Chapter 7
EVER
You stabbed her?” Sypher asks.
Stabbed?
“No. Now go find the fucker who threw a knife at her before I stab you,” Eli says. “And take Kaleida. Milo, stand watch.”
Pounding boots disperse. Rain smacks my back.
“We have to get her out of the open before someone else comes,” Kelter says.
I breathe faster. My shoulder blade burns.
“We can’t touch her. Get her onto something we can drag,” Eli says, panicked. “Her heart is all over the place.”
“Drag her? What kind of asshole are you?” Kelter scoops me off the ground and into his arms, somewhat clumsily with his wrists still cuffed.
I groan at the movement.
“How are you doing that?” Eli sputters.
“Maybe it’s only you that she hurts when touched. Take a godsdamn hint.” Kelter adjusts his hold on me.
He can touch me… which means somewhere inside me, the pain I cause Eli is a choice.
“Careful! She’s got a knife in her back,” Eli says.
I what?
“What is the point of your obsession with her if you can’t even keep her safe?” Kelter lectures. “You’re a walking mistake.”
“I know! Fuck. Just get her safe.”
A loose string in my heart twists at his words, at how he views himself underneath the show of confidence. I twist in Kelter’s grasp to look at him.
“We’re under attack!” Milo yells.
Kelter scoffs. “You think?”
Milo rushes up to us. “There’s more of them!”
“Shit.” Eli grimaces, as if he felt the blade in his own back. He tosses his pack to Milo. “Kelter, put her down and get your bitch ass out of here. Milo, fix her and don’t fuck up. I’ll be back. Kaleida never takes a life, and that asshole is dead.”
Don’t go. I almost let the words escape as he runs off. But why would I care? A guard in a black jumpsuit tries to take him down, earning a knife through his heart a second later. Three more guards surround and tackle him.
Milo points frantically. “Put her down behind those trees. Hurry!”
The last I see of Eli is his feet sticking out from underneath the guards as I’m carried away.
Kelter drops me facedown on the ground and pulls my cuffed hands out in front of me, stretching my arms flat over the wet dirt.
I moan in pain and turn my head to the side, resting my cheek on the cold ground. “Eli?”
“He’ll be okay,” Milo assures me.
“Uncuff me,” Kelt says, followed by the clatter of metal. “And keep your hands off her.”
Milo kneels at my side. “Why? I need to treat her shoulder.”
“Just trust me.” Kelt tugs my shirt up above the wound, then pushes the wet hair from my eyes and brushes my cheek before standing to go. “Take care of her.” I watch him run after Eli, wondering when in his secret past he became capable of fighting.
Consciousness sticks around to torment me as Milo tends to my back. The pop of a cork slipping from glass sounds above my head. Rain drips into my ear, each drop amplified.
“First I’ll pour the tincture to heal the inside of the wound, then pull.”
“Pull what?” I’m frantic and trembling, barely able to keep track of my thoughts, but he gives no further explanation before the liquid hits my skin.
I’m not sure if I yell out loud, or if it’s in my head. I scrape my nails through the dirt. He must be burning a hole straight through me. He braces himself with one hand on my back, then pulls. And this time, I know the scream makes it past my lips.
“You demented fucker!” Wind thrashes. Lightning strikes over and over.
But he yells too. “Ow!” He slams a bloody hand over his mouth, breathing through the pain, then rips it away. “I don’t know what that was, but we have to be quiet. They’ll find us. And save that talk for Eli.”
The ground shakes with the impact of dozens of fallen limbs, severed from the trusty trunks that held them for hundreds of years. Branches crack, their sharp echoes carried by the wind.
I know the language of the forest. And it’s livid.
“The woods seem as pissed as you,” Milo says.
Rapid breaths shove in and out my nose. I groan and whine, squirming in pain, my cheek in the blood-soaked dirt.
“Don’t yell again. I’m going to have them close it up,” Milo says.
Them? But I don’t even have the sense of mind to question him in time.
Heavy wet blobs drop onto my shoulder blade, and it’s not the rain.
Tiny teeth or maybe nails or miniature daggers sink into my skin, pulling and twisting, stabbing and tugging.
I grit my teeth. The motion repeats until I’m dizzy with pain.
My mind conjures a vision as its offer of escape.
Lightning strikes at my heels, chasing me as I run through the woods until my legs tire. Until my muscles lock. I turn my face to the sky and embrace the violent flashes with my arms stretched wide. Lightning jolts my chest. And stops my heart.
But it’s the pounding beat of pumping blood that brings me back, the pain I tried to escape now multiplied. I search for distractions. The splatter of rain. The cool wind. The squish of fresh mud between my fingers.
When I consider banging my head into the ground with the sole intention of slipping into darkness, the pain lessens. My breathing slows. I unclench my fists.
“The bleeding stopped,” Milo says, as though he wasn’t quite sure it was going to. “You’re all sewn up.”
I roll fully onto my side. The rain ceases to fall, and the wind calms to a swirling breeze. “The cuffs,” I say weakly.
He moves the lock stone over the cuffs. They pop open, and I immediately try to sit up.
