Page 109 of Wretched Thorns

I came down to the kitchen at first light.

I barely remembered the night. Tara’s arm across my ribs at some point. Waking up once to a window I’d forgotten to curtain and not having the energy to do anything about it. I hadn’t slept enough, but I’d slept harder than I had any right to expect after years of sleeping with one eye open. The sounds from the kitchen pulled me the rest of the way out of bed before my body was ready. Rowena’s voice low at the stove. The iron pan spitting. A chair scraping across the floorboards.

Somebody had laid clothes on the chair beside the bed. A pair of jeans that fit a little loose at the waist. A long shirt of Tara’s that I’d recognize anywhere. Soft socks. I sat at the edge of the bed for a long time before I made myself put any of it on. The shirt smelled like Tara, which is to say it smelled like every dorm room, apartment, and rental house I’d ever shared with her, and the smell almost undid me before I’d gotten dressed.

Going down the stairs was easier than going up had been the night before. One hand on the banister. My right knee held. I did not look at the third step where my knee had buckled. I kept my eyes on the bottom step like it was a finish line.

The house was awake.

I’d known before I’d opened the bedroom door. The smell of biscuits, bacon grease, and the chicory blend of coffee Rowena always had on at the back of the stove. A man’s voice, low and amused, at the back of the kitchen. A chair scraped. Tara’s grandmother laughed once, a short, dry laugh that didn’t quite finish.

I stopped at the kitchen door.

Every chair was filled.

That wasn’t what I’d been expecting. I don’t know what I’d been expecting. Rowena and Celie, maybe. The two of them at the table with a mug of something between them. Not the whole house. Not all three brothers, Dex against the back wall, Tara’s grandmother at the head of the table, and Miss Delphine in the chair by the window with a leather-bound book closed in her lap, like she’d been waiting for me to walk in before she opened anything.

Callum stood and pulled out the chair beside him.

I sat.

Rowena turned from the stove and set a mug in front of me. Not coffee. She’d brewed me the green stuff with honey. Tara’s anti-nausea tea. So she’d been paying attention. The mug came down on the cypress with the smallest sound. She didn’t touch my shoulder. She didn’t say my name. She turned right back to the stove.

I wrapped my fingers around the mug. They didn’t warm. They hadn’t warmed properly in I wasn’t sure how long, and I was starting to suspect they weren’t going to for a while yet. Steam curled off the top, and I watched it curl instead of looking at any of the faces around the table.

Tara reached across the table and put her fingers over the back of my hand. She wasn’t looking at the witches or the brothers. Just at the spot on the table where my hand was. She didn’t squeeze. She just kept her fingers there, warm against the back of my hand where the cold was the worst.

The back screen door opened, and I could see Bodie on the porch.

Eli straightened before Bodie had cleared the threshold. He didn’t make a sound doing it. Callum’s knuckles went white on his mug. He was holding back from breaking the handle off, and you could see it in the angle of his wrist. Rowena didn’t turn from the stove.

Bodie didn’t come past the threshold. The dew of the morning was visible on his shoes. He didn’t look at the table. He looked at Rowena’s back.

“Rowena.”

Rowena set the spoon down on the spoon rest with a small, precise motion. She turned from the stove. She didn’t look at any of us. She walked past Bodie and out onto the back porch, and the screen door closed behind them, carefully, no slam.

Callum’s jaw locked.

Jasper’s face went blank in a way that wasn’t calm. I’d never seen Jasper’s face do that before, and it occurred to me that the lovable-puppy thing was a setting he chose, and far from the only setting he had.

Eli’s chair scraped back an inch like he’d started to stand and caught himself. His off-hand left his lap and came up to the table and stayed there.

I looked at all three of them, and none of it helped. Whatever they were each reading from the air around Bodie’s arrival, they were reading the same thing in the same way ‌and they weren’t going to share with me. The bond didn’t tell me either.

That should have caught my attention, but I was too tired, too wrung out. I let it go.

Tara’s fingers tightened over mine.

***

I didn’t know how long Rowena was gone. Not long enough to be alarming. Not short enough to be nothing. Long enough for Miss Delphine to set her book aside on the windowsill and fold her hands in her lap. Then longer. Eli’s hand on the table began to tremble for real, and he didn’t bother hiding it. As time continued to drag on, Tara switched which finger she had over the back of my hand twice.

When the screen door opened again, it opened slowly. Naturally. Whatever was coming back through it with Rowena, she was not letting any of it show in how she opened a door.

She came back through.

Her hand was flat on the counter the second she made it back to the stove, fingers spread wide, holding herself up. She wasn’t looking at the door. She wasn’t looking at any of us. She was looking at the witches.