Page 77 of Wretched Thorns

I knew that voice. Not the words, the voice. It had the weight of the fiery gold thread in it, the low steady fire that had been holding me up for days without my understanding that was what it was doing, and along with it, braided in, the steady strong glossy onyx one and the precise silver one, all three of them arriving at once in the only register Marcus could not reach. Three years ago I would have stayed down and told myself that staying down was survival, that a woman who does not get up does not get hit again. The voice did not care what I had told myself three years ago. The voice said get up the way you say it to someone you have decided is worth the trouble of saving, and something in me that had been waiting most of my life to be worth that trouble, got up.

The shadows came up.

Not the wall they had made the last time. Not the quiet refusal. This time they came up the way they had wanted to come up for three years and never been allowed. They came up like they had a long held grudge to settle.

They came up over his back first. A black hand of them circled at his throat. Another at his shoulder. A third around his ribs, hard enough to creak the bone.

He made a sound he had not made in this house in front of me before. He pulled his mouth off my throat. The cold stopped pulling. His hands stopped tearing at my clothes, as he grasped for the shadows at his throat. The bond seared through me like a wildfire. Three threads bolstering me, lending me their strength.

I bit him.

I bit the side of his hand where his thumb met his palm, and I tasted his blood along with my own, and his blood was wrong. Sour. Old. Dead-meat old. The taste went down my throat and my stomach revolted.

Marcus came off the cot.

He went two steps backward and a shadow went with him for each step. He hit the wall. He brought his free hand around and his fingers were doing something I had watched his fingers do a thousand times. Spread-close-tilt. The small motion he used at his hip when he was pulling rose petals out of nothing, except this time the air at his fingertips wasn’t blooming. It was burning.

A sigil. He was sketching a sigil into the air with the inside of his hand, and the line of it was glowing the dirty yellow color of fire that wasn’t fire.

The sigil dropped.

It hit me in the chest where the bond was. It didn’t break the bond, but it grabbed the silver rope at my wrists and pulled, and the silver pulled at the shadows, and the shadows hissed in a register I had never heard them in before, and they let go of him.

He came back to the cot.

He didn’t lean down this time. He didn’t have the time.

He grabbed the silver rope at my right wrist and yanked it across the cot to the corner. He wrapped it around the wooden frame and pulled it tight with his teeth and tied it off. He did the same with the left. My arms went spread above my head, the silver biting into my wrists where it hadn’t been biting before.

He went to the leather pouch at his belt and pulled out a length of fresh silver threaded rope. He cut it in two with a flick of his thumb. He bent at the foot of the cot. He wrapped the first length around my right ankle and the right corner of the frame and pulled until the thread hummed against the wood. He did the same with the left.

The whole thing took him less than a minute.

The shadows pushed at the sigil.

The sigil held.

The shadows pushed harder.

The sigil thinned.

I watched the sigil thin.

I watched Marcus watch the sigil thin.

The sigil might last the night. It wasn’t going to last a week.

He stood up.

He looked at me on the cot, bound at the wrists and the ankles, bleeding from the mouth, breathing through one side of my face because the other side was already swelling shut. He had tried to feed, but was far from fed, nor had he gotten the other thing he had walked into this room to get.

“You little bitch,” he spat again.

I laughed, despite the terror coursing through my veins. It hurt. The blood on my teeth. The swelling. The inside of my cheek where my own teeth had opened it. I smiled anyway.

He turned and walked out. He slammed the door so hard the candle in the sconce blew out from the air. The bolt was thrown so fast the metal complained. I lay in the dark with silver at my wrists and my ankles, and the bond coursing through my veins like a hit of crystal.

The candle came back to life seemingly of its own accord.