Page 407 of Alchemised
Kaine ignored him, his eyes going briefly out of focus. “The fire is out. Let’s get you inside.”
Before she could try to stand, a loud blaring split the air. For a moment, Helena thought it was the buzzer, that Kaine was being summoned again, but it came from the wrong direction.
They turned in time to see a lorry come roaring up the road, approaching so quickly it threatened to crash through the gates.
“They’re coming! Let me free!” Atreus shouted. “Let me free!”
The lorry stopped short, and a figure tumbled out of the driver’s side, clutching something against their chest, as if fleeing with a child in their arms.
“I got it! I got it. Take it quick.”
It was Ivy. She was pressed against the gate, her eyes wild, and she kept looking over her shoulder as if expecting pursuit.
Helena stumbled across the courtyard to the gate, grasping towards her.
“How did you—?” Helena’s voice shook with disbelief as Ivy shoved the bundle through the gate at her. It was wet and smelled like gangrene and formaldehyde. The fabric fell aside, revealing a rotted arm, ripped off at the elbow, missing dozens of bones as the skin sloughed off, three fingers remaining. They twitched as if still alive.
“Sofia did it,” Ivy said, her voice breathless and shaking. Her eyes were red, her face streaked with tears and smeared with rot. “I tried all kinds of ways to get close enough.” She shook her head. “Couldn’t. She did it.”
“How?”
“Morrough doesn’t watch his own necrothralls,” Ivy said, her face twisting at the admission. “But she does what I tell her. Always does. She walked over and he didn’t even notice her there. She ripped it off and threw it to me. He attacked her first—so I was able to run.” Her face crumpled. “Do you think she’d forgive me now, if she knew?”
Helena didn’t know what to say. “She loved you.”
Ivy stood trembling.
Kaine had reached them now, his expression unreadable, but he reached into his uniform and pulled out an obsidian knife.
“What are you—” Helena started, but he flipped the hilt away from himself and offered it to Ivy. She took it without hesitating.
“Through the chest, near the heart,” he said. “It’s quickest that way.”
Ivy nodded and turned, scrambling back into the lorry. In a minute she was gone, the rumbling engine fading until the only trace she’d ever been there was the dust above the road and the bundle clutched in Helena’s hands.
“Kaine,” she said, her voice hoarse from smoke. “You can come with me now. We can escape together.”
He shook his head. “Come inside.”
She stared at him in disbelief, not moving when he tried to guide her back towards the house. His jaw set, and he picked her up.
“What do you mean?” she said, still clutching the bundle in her arms, trying to get down even though she knew she was tearing open the burns on her back. “This was what we needed. This buys us a month, I’ll be able to find a way …”
“I can’t go with you,” he said, walking towards the house. “My father is right. When you escape, war or not, you’ll be hunted. If I went with you, we’d have a month, and I could protect you, but then I’d be gone, and Morrough would know what direction the hunters didn’t come back from. Eventually they’ll find you. If I stay, now that we have this, and he can’t control me anymore, I can make sure that no one he sends makes it out of the city until you’ve safely disappeared.”
She clutched at his shoulder, trying to make him listen. “But what if I reverse it—”
He shook his head as they neared the door. “You need a willing soul for that, and you’re not going to find one, because the only person who’d die for me is you.”
She stared at him as if he’d struck her in the throat.
“What? You’re not even going to ask me?” Atreus’s voice rose tauntingly from the ground.
Helena gasped, wrenching at Kaine’s shoulder in order to look past him at his father. Atreus still lay on the ground, bound in iron, barely able to move even his fingers.
“Would you?” Helena said.
“I’d rather die,” Kaine said before his father could reply.
