I was so cold. It had been bad enough before, but lying on the ground, being like this? I was shivering uncontrollably, and with everything else that was wrong, I’d barely even noticed.
“I could try the Hyena again. He could carry you, and we could get help.”
“Eh-” I started. “Ev. Sor- sorry.”
“No! Don’t say that!”
“Pro-mised, try to, stop more- stop bad things,” I said. “Did- didn’t last- not long enough.”
Maggie, the Sphinx and Ty were exchanging words, but I was too focused on putting sounds together and trying to make them into words. Half of them stopped short before I got the whole word out, my breath catching in my throat as I huffed in pain. I had to use shorter words.
“Doesn’t matter,” Evan said.
“Mat… ters,” I said.
“Doesn’t! I… Can’t I say or do something?” Evan asked. “I don’t know the right words. You don’t have to do what you said. You don’t have to stop the bad things to keep your promise to me. You tried.”
I shook my head.
“I swear, I swear I free you,” Evan said. “Okay? So you don’t need to worry about that. Worry about other stuff.”
Other stuff.
Evan had to hop to a new location, settling on my stomach as I tried to look, turning my head all the way to the right, then all the way to the left, straining my eyes to look as far to the sides as I could, reaching for some possible combination of angles that would let me see into the blind spot where Alexis lay.
Ty was crouched at her side, I was pretty sure. Maggie was backed up to the wall, her dagger in hand, facing the sphinx.
“Blake,” Evan said. “My promise… there are strings. That’s how people do it, right?”
Still trying to catch my breath, feeling like I’d lost far too much ground for a mere handful of sentences, I was left only to shut my eyes and listen.
Please, Evan, you were one of the good ones. Don’t learn from them. Don’t learn from me. Don’t learn from them.
Evan represented everything I wanted out of life. Something uncomplicated with moments of fun, getting by, surviving. Leaving the bad stuff behind to build something better.
If he started scheming, then I felt like I’d already lost. I’d failed to leave a better impression, the world better off than it had been before I’d gotten involved.
I managed to sum up the breath. “What?”
“Keep fighting. Do something. But you gotta try.”
I didn’t have words to sum up exactly what I felt, right there, looking at him, on the other side of the gory mess that was my chest.
Frustration at the fact that I couldn’t, anger at him for not understanding even when he could feel some measure of the pain I did, confusion over everything, and abject relief, because he was still Evan. No scheming, no underhandedness.
Only the core shared trait that had drawn us together. We’d press on.
“Help,” I said. “Give… strength.”
“You need a push?”
“No. Need-” I stopped, grunting, eyes screwed shut. “-ten… acity.”
“I don’t know how to give you that.”
I didn’t have the words to respond.
I needed whatever had driven him to survive and escape for those days or weeks in the woods.
Scared, cold, hungry, alone.
My left shoulder wasn’t working a hundred percent. I simply clenched the hand, so the chain of the locket bit deeper. I used my right arm to try to stand, resting my weight on my forearm, then trying to shift it so I could use my hand instead. Every movement redoubled the pain. I was acutely aware that things weren’t in the right place, that the pain was out of sync with what was actually there. Flesh had parted, and yet my brain could only map stuff to what it understood as the way I’d been put together.
I felt pain in my chest, but it traveled a funny route as it throbbed, and my eyes told me that my skin was hanging loose.
Four deep gouges, from the left of my chest to the right. At least one claw had gone deep enough to have raked along the bone. My skin was in strips, two of the three still attached at both sides.
When I propped myself up, the skin moved, the weight of my flesh pulling on the injury site in a different way.
I very nearly hurled as I felt it. More wrongness.
Blood ran down my front, over my stomach toward my lap. Lukewarm, but still warmer than my skin.
Evan settled on my shoulder.
The Hyena had slipped away, and lay against the snowbank. Shifting forward to the point that I could crawl forward on three limbs made my tattered skin hang away from me. I didn’t hurl, but I did feel like half the strength went out of me as blood started trailing down in thick streams.
I grabbed the Hyena with my good hand, already numbed fingers plunging into cold snow. I gripped it by the handle. The Hyena had studded it with spikes sharp enough to pierce through my gloves and stab into the flesh, and I let it. I made my reaction to the pain -outside of the reflexive pulling away- to be to grab harder.
“H-” I started. I had to stop, because I gagged. The pain was intense, and the signals were scrambled.
“What?” Evan asked,.
“Help,” I said.
I tried to use the snowbank to get to my feet, but snow crumbled under the hand, and my weight only pressed the snow down. I was using the hand to hold the sword, and came within a foot of falling onto the blade.
Evan hopped back, grabbed my collar and pulled up, flapping. It was about as effective as one could expect.
“No,” I said. My vision swam. I still couldn’t breathe well, and talking meant drawing on a precious resource. “Help… swing.”
“Huh?”
“When it’s,” I winced, “Time.”
I moved further forward to reach a part of the snowbank where ice and general traffic had made it harder. A more stable surface to lean on.
I very nearly blacked out. I’d found my feet and had no memory of doing it.
My gaze fell on the others. Ty was pressing down on the outside of Alexis’ wound, around the shaft of the giant arrow.
It was this spectral thing. Would it fade away? What happened then? Removing an object from a wound just gave everything a chance to bleed.
If she bled like that… she’d wind up like me. Due to bleed out in a matter of seconds.
“I don’t know how to give you strength,” Evan said, sounding as if he were confiding or confessing.
I think you already are.
If he wasn’t, I wouldn’t be standing, I was ninety percent sure.
I couldn’t move my left shoulder, but I could move my elbow. I grabbed at my coat where it was intact, clutched it tight, bunching it up. I was trying to draw cloth tighter against the wound, for all the good it did, and I was pretty sure I was failing. Blood was running from the slice in my shoulder to my elbow and down to my wrist. It dripped from the opening in my glove.
We’d been doing okay, Isadora had stopped us.
She’d stopped everything. The giant archer constellation thing was still, no arrow nocked. The wraiths and everything else stood where they were.
The sphinx’s arrival had frozen the fight. Nobody wanted to be the one to move and upset her.