Page 73 of Wretched Thorns

“The new ones.”

“The new ones.”

“Knew them how.”

“That’s the question Bodie is going to bring us an answer to. Guesses won’t do us any good here.”

“Why are they so interested in what happens with Serena?”

She adjusted the cloth over the bowl carefully before adding, quieter now, “I’m not sure they are.”

Eli went still.

Silence stretched briefly between them.

“Okay,” Eli said finally.

Rowena studied him for another second as if she expected an argument.

He didn’t give her one.

After a moment, she nodded once and went back to her work.

Eli looked down at the ledger again, though his attention stayed fixed on the conversation still waiting somewhere out past the porch rail.

***

The thread went out a little after dark.

Eli was alone at the table when it happened; the others gone to whatever rest they could find. One breath, the silver was there, smeared and faint but there, the dim certainty of her he had been holding for days. The next breath, it was gone. Not muffled. Gone, the way a radio drops to static when the station quits, and his whole body was up out of the chair before his mind had named the fear.

He stood in the dark kitchen with his hand flat to his sternum and reached down the thread into nothing.

Three seconds. Four. Long enough to learn what four seconds of nothing did to a man. Long enough to understand, in a cold clear way that had nothing to do with the maps spread across the table, that a night was coming when the thread would go quiet and not come back, and that no amount of careful work was going to outrun a warlock who could decide to be finished with her between one of Eli’s heartbeats and the next.

Then it came back. Faint. Frayed. Hers.

Eli sat down very slowly. He did not wake the house. He pulled the map toward him with his good hand, and the thing the four seconds had burned into him was not despair. It was a number. They did not have the week they had been quietly telling themselves they had. They had days, maybe, and the warlock got to decide how many.

He picked up the pen. The tremor was bad. He wrote anyway.

Chapter fifteen

Fight or Flight

Marcus came back with three men I’d never seen before, but the bond I shared with Callum, Eli and Jasper was evolving and I was learning to recognize some things the way a wolf would. Whatever fucked up cringey kind of mystic creature Marcus was, two of them carried all the same markers.

Two more Marcus-types. The kind you brought in after the last one got his face broken across a chamber floor. Cold-eyed, both of them. Older than Marcus. The shorter one already had a weird bag of random shit in his hand before his boots cleared the doorway. The taller one swept the corners of the room. Slow. Practiced. Then produced a similar small leather pouch I’d watched Marcus carry for three years, and they moved the way Marcus moved when he was working a room.

The third man didn’t have a weird leather bag of shit.

He didn’t have anything in his hands at all. He stayed half a step behind Marcus and didn’t look at his cringey brethren, didn’t look at the candles, didn’t look at the door.

He looked at me.

And he didn’t blink.

His eyes were the wrong color of brown. Too steady. Too quiet. The kind of eyes that had been sitting still in tall grass for as long as they needed to.