The Wicked We Have Done by Sarah Harian Read Free Book Online Page A

coming up.
    Casey and I have been hovering around Jace for the past few hours, unable to revive her. Her skin is tinged gray, hair laced with blood and the beach’s white, grainy sand. The same sand that stretches for hundreds of yards on the northern edge of a crystalline, perfect alpine lake.
    The paradise mocks us. Nothing is reminiscent of the night’s events other than the blood crusted onto all of us, and the knife stuck in Jace’s shoulder. We have to pull it out—the question is when one of us will muster enough courage to do so.
    Salem and Erity are dead for sure . . . maybe others are too. I didn’t see anyone else make it out of the house. I don’t even remember seeing Tanner in the living room before the place burst into flame. He could have been burned alive.
    In the direction of the lodge, smoke still floats into the sky, clouding the north, filtering the new sun. All that’s left is a hellish orange hue.
    I start to cry. I stupidly start to cry. With my adrenaline gauge on empty, I have no way to gain my bearings. In the past few hours, I’ve seen the impossible. Like we’re lab rats in a globe of secret supernatural government experiments. We’re criminals, and we don’t deserve more than that.
    I wipe my cheeks, the tears softening up the blood. Casey’s lip rises in disgust.
    “I’m fine, thanks for caring.” I return my attention to Jace.
    I’m trying to understand what would happen if her heart stops beating. Would that mean the Compass Room deemed her worthy to die? Logically, it would have to. It was obvious that Salem should have died. Erity too. But Jace—I can’t imagine what she did or thought in the past few hours to condemn her.
    I’m not going to sit here and watch her die.
    I promised myself.
    Never again would I wait for anything.
    I reach out, curling my fingers around the bone hilt of the knife.
    “What are you doing?” Casey’s back tenses. “You don’t know what that will do to her.”
    “True, but I know what doing nothing will.”
    He doesn’t argue.
    I rest my left palm on her shoulder to steady myself. There’s no telling what will happen when I pull—or if I’ll even be able to rip the blade out. If she’ll wake up.
    I count to three in my head and yank as hard as I can.
    My hand flies back, and only the hilt catapults through the air.
    “Fuck!” I scream. This is worse than leaving the knife in her—now the blade is buried deep within Jace and we have no means of getting it out.
    Casey jumps up to grab the hilt—wherever it landed—and I examine the damage. I’m expecting to see the sharp edge of the blade where it broke. Instead, there’s nothing more than a shallow puncture wound, maybe an inch deep.
    “Evalyn.”
    I glance at Casey. He lifts the hilt. The unbroken piece of the blade is coated with blood—about an inch, enough to make the cut in Jace’s shoulder. The end isn’t jagged, but smooth.
    Like it’s been sanded down. Like it dissolved.
    “What the hell?”
    “Why would Erity try to stab her with
this
?” Casey chucks the hilt onto the sand.
    I study it, the blood melding states of glistening liquid and crust.
    “She didn’t.” Jace coughs once, raising her shaking hands to wipe her cheeks. “She stabbed me with a knife.” Her words are slurred. “A real, full one. She recognized it. She said it was her ritual weapon.”
    I hush her. “Rest. Don’t talk. You can do that later.” I squeeze her uninjured shoulder, releasing a breath of thanks that she’s awake.
    Casey kneels next to me. “Where’d the rest of the blade go?”
    I pick the handle of the knife up off the sand, running my finger over the smooth, dull edge. Jace says Erity stabbed her with a whole knife. But Jace’s wound isn’t more than an inch deep, which is the amount of blade here.
    I hold my thumb into the bit of blade until my skin turns white and leaves a crescent imprint in the metal.
    “It’s dissolving,” I say.
    “Dissolving?” Casey