I ran back to my body on the floor, already in better control of my drifting state. Myra and Jean were there, Jean on her phone calling for an ambulance, eyes wide with tears, face shock-white, hand trembling. Myra knelt over me, trying to stem the bleeding on my chest with her jacket, her face grim, mouth moving around a single word over and over again: “please, please, please.”
It was horrifying. I stumbled beneath the wave of guilt and fear and sorrow that crashed over me, threatening to drag me torn and tattered over the rocks of this moment, this pain.
I gulped air. Even though I was nothing but a ghost, I could feel that pain, could feel that bone-hollow sorrow.
I couldfeel.
It stopped me in my tracks.
Maybe a second went by, maybe a minute as I watched my sisters fighting for a life I wasn’t sure I’d ever regain.
“The knife!” I yelled. “Myra, gods, get the knife. Stab him. Stab Lavius.”
She couldn’t hear me. She couldn’t see me.
But Brown was suddenly there, his head cocked to one side as he stared at my body. “What? What knife?”
“You can hear me?” I rushed around so that I was standing next to him.
“Delaney?”
“The knife. Get the knife. It’s in my belt. There. At my hip.”
Brown frowned, and knelt, reaching for the knife while carefully staying outside the bloody pool. Myra didn’t even say anything as he pulled it out of the sheath, didn’t even notice him, her eyes too intent on my face, the snarl of her lips changing her chant to a curse.
Brown didn’t move, just frowned down at the knife, glanced at my body and shifted his grip on the handle.
“No! Not on me. Don’t stab me.”
But it looked like that’s exactly what he was going to do.
“Stab him!”
Brown’s eyes flicked to my face, to Myra, back to me.
Damn it.
I grabbed his wrist, intending to point the blade at Lavius.
Brown shivered, but held very still. My hand had sunk all the way through his hand and sort of aligned with it, like I was pulling on a well-fitting, overly warm and slightly squishy glove.
Ew.
“Show me,” he demanded.
Those two words were more than a demand, they were a path, an invitation, a compulsion.
I stepped forward, steppedintoBrown.
A thousand sensations swamped me: a body, warm and beating around me, vision so sharp I could see the motes of dust in the sunlight coming in from the window, could smell each distinct kind of blood mixing in the air, could hear…
…everything. The trees hummed of wind and sun and deep, dark soil, the seagulls sang of food and sand and shells to crack, even this old house grumbled about the loose-fitted window pane and missing shingles.
No wonder elves—well, Brown—made good thieves. The whole world was yelling and whispering and pouring out all its secrets.
I could hear the knife too, a hiss of death, death, death, steady as a drip of acid.
“Stab Lavius. This will slow him down. Use the knife. Use the knife.”
