against my throat. I could have closed my eyes, but that wouldn’t have made things any better. I’d still have heard the impact of fists and feet on Finn’s defenseless body, would have heard the grunts of pain he couldn’t help making.
The Knight hit Finn again and again, sometimes so hard I heard bones breaking. I sobbed and struggled and begged Finn to protect himself, but he wouldn’t do it. Eventually, he couldn’t.
Finn lay face down on the floor, and if it weren’t for the painful sound of him gasping for air, I’d have thought he was dead. The Knight who’d beat him smiled and pulled a long, thin knife from a sheath hidden in his boot.
“No!” I wailed, although I knew it would do no good. “Why are you doing this?”
The Knight knelt at Finn’s side, and even behind the dark glasses, I could feel his eyes locked on mine. His smile was cold and cruel, and I saw nothing even remotely human in his face.
“Leave Avalon,” he said to me. “Leave, and never come back. Else, it will be you next time.”
I screamed as he raised his hand, then plunged the knife into Finn’s back. Finn cried out and tried to move. I realized with horror that the knife had pinned him to the floor.
The Knight who was holding me finally let go, shoving me to the floor. Their feet crunched on broken glass as they left the dressing room.
Horrified, I made my way to Finn’s side, heedless of the glass. The knife hilt protruded from just above his right shoulder blade, and blood poured from the wound. He was still breathing, though, the air sawing in and out of his chest. I put my shaking hand on him, not sure what to do for him. I’d nursed my mom through a couple of drunken accidents before, but nothing remotely like this. Should I pull the knife out, or would that make things worse?
With a groan of pain, Finn turned his head toward me.
“Oh, God!” I cried. “Don’t move!”
His face was … ruined. That’s the only way I could describe it. I don’t know how many bones were broken, but it was a lot. But Knights are apparently made of some really strong stuff.
“I’ll live,” he managed to gasp at me. “Get help.”
I didn’t know if I believed his claim, but his words were enough to get me moving. Now covered in blood and mirror shards myself, I stumbled out into the shop.
The shopkeeper was lying on the floor behind the cash register. Kimber, sporting what was soon to be a massive bruise on the side of her face, was helping the other woman sit up. I’d have been relieved to see they were all right if my fear for Finn had let me think of anything else.
“The phone!” I screamed at the shopkeeper, hysteria threatening to take over. “Where’s the phone? I need to call an ambulance.”
She pointed at the phone, which was practically right in front of my face. I picked it up with shaking hands, but my palms were full of glass, so I dropped it. The shopkeeper had recovered enough to stand, and she reached out her hand.
“Let me,” she said. And since I didn’t know what number to dial, and couldn’t give an address, and probably couldn’t dial correctly anyway with my injured hands, I did.
chapter nineteen
The ambulance and paramedics arrived at the same time as the police. I was still shaking, but I had enough brain function to know I was better off staying by Finn’s side—even though he could do nothing to help me—than letting the police take me down to the station for a statement or questioning or whatever. The police had arrested my father on a trumped-up charge, and I had no idea whose pocket they might be in. I didn’t want to take the chance of losing what freedom I had, so I pretended to be a little more hysterical and hurt than I was. There was enough blood on me to make the act more than convincing.
Kimber and the shopkeeper received a cursory examination by the paramedics and were quickly dismissed as non-emergencies. Finn, however, was a different story. He was unconscious, and had clearly lost a lot of blood.
I rode in the ambulance with Finn to Avalon’s only hospital. The paramedics—one Fae and one human—didn’t seem anywhere near as worried about Finn’s condition as I was.
“He’ll be fine,” the Fae paramedic said. “If they’d been trying