Page 73 of The Lies We Conjure
I can’t waste any time.
“That won’t be necessary,” I say. “Are you able to provide a shield?”
I know the answer before the question is out of my mouth, but I need to ask it. The Blackgates shake their heads. I hold up a hand. “Fine—I’m going to need both of you to watch for another attack while I divert my magic to heal Evander.”
“Let them go,” my cousin says, his voice sliding from gritted effort to slippery whisper. “I can wait.”
He finishes with a wheeze and a rattle now. The knife isn’t just bleeding him dry, it’s buried in a lung. Maybe two. My eyes meet Lavinia’s. She pales and I know she can read the panic in them as surely as I read her own last night. She nods. “We’ve got this.”
I lower the shield and she grabs the largest knife left at her feet with her uninjured arm. Kaysa collects the other two. The sisters face out, shielding us as best they can from the woods at all sides. Something itches the back of my mind—they’re Blackgates with knives.No, I can’t question it. I can’t split focus. Evander needs all my attention on the immediate threat to him, not ghosts of years past and reputations earned.
I get Evander to the dirt and remove his waist pack, lying him on his side so I can probe his wound. I don’t miss that he’s trembling. That beneath his scruff, his lips are growing blue with each labored inhale.
The blade is an eight-inch chef’s knife, razor sharp and plunged straight through to the hilt. It missed his spine by mere millimeters. Definitely hit a lung. I run my fingers along the front of his shirt. The tip nicks my skin. I swallow away the panic.
“I’ve got to pull it out,” I inform him, forcing myself to look him in his paling face. His eyes are squeezed shut. “The magic will staunch the blood and heal. Ready?”
I’m already in position before I pretend to accept an answer to that question, one hand over the knife’s exit wound, the other wrapped around the knife’s handle. I clench my teeth, prepared to pull when Evander touches a cold hand to my own. His eyes are open now, fierce.
“If it’s too much, don’t.”
Forcing a smile, I hit him with his favorite dismissal of my pompous ass. “Shut up, Evander.”
I pull.
The knife releases with a slick tearing and Evander wails. Then my magic is pressing into him, life element fizzing from my body into his, knitting his wound, refilling his veins, inflating his lung. My own breath catches at the weight of it, my vision blurring in an emerald haze, my mind fuzzing, furring. I sway where I kneel, seasick. I clamp my eyes closed, but the feeling doesn’t dissipate. Still, I hold tight, every muscle in my body willed to hold myself steady, upright. Nausea crashes like lightning in the darkness of my mind as my life element flows out into the wound still spewing viscous, deep blood.
There’s a hand on my shoulder. “Auden?” Lavinia. “Are you okay?”
I feel my head droop and she catches it. Something clatters beside us. The knife.
“Evander?” Kaysa’s voice now. There’s some shuffling. “Oh, for goodness’ sake, you were just knifed. Take my hand to stand. It won’t tank your manliness quotient.”
Beneath me, Evander shifts. I slump from my kneeling crouch to sitting, guided by Lavinia’s hands. She puts an arm around my shoulders, her relics somehow not touching my bare skin. “Auden?” she whispers. But no answer lines my tongue. Not yet. When a life element is drained like this, so quickly, so forcefully, it takes the body time to recalibrate to what’s left.
There’s some shuffling, and then the unmistakable surge of power surrounds us. A shield.
“You left us unguarded,” Evander grumbles, his voice raspy but there.
“And you almost left us entirely,” Kaysa shoots back.
Even though I feel like literal shit, my heart swells and I want to laugh—the youngest Blackgate is on to his shit and won’t let him get away with it.
That little spike of emotion seems to be the last step my life element needs to get rebalanced within my body enough that I feel as if I can open my eyes. I blink. Lavinia’s face is the first I see, only inches away, watching me intently for some sort of sign that I went too far, pushed it too hard. It doesn’t do to think of what I’ve just lost. I need to focus on survival—which means knowing our attacker. “Check the knife. Magical signature?”
Kaysa gets the picture and immediately shoves the ones she’s collected—a paring knife and a longer utility blade—at Evander. The moment they’re tight in his grip, he frowns.
“No magic here, nothing to check. They were thrown.”
I comb through the cotton in my mind, trying to recall if I’d seen the knives this morning when I made breakfast, or at noon when we’d had our aside after putting the dead driver in the root cellar. I can’t remember.
“Who the hell throws knives?” Kaysa asks.
“Someone who wanted to hit me straight in the heart,” my cousin answers.
“Not just Evander. He went after Lavinia too,” the younger Blackgate points out. “Didn’t try to hit me even once.”
She’s right. The final three throws weren’t just from the opposite direction, they were for a new target. The way we were situated, if the attacker wanted to hit Evander from another angle, the knives would’ve bounced off Lavinia’s portion of the shield.
