Page 14 of Wretched Thorns

The man’s jaw tightened by a fraction.

Neither of them spoke.

Neither of them was going to.

The man held the look longer than he would have if it hadn’t mattered. Then he turned and walked back into the deeper preserve.

Same way he’d come. No hurry. No explanation. A man who had somewhere else to be, who didn’t owe anyone an answer about it.

Jasper watched until there was nothing there to see.

His wolf strained against his ribs. It wanted to follow. It wanted answers from the male that had carried him through a dark hour of his early life. The frequency faded with distance. Jasper stood at the southern edge of the grove and lost it the way you only notice you’ve been holding someone’s hand once it’s pulled away.

He did not follow.

His brother was in the roots of the great magnolia, and his mother was on her knees beside him, and neither of them was moving from that grove tonight.

He crossed the clearing.

* * *

Callum was breathing.

Jasper kept coming back to that. He went down on his knees in the dirt beside the magnolia roots and pressed his hand to his brother’s chest, and the chest rose. It rose again, and again.

“Callum,” Jasper said.

There was no answer. There had been no answer expected. Callum’s eyes were closed and his face was wrecked, and the bruising on the left side was the kind that takes a fist with intent behind it. The intent had obviously been to do as much damage as a wolf’s body could to take.

Rowena’s hands kept moving.

Jasper put his other hand on the soil beside the great magnolia.

The ley lines came up through it. Slow. Patient. Powerful. The grove had a frequency of its own. Tonight the frequency was bring him home, bring him home, bring him home, and Callum was home and the grove knew it.

The warmth crept into Jasper’s palm and from his palm into his arm.

“Who was that?” Jasper asked.

Rowena’s hands kept moving. She did not look up. She did not stop her work for the question.

“Someone who keeps his promises.”

That was all.

He knew that it was all he was going to get tonight. Rowena had decided what she would and would not say in this grove before she had come down the stairs. There would be no further discussion.

He looked back at the preserve’s edge.

The wolf was gone.

But the voice in his head now rang clear in his memory.

Let’s get you home.

He had been hearing it most of his life, and tonight he had finally seen the face that went with it.

He pressed his palm flat to the magnolia root beside Callum’s shoulder.