Page 42 of The Second Death of Locke
“Tether!”
The small voice caught them both off guard enough that Grey nearly missed a block and Brit did—but it didn’t matter, because Grey felt the new strand of magic as Sela pushed her power forward and Brit latched on.
“Drop!” they shouted, and then the metal shavings they had clenched in one fist went flying through the room at a killing speed. Grey hit the floor, face-down, covering her head with both hands as the metal pattered around her and at least two more bodies thudded to the ground.
Silence rang in the air. She smelled blood, and felt the sweet aftermath of worn-out power even as her own well brimmed overfull with adrenaline.
She opened her eyes. One of the Luthrite soldiers was on the ground next to her, their face half obliterated by metal. For that force of an explosion, that much projection, Sela was probably spent.
Grey sat up, wiping the blood away from her face, taking careful stock. The four soldiers were dead. The desk Sela had hidden behind was a mess of wood splinters, but she could hear the girl crying, soat least she was alive. It was Brit she focused on, slumped over the bed, breathing hard.
“Brit?” She pushed herself up, stepping over a body. She pulled the mage over onto their back—their eyes were wild with pain. Blood dripped down their forehead; another wound soaked their sleeve, and there was one more that Grey couldn’t see across their ribs.
“You didn’t tell us,” Brit said, staring straight up at the ceiling.
Grey did not cry—she’d lost that instinct to cry in the face of danger years ago—but she did curse fantastically under her breath. She opened Brit’s shirt, slicing through buttons with her bloody knife, and took in the injuries. The one across Brit’s ribs was deep but she didn’t think it had punctured anything important; there was another just to the side of their navel, not deep enough to pierce the gut, but she could not fully tell without inspecting further.
“Sela,” she said very carefully. “Are you okay?”
“Um.” The girl sniffled, trying to breathe through sobs that racked her body. “I don’t… I’m not… I’m not bleeding.”
“Good. Sela, dear heart, can you do something for me?” Grey had a choice to make: concentrate on Brit or worry about Sela. If the girl wanted to run—well. She was more trouble than she was worth. And though her own retirement hung in the balance, though Kier might actually kill her if she lost the prisoner, she wasn’t going to let Brit die. She pressed a firm hand to the worst of their wounds to staunch the bleeding.
“I think,” Sela said. Grey glanced over at her. She was standing now, breathing heavily, probably in the middle of a panic attack. When her eyes landed on Brit, half unconscious under Grey, then on the body of a soldier close to her on the ground, the blood drained from her face.
Grey held out a key. “Don’t look at them. Sela, next door, my bag is on the bed. I need my kit from it. The one with salves and herbs and antidotes—you’ll know it when you see it. It’s okay to bring the whole bag. I’ll need you to do a few other things and then I’ll send you for Ola, okay?”
“Okay,” Sela said. She took the key. Grey wondered, her thoughts fuzzy with adrenaline and the pain of the fight, if she would regret this.
She couldn’t think of that now.
With the girl fetching her kit, Grey got to work. She moved around Brit, stripping the bed to the top sheet to give herself a level surface. She dragged the bodies into a pile in the corner, swearing profusely at the waves of blood that drenched her shirt as a result, and draped a sheet over them—the others could deal with them later. Grey hurried downstairs, not caring about the sound of her boots on the ground. The inn was eerily quiet, empty—the door was locked from the inside, covered with a heavy crossbar. She found the innkeeper, collapsed on the other side of the bar. Grey paused for a moment to check her breathing, her heartbeat; she didn’t wake when Grey kicked her arm, so she must’ve been poisoned or ingested a sleeping draft.
There was no time to worry about it. Grey dragged the woman into a back room, then stole the keys from behind the bar and locked the innkeeper in just in case.
Then she steeled herself and returned to the room where Brit lay.
Amazingly, the pitcher hadn’t been shattered by Brit’s improvised projectiles. Grey pulled off the pillowcases and dipped them in the water, using them to clean the blood from Brit’s wounds. They were breathing shallowly now, eyes closed.
Sela returned with the med kit and sat quietly on the night table in the corner, as far away from the bodies as she could get, even though her eyes kept flicking to the pile—the white sheet was starting to stain red in places.
“Sela?” Grey said, washing her hands thoroughly with water and soap powder.
“Yes?”
“I want you to breathe,” Grey said as carefully as she could, trying to keep her own voice from shaking. She found a jar of numbing salve among her medicines. “Breathe in for five counts, then out for five. Can you do that?”
“Yes,” the girl said. Grey listened, timing her own breathing to Sela’s as she numbed the areas around Brit’s wounds.
“How are you feeling?” she asked.
“My stomach hurts.”
Grey’s hand stilled, halfway through her kit. “You weren’t trained, were you? You’re a well, but you don’t know how to do it.”
The answering silence was so loud that she had to glance up to make sure the girl hadn’t passed out. Finally, “Yes.”
Grey nodded. She took a second to assess. Brit was still breathing, and there was nothing blocking their airway.
