“Go!” Ezra shouted, muffled by Ike’s meaty arm around his throat. They rolled toward me, and I shuffled out of the way, clumsy and off-balance with my arms bound before me.
“I can’t exactly run off into the woods with my hands tied,” I shouted back.
Ezra twisted out of Ike’s grip and punched him. The knife had fallen.
He wasn’t trying to kill Ike.
It was almost like he wouldn’t.
Couldn’t.
Shaking my head, I rushed into the fray as best I could, fumbling for the knife. But it was too hard to hold. I had to do the only thing I knew, no matter how badly I wanted to cradle my radiance close to my heart, safe and tucked away from their loathsome insulation.
“Move!” I shouted, giving Ezra only a breath of warning. He rolled away from Ike, and I unleashed another bolt at Ike’s bloody, terrible mouth.
Ike’s eyes bulged and exploded like grapes squeezed in a fist. He collapsed to the ground, scorched mouth frozen in a rictus of pain.
Horror curdled in me, stilling my heartbeat, freezing my blood.
And then I screamed.
And screamed.
My body moved on its own. I stumbled back from the gore, from his grotesque grimace. My back hit a tree. I crashed to the ground.
The sound wouldn’t stop. Screams upon screams. Shrill and wet.
“Josephine.” Panting, Ezra approached me with the knife. I couldn’t fully connect to my radiance. It fought me, curling up inside like a beaten animal. Only wisps of blue light danced around my fingers, but he flinched. “Please. I’m trying to free your hands.”
The light intensified, tried to congeal into ropes and fingers. A stray edge lashed at his bare arm, and he let out a ragged cry.
I was hurting him. I didn’t care.
He didn’t seem to care either. As if pushing against a tide, he crept toward me. Sweat ran down the sides of his face as he found my hands and rested them against his lap to carefully saw through the twine. The blade fell from his hands into the leaves.
“Go,” he choked out. “Run.”
“I don’t know where to go!” I screamed at him. I had to get away from Ike’s empty sockets, from Marshall’s charred flesh.
I had to run far away—before Ainsley woke up and discovered what I’d done. What Ezra had done.
And I couldn’t escape on my own. Not here in the woods, in the wild unknown.
“Get up,” I snapped, pushing myself to my feet with the help of the tree and showing him my hands. Harmless, plain hands. Cold, trembling fingers. “And show me where to go.”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
“Will you stop that?” Ezra asked, doubled over and winded with a white-knuckle grip on a tree branch.
I panted beside him, my whole body screaming to run faster and farther than I’d ever run in my life. “Stop what? Breathing?”
He leveled a dark look at me and shook his hair out of his eyes. “Look at your hands.”
Oh. They were glowing faintly, a fine sheen of radiance around them. I sucked in a careful breath and called it back to me. “Sorry. It’s only that you’re a murderer and Ainsley just ordered you to kill me.”
“You, too, are a murderer,” Ezra pointed out mildly. He looked paler than I remembered. The freckles across his cheekbones and nose stood out like flecks of dirt.
“Do you want me to stop or not?” I asked, not feeling any more in control after being called a murderer. No matter how true it was.