“Hold still!” he cries, pushing me down onto my back then crying out again at the contact. He grabs his chest, recovering. “You’ll never heal like that.”
“And shoving my wound into the dirt will help? Stop touching me!”
Milo leans over my head, his untamed blonde hair hanging down, light blue shirt splattered with blood. “You need to rest.”
“Where was this tincture shit when the blitzer tore me open?” I force myself up again, but before Milo can complain, a guard appears from behind a tree and races toward him. “Watch out!”
He startles and twists, accidentally elbowing the guard in the leg and setting him off balance. It buys him half a second to get to his feet.
“Oh shit! He’s big.” Milo raises two fists and tosses them around sloppily. “Do not mess with me!” The guard laughs and goes for him again. Milo ducks out of the way. “And don’t you dare move,” he says to me as he swoops down and picks something up from the ground.
“Focus!” I yell.
The guard closes in on him and punches him in the gut. Milo groans and splashes the remaining tincture into his eyes before doubling over in pain. The guard screeches and grabs his face. “Fucking medicine freak!”
Then Eli returns. He finds my eyes in an instant, the depth of his gaze pulling me in as he drives his knife through the guard’s neck.
He lets him fall, then snatches his pack up and shoves a small, dripping sack inside before sitting next to me.
My heart is still going berserk from the attack, the sudden death.
He leans as close as he can get without making contact, one hand sinking into the puddle of blood surrounding me.
I hate that his presence is comforting.
Kaleida and Sypher drag themselves into the patch of trees, dirt-caked blood streaked across their faces and splotches on their clothes. They drop their packs and collapse on top of the worn fabric, using them as pillows. Kelter is last, heaving a tired breath and leaning against a tree.
Eli lifts his hand from the puddle. Ruby red blood bathes his fingers and palm, trickling down his wrist in sporadic lines. The green flecks from Kelter are gone from his eyes now, overpowered by a dark brown mix of rage and control. The deep cave scent of his darkness is near pungent.
“Look at the beautiful mess you made.” Without the slightest glance away, he holds his wrist to his mouth and extends his tongue, licking my blood. Then his lips. Then each finger with a quiet smack.
The simple act mesmerizes me. Maybe it’s that he’s swallowing up a part of me that’s run through my veins—through my heart—countless times. Or the way his lips and tongue take on the red as though they crave it. Or maybe I can’t look away because it’s him. Because he’s the beautiful mess.
“Uh, I have a rag.” Milo offers him a scrap of fabric.
Eli ignores him, madness flickering behind his inky gaze.
Milo tries to hand the rag to Eli again as he watches him scoop up a runaway drop of blood with his tongue.
Kaleida gives a tired wave. “I think we got all the guards in this group.”
A slingshot falls from Sypher’s hand, the scarver creature squirming in the other. “Remember when everybody didn’t want us dead?”
Kaleida laughs from her belly and turns her head toward Sypher, smiling wide enough for all of us. “Remember ten minutes ago when you hid in the trees while we fought?”
“I was looking for Wendell! He jumped out of my pocket.”
Milo passes canteens around, then makes me lift my shirt so he can check my back again. “You can walk now, but take it easy, okay?”
“I’m fine,” I say.
Eli stands, the slap of his boot splashing blood onto my face. “Let’s get moving. No cuffs. We’re almost at the border.” He stomps away with Milo a step behind.
I follow him, the others on either side of me. “It’ll be night by the time we make it to the city edge.”
“We’ll go to your house,” Eli says.
“I don’t have a house. It’s a room. And I’ve probably been evicted.”
“Probably not,” Kelter says, hesitating. “I left a note at the coffee shop saying you were taking some time off and staying with me, and I paid for a year of your rent so no one would try to look for you.”
A new level of rage circulates through my veins. I hold back from revealing that no one would have looked. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”
“We can go to my place,” he offers.
“We’re not tucking her into your little come-stained bed,” Eli says. “Hurry the fuck up.”
“It’s big, actually,” Kelter argues.
Kaleida drapes an arm around his shoulders and leans her head against his sleeve. “I love how you don’t try to deny the stains.”
Milo staggers to the side. “Woah, what in Malachite’s Eye is this?” With a bored expression, Eli slowly turns around and yanks him a foot farther by his elbow. Milo looks all about then down at the ground, bewildered. “I felt like I was flat. Or stretched. Or inside out. I don’t even know.”
Sypher catches up to them, and within a second confusion hijacks his face. The scarver jumps from his hands and scampers off in the direction we came from. “No, Wendell!”
Kaleida stops short and grips her chest upon reaching the same spot. “What is this?”
“It’s only the border. Keep going. The feeling will go away,” Kelter says as we approach, quite unlike his silence when I first experienced the sensation while smashed up against him and stuffed in a sack. Why didn’t he comfort me for fuck’s sake?
I bury the hurt and cross the invisible barrier separating the realms, my mind collapsing, my breath stolen, my muscles limp.
Then nothing.
The Calderan forest welcomes me back with a shifting sky, the dark gray falling away behind us and hints of a bright sunset stabbing through the tree branches.