It just seemed like her own breathing—or maybe some far-off stirrings of one of the wraiths, settling down now their food had gone still. There was a rattling quality to it that reminded her of them.
Only after a second, she realized:
The rattling wasn’t random.
It was rhythmic.
It followed a pattern.
Up, down. Up, down.
And there was another note to it, too. A thick, clotted sort of note underneath that rattle. Wet, it sounded like, to her. Wet, and oddly familiar, in a way she couldn’t piece together at first. But then it struck her, in a rush. The thing it reminded her of:
The deer, on the side of the road. The one her father had glanced with the car. The one trying to breathe, while drowning in its own blood.
They got him, she thought, in a flash of bright shock and panic.
Sure of it, yet at the same time barely able to believe. It could have been a trick, after all. It could just be him trying to lure her in. Yet somehow, she crept toward the sound anyway. On her hands and knees over the dusty tiled floor, as low and quiet as she could be. Half of her scared of finding a lie.
The other half scared of finding the truth.
Silly, she thought.
Until she got to him and had to bite back a scream.
It didn’t just look as if something had stabbed him. There was no sign of some simple neck break that a spell might fix. A wraith had very clearly run right through him, and shredded almost everything as it went. His clothes were in tatters; his body was now a row of deep bloody grooves.
And his face...
God, his face...
She had never seen anything like it. It laid in utter ruins, completely unrecognizable. In fact, she could only tell it was truly him because his one remaining eye rolled to her the moment she got close. And even surrounded by gore, it was completely familiar to her.
That deep brown, edging toward black.
The strange light in it, like amusement, only not.
It can’t be amusement now, she thought.
So maybe it had always been something else. Maybe it had always been fear and panic.
Though she didn’t suppose it mattered now. When he tried to speak, blood bubbled up instead. It spilled over what was left of his lips, a brilliant red when it caught the light from one of the high windows, a deep and glittering black when it slid down over his cheek and throat and into the darkness.
So she did the only thing she could.
She told him not to. “Don’t say anything. You’re making it worse,” she said and was startled to find there were tears in her voice. As if she was saddened at the thought of her mortal enemy dying. As if it hurt to see it happening, somehow.I don’t, it doesn’t, it can’t possibly be the case, she tried to tell herself.
But she yanked off her jacket anyway.
She pressed it to the biggest wound she could see, on his side.
And let out a sob when the material disappeared into a hole too deep for him to survive. This was it—he was dead, he was done. There was no coming back from this. She shouldn’t havewantedhim to come back from this. She should have been gloating over his wrecked body.
But somehow, she wasn’t.
Instead, she felt herself gripped by the strangest feeling. A kind of deep loss—as if she had known him for far longer than this. As if she had liked him for all that imaginary time. She even found herself saying words that felt so familiar but so strange to say about him. “No, no, no, don’t leave me,” she let out.
And for a moment the world seemed to turn upside down.
