Page 9 of The Second Death of Locke
It took a moment for them to clear the girl, lead her away, another moment for Kier to take a step, stumble. He gripped Grey’s arm for stability, clutching the edge of her pauldron. Grey’s hands went to his upper arms, holding him upright without thought, fingers digging into the bulk of his padded shirt.
“What? What is it?” she asked, searching his face. It was difficult—he was a mess of blood anyway, all drama with very little true injury besides a cut cheek and perhaps a broken nose, but none of that was enough to explain the glassy look in his eyes.
“She stabbed me,” he said. He moved closer to Grey, shielding his body from their company. Very carefully, he pulled up the bottom of his padded shirt, revealing the blooming stain on his undershirt. It was very quickly going red and wet.
“How badly?” Grey asked.
Kier winced.
“I’ll kill her,” Grey gritted, pressing her fingers to Kier’s side. “I’ll fucking kill her.”
“No…” Kier was saying, his hand tightening on her arm.
She couldn’t kill the resource. She couldn’t kill the resource, because that order hadn’t been given, and yet, andyet—when she looked back, the girl’s hands were red with Kier’s blood. Kier leaned in, his breathing ragged on Grey’s muddy cheek. All she could think of was the overwhelming crush of her own failure; all she could hear wasthe pounding of her heartbeat in her ears.
“Yougave her your armor,” she seethed.
“She’s just a girl,” Kier said, unsteady. “She was—is—terrified.”
Grey herself had been “just a girl” once, and look at her now. She wondered if Kier would’ve underestimated her, too, when she was a girl—or if she would’ve made the same decision their prisoner had. To cut. To wound. To run.
“How did you not check if she was armed?”
“Grey,” he said. “It was my own dagger. It… it probably did a lot of damage coming out, and I won’t let you put yourself at risk for me.”
She knew the dagger. Dark metal, barbed on the lower edge. She’d given it to him herself—had presented it to him on his twenty-fifth birthday with a note that read,So you can be deadly all on your own, partially as a joke. He must’ve recovered it before handing over the resource—good move; it wasn’t a solid plan to leave her armed—because he shakily offered it to Grey. If only the girl had left it buried in his lower intestines, she wouldn’t be quite so panicked now. Removing it had only done more damage.
“Listen to me,” she said, holstering the dagger then moving one hand to grip his chin, forcing him to look at her. It was shock, probably—he was fine. He’d had worse. He’d befine.
“Grey—”
“Don’t,” she chastised. He’d been stabbed before, worse than this. They’dbothsuffered worse than this. She pressed a hand against his wound and sent a push of power at him. Kier let out an awful noise, staggering against her, his eyes going very dark.
“I just need to get you to camp,” she said. “Once we get back, I will fix it. Okay?”
“Grey,” he said, scrabbling for her hand. She let him take it, his slick and wet with his own blood.
“No,” she said, feeling him resist the tether. “Take it. Siphon from me. Take it all—don’t youfucking look at me like that.”
There was blood between his teeth. It took her a minute to recover the gauze from her pocket kit, another to wrap his torso as tightly as she could under his shirt. Once that was done, she kept his hand in hers, forced him to move forward, draped his arm around hershoulder. He was so heavy, too heavy—she staggered, nearly dropping him. One of the other Hands was there before she was even off the bank, taking his other side, giving Grey the freedom to press her hand firmly against his wound. She could not do that much now, not without stopping to clean and inspect the wound, but he wouldn’t get any worse with a constant thread of power running into him.
Mages could not heal themselves, even with a steady flow of magic. It was like trying to tickle oneself—an impossibility. Just as it was impossible to harm a well with magic; the power didn’t allow for that kind of direction. But Grey’s hands paired with Grey’s power… Though she had no affluence to perform her own magic, her medical training and undiluted power worked in tandem to put Kier back together. And until she could get her hands on him, could actuallyhelp, she could keep him indefinitely stable with power alone.
If she could sustain it.
“Let’s move!” she shouted, hating the shrill note in her voice. But she was his Hand, his voice—she was in command when he could not be.
The Hand on Kier’s other side said very softly, “You must move your feet, Captain Seward.” Grey looked over just long enough to register that it was Ola Et-Kiltar, a sharp-tongued well who had caught her eye often enough that she and Kier were planning to put her mage, Brit, up for promotion. Grey couldn’t see Brit now—usually their pale hair was easy to spot in the heaving mass of soldiers—but she forced herself to stay calm, because if Ola wasn’t panicking, Brit probably wasn’t dead.
But Kier was still resisting her, and losing valuable time because of it. “Take it,” Grey seethed into his shoulder. He hissed a breath through his teeth, coughed, and spat out a mouthful of blood. She pressed her hand firm against the gauze, feeling the muscles of his stomach and another sluice of hot, sticky blood.
But this time, he listened. She felt the thread of her power moving into him, unraveling like a loose bit of yarn on a knit sweater. He took another unsteady breath.
They supported him, shuffling along as Grey’s head pounded with the agony he was unable to keep from slipping down the tether. Shefelt the thread unspooling further and further, the tugging against her. She had quite a lot to give before she ran out, but she had to keep just enough to heal him when they got back to camp, and avoid suspicion on top of that.
Halfway back, Ola switched with her mage, Brit—this was a relief to Grey, because it confirmed that Brit was not dead—but that left a new problem. Kier stumbled, once, and Brit sucked a breath through their teeth as they caught him, looking over at Grey.
“Is he siphoning from you?” they asked. “Has he been siphoning from you all this time?”
