Page 7 of The Second Death of Locke

“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, and yet— 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 was the pounding of her heartbeat in her ears.

“You gave 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 be fine .

“Grey—”

“ Don’t ,” she chastised. He’d been stabbed before, worse than this. They’d both suffered 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 you fucking 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 her shoulder.

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 actually help , 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.

She felt 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?”

“That’s none of your concern,” Grey snapped. But Kier was grappling against the tether like a dying man—he wasn’t doing it intentionally, but he was drawing a lot . For a normal well, it would be too much.

Ola, within earshot, hurried to Grey’s other side. “Surely it’s too much—Hand Captain Flynn, you can’t let him drain you.”

Grey shot Ola a fierce look. “I know what I’m doing.”

“Hand,” Kier said, very quietly. He’d always been better at propriety. A terrible irony, that was.

She didn’t know the edges of her power, the barriers—it’d been a long time since she’d gone looking. She had felt the fatigue of true emptiness only once, after a particularly awful battle years ago, when Kier had overdone it. Then, she’d slept for three days straight and woken to his guilt.

They’d taken measures since then, legal and otherwise. And he’d always been so careful. She didn’t think she was going to run out of power, but they were so far from home.

She couldn’t think of it. Not now.

“Hand Captain,” Ola said again, more urgent.

Her vision was graying out a little bit at the edges, going grainy from the force of her focus. Her jaw was clenched hard enough that it felt like her teeth would shatter. The spool was ever spinning, but Kier’s feet were moving, and his heart was pumping, and if he stopped siphoning…

“He’s going to kill you,” Ola said urgently. She exchanged a look with her mage and held out her hand. “Let me. Please.”

The idea of giving Kier over to someone else was so sweet—and utterly impossible. Grey looked at him, his eyes half shut. There was a scar through his eyebrow from falling out of an apple tree when he was nine. The scratch on his cheek was now clotted, crusted nearly black.

“I’m fine,” she insisted. She adjusted his arm across her shoulders, gripping the hand that hung limply on her chest. It was so, so cold.

“Hand Captain,” Brit said, very carefully, “if you do not disengage, we will be dragging back both of your bodies. Let Ola take him.”

All she wanted was to give him up. Push him out. Let him go. But she could keep holding him; the well of power inside of her was not empty.

If she kept holding him, they would know. They would know she was not normal, that there was something wrong.

If she let him go, Ola would try to tether to Kier, and she would find that she could not.

“Drop it,” he said to one or both of them. His voice was utterly unlike himself—it was like listening to a version of Kier already years in the grave. His head lolled to one side, his forehead pressing to Grey’s temple. “Let go,” he muttered.

“I’m not going to,” she said. She was going to throw up. There was so much of her going, so much of her gone, it felt like she was pulling her intestines out through her navel. “You can’t ask that of me.”

He sucked a breath. She stumbled, pressing her hand tighter. She felt his lips on her temple, chapped, uncoordinated with pain. “Hand Captain,” he said, the lips brushing her skin so very cold. “I order it.”

“You don’t outrank me.” If she let go, there was no guarantee he’d get back alive. No guarantee he’d get back at all.

“Like hell I don’t.” If she didn’t let go, there would be even more eyes on them. Suspicion.

A pause. A breath. How nice it would be, Grey thought, to lie next to him and die. For all of this to be over.

“I have enough,” Kier said.

She snapped the tether.

The relief was so dizzying that she very nearly lost consciousness, and in a moment of panic, she realized that she had given a lot, and she was not as powerful as she thought.

Her neck was clammy with sweat under Kier’s arm, her stomach awful with bile, her head pounding.

There was a great, caving emptiness within her, the well of magic nearly dry, and then she heard Kier suck in a breath.

She couldn’t even imagine—without the power of a tether, any pain he’d kept at bay rushed in, doubling, trebling.

“If you die on me,” Grey hissed into Kier’s shoulder, “I’m going to come right down with you and haunt your bones, Kiernan Seward, you absolute fucking bastard.”

His laugh was weak, breathy and full of blood. “I’ll hold you to that.”