Page 25 of The Second Death of Locke

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.

“Okay. I need you to go get Ola. Once she’s here, you can sit with us or on the stairs and wait to let the others in. Okay?”

“Yes,” Sela squeaked. She hesitated for only a moment. “Will they live?” she asked.

Grey glanced up. Sela stood with her hands pressed to her chest, like something had wounded her. She had a scrape across one cheek, Grey noticed, but it had missed the eye.

“If I have anything to say about it, yes.” She forced her tone to soften. “It will be okay, sweetheart. Go get Ola.”

Sela was out the door in a second, and Grey glanced over her shoulder to make sure the girl ran across the yard into the wash shed. Then she spent an agonizing minute cataloging everything that could go wrong.

A moment later, Ola appeared, running across the yard. Sela followed, not as fast, still shaky on her feet.

Grey turned back to her work.

The worst of the injuries was the slash across Brit’s ribs, then the wound on their stomach.

The arm was gruesome to look at, but overall fine, and the head wound looked much worse than it actually was.

Grey could worry about a concussion after she was certain none of Brit’s insides were about to become their outsides.

“What the fuck ?”

She lifted her head to see Ola in the doorway, but she needed to focus.

Her hands were shaking, half from fading adrenaline.

Though she’d helped in the infirmary often, it had been a while since she’d actively operated on anyone who wasn’t Kier.

She forced herself to remain calm now, to think only of her training and those endless days of surgery after surgery when she was a healer.

She didn’t have the tools to keep Brit unconscious and cursed herself for it, but she could only work with what she had.

“I need you to tether,” Grey said very carefully.

“ Locke’s bones , Captain—”

“ Tether ,” Grey hissed through her teeth. She noticed Sela edge into the room behind Ola. The girl went very quietly back to the nightstand and sat with her knees pressed to her chest.

Ola narrowed her eyes, but Grey could feel the greenness of new magic as the tether took. “Yes, Hand Captain.”

Brit sighed in relief, their face relaxing just a fraction. Ola sat at their head, her hand pressed to Brit’s uninjured arm.

“Can you remain tethered and secure downstairs?” Grey asked, detached as possible. “I didn’t have the time to do a thorough search.”

A pause. Then, “Yes, Hand Captain,” Ola said, brimming with anger.

Neither wound had perforated the internal organs, but they were still serious. Grey cleaned them up, nudging the threads of Ola’s magic to heal what she could, and carefully stitched Brit’s stomach. Ola returned when she was tying off the thread, settling back into the space next to Brit.

“Why didn’t you have them tether to Sela immediately?” she asked, her voice strained and bitter. “Isn’t Locke meant to be some great well? Some unbelievable power?”

Grey froze, her breath caught in her throat. She looked up at Sela— but the girl only hid her face.

“I cannot answer that,” Grey said through her teeth. She went back to her work, her own heart pounding with the lies she held.

When she was finished, she moved to the wound over Brit’s ribs. She focused on bringing the muscle together, then the flesh; she forced herself to think only of that, and not of Sela sobbing in the corner, or of Ola’s hard, unforgiving glare.

If she stopped, she was going to fall apart, or throw up. She’d lost so much fucking blood herself and she couldn’t even tell if Brit was dying under her.

“What’s going on?”

Grey lifted her head to see Eron in the door, shock clear on his face. She couldn’t deal with it right now.

“Where’s Kier?” she asked, tying off her knot and examining her work.

“Downstairs.” He grimaced, and Grey thought again of the innkeeper; she wasn’t sure if she was awake, or even still alive.

“Can I just… What the fuck ?” Eron repeated, as if they had not heard him the first time, as if Grey had the capacity to answer. She was busy adhering a strip of gauze to Brit’s forehead.

“Can you take Sela into the other room?” she asked. “And—Kier. I need Kier.”

It was only then that her voice broke. As if he sensed it, the tether she’d been reaching out found its mark. Kier caught her, and before she could stop herself, she sent a pulse of agony through. Help .

Boots sounded on the stairs, then in the hall. Then, a quiet inhale in the doorway. “Eron, can you help me with the bodies?”

Kier’s voice, calm and sure, always so much better with emergencies than she was. Grey finished her work on Brit’s forehead and cut away their jacket, revealing the slice to their arm. It was not deep enough for stitches, merely a graze.

A hand landed on her shoulder. “Are you okay?”

She did not look at him. If she looked at him, it would all be over. “Yes,” she said. “The keys are on the nightstand by Sela. I don’t know if the innkeeper is dead or just unconscious.”

“I’ll handle it.”

He brushed the hair away from her forehead. She swabbed gently at the blood crusting around Brit’s wound. Ola had shifted closer to their head, humming softly as she fed a constant thread of power into them.

Grey finished at around the same time Kier and Eron removed the last of the bodies, and Eron took Sela into the other room. She looked up to find Ola’s eyes, hard as flint.

“Why didn’t you give them power?” Ola asked, clearly seething.

Before Grey could answer, Kier said, “Now’s not the time. Can I trust you to keep watch in here for a moment?”

Ola looked up at him, silhouetted in the doorway. Her mouth thinned into a line. “Yes, Captain,” she said very quietly.

“Good. Hand, bring your supplies.”

Grey packed the kit with shaking fingers. Kier had already disappeared down the hall, but the door was open to a new room—the six of them were the only ones there, so she figured he’d commandeered an empty room. She walked in to find him sitting on a chair he’d dragged to the bed.

“Are you hurt?” he asked, his eyes catching on her blood-soaked sleeve.

“Not mortally wounded, no.”

“Take off your coat,” he said, all authority. “And shirt. Please.”

Grey didn’t know what to do—what to say. The tether between them was unbroken, but he didn’t pull from her, nor did he send anything through. It just sat heavy on her chest, her power unspent.

So she did as he asked. She shrugged off her coat, biting back a sob at the pain in her arm, and unbuttoned and discarded her shirt with one hand. He did not look at her face when she sat in front of him in her vest.

“I… You know more than me,” Kier said. “What do you need? Stitches?”

Grey forced herself to look, breathing in through her mouth and out through her nose.

“It’s deep,” she said. “There’s gauze in there—yes, take that, and the soap there.

” Her voice felt very far away as Kier shuffled through the kit, picking up the items she indicated.

“Clean your hands, then me. It will hurt.”

“Okay,” he said. He disappeared for the barest moment to retrieve a pitcher and basin.

She focused on her breathing, watching him as he washed his hands before turning his attention to cleaning her skin.

When he rubbed at the wound, she gritted her teeth against any noise that threatened to escape—the world went white in a frizzle of electric pain around her.

When she came back to herself, her fingers were gripping Kier’s thigh so very tightly.

Her mouth tasted of blood—her teeth had pierced her lip.