My body tenses beneath the blanket that’s been laid over me. My skull is still vacant.

I can’t find any tingle of Julita’s presence no matter how hard I strain my senses.

“We followed the locket’s signal and found you in the farmhouse,” Casimir is saying. “You must have passed out.”

Stavros’s voice carries from somewhere beyond my view. “Exhaustion and blood loss will do that.”

Blood loss. I adjust my position on the ground—padded by another blanket—and an ache ripples through my side from the spot where Borys cut me.

No wry comment from Julita. No cheer that her sadistic brother is finally, definitely dead.

I pry at my mind as if I can summon her voice through sheer will, but nothing comes.

Casimir’s brow knits at the emotion that must show on my face. “We patched you up thoroughly. Most of the blood wasn’t yours.”

Alek appears beside him, holding one of our canteens. “You should be all right, but it’d be good for you to drink something.”

I stare at them, a much deeper ache spreading through my chest. It twines around my lungs, making it hard to speak.

“Julita—she helped me distract her brother—she… she flung herself right out of my head at him so I could get his dagger?—”

---