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“Finally,” he gasped. “What took you guys so long?”
“Are you clear?” I asked.
He nodded. “Yeah, but the grounds are crawling with Morgan’s men, you’ve got to hurry.”
He reached an arm down and I lifted Emily by the waist to him, my hand grazing the strap for the third knife that rested behind her back. She kicked off the top rung of the ladder and disappeared through the opening. It only took a moment before I was climbing out behind her.
“We’ve got to go now,” Wesley explained as we all crouched beneath one of the shed’s windows. “Brianna said it would only get worse the longer we waited.”
My eyes narrowed on him.
He shook his head. “It’s not like that, Aern. She has a gift.”
Emily stiffened beside me.
“She helped me,” Wesley said, “because she needed me to help you.”
“What can you do?” Emily asked. “Because if Brianna said run, and we’re not running, then you’d better have something damned fancy hiding up your sleeves.”
I was taken aback by her response, but Wesley only reacted. “Right.” He shoved a crate aside on the back wall. “There’s an opening here, run due south, I’ll cover you until you reach the trees.”
I stared at him.
“Go,” he said. “For the chosen. For all of us.”
Emily spared me a brief glance before shoving through the door at a full run.
The lawn was crowded with running, fighting, screaming men. Commonblood, Council, Division. Everywhere. We were less than two yards from the shed when the report from Wesley’s rifle echoed off the woods. He would pick off any who targeted us, and in the mayhem, that seemed to be all of them.
Emily flinched at each crack of rifle, each boom of .45, but she didn’t slow. We were six yards from the trees now. Five. A large man in black got too close before I could decipher which side he was on and I shouldered into him low and hard, and then spun away before I lost sight of Emily. He fell to the grass behind us as a bullet ripped through his shoulder. Three yards. Two. Emily ducked aside as bark splintered off the tree she headed toward, and gunfire erupted again, peppering both our escape and our attacker. Metal ricocheted off the trees, landing a sharp fragment into the meat of my shoulder, and I threw an arm over her as we adjusted course. But they weren’t targeting her.
A round clipped my thigh, but adrenaline kept me going. They were trying to slow me down, incapacitate me. Morgan must have given the order I wasn’t to be killed. Not yet. I pushed Emily forward as I struggled to overcome the hitch in my stride. They were gaining ground. There were too many of them.
Emily grabbed my shirt and yanked me into the trees with her, and I realized I’d been lagging. She dodged left around a tall oak and then right to pass another. My shoulder brushed the second tree and I stumbled before we reached the underbrush.
“Aern,” she hissed, grabbing at me again. Shots fired from in front of us now, and she hunched forward as she pulled me right and through a patch of saplings.
The trees were crawling with men. Morgan’s men. There was no question this time who was winning, who was after us.
“There,” I said, disturbed by the distant quality of my own voice.
She followed my direction, heading toward a grove of fir trees. The snap and shuffle of the forest floor behind us made it clear there were not just trained men after us. They could make a mistake. They could fire on Emily to stop me. They could take out the chosen.
“Aern!” Emily screamed as I fell behind her. We’d been running, and I realized belatedly that I’d not loosened my grip on her when I’d gone down, that I’d taken her with me. “What is wrong with you?” she gasped. She rolled me to my side, her hands frantically hovering over me, searching for a gunshot wound.
I could feel the blood soaking my leg, but she didn’t pause there, instead staring open-mouthed at the thin sliver of metal protruding from the front curve of my shoulder. I forced my gaze to follow hers, but my neck didn’t seem to be connected properly.
Emily clenched her teeth and winced as she wrenched the metal from deep within the muscle. When she held it in front of my face, I could see the small feathered tip of a poisonous dart. By the time my brain processed what was happening, my body had begun clearing the toxins from my system. But it wasn’t fast enough.
Emily flinched as another shot landed too close beside us.
“Go,” I said. “There’s a hatch beneath the trees. Hide there. Run.”
“What?” she hissed. “Aern—”
“Go, Emily. They don’t know.” The feeling returned to my arms then, though my fingers still tingled, and I pressed myself up. They were closing in, taking their time. They thought they had us pinned down. Thought we had no place to go.
“They’re shooting at you,” she said.
