Page 78 of Wretched Thorns

I started laughing. The sound that came out of me after that didn’t feel entirely sane. My mouth was bleeding again by the time I stopped trying to hold it back.

Marcus had come in here determined to prove he still owned me. He failed.

The chord burned warm. Every person on the other end of the bond felt it, and now I knew something Marcus didn’t.

I was getting out of here. His threads weren’t going to hold me for long.

I lay back as far as the silver bindings let me. I closed my eyes. I sent down the bond what I could. The blood in my mouth. The bindings. The sigil on my chest, already thinning. The shadows watching the sigil from the corners of the room. I sent it down dark first, the way I always sent.

Callum took it.

He gave me the only thing he had to give. He was coming. He had been coming. He was going to be coming until he got here, and there was nothing in the wolfing world that was going to stop him.

Then silver to Eli. He sent me a single line of a sigil I had never seen, in the shiny white silver of his thread, the way a man handed a woman a knife. Use this if you need it before we get there.

Then Jasper. A wild insanity, a feeling we shared at the moment. Already in the truck, Serena. Already in the fucking truck.

I lay in the dark with silver at my wrists and my ankles and a sigil thinning on my chest, mouth full of blood, one eye going to a slit, and I took the inventory a survivor takes. Cracked rib, maybe. Cheek split on the inside. Both shoulders screaming from the time my arms had spent wrenched up over my head. It was bad. I made myself look at exactly how bad without flinching from it, because flinching from it was a luxury I had given up somewhere back in Atlanta, and because the three threads in my chest were reading every line of the inventory along with me and I wanted them to have the truth. No softening it. No brave little lies. They had given me too much to be handed anything but the whole of it.

“I’m here,” I said. Quiet. “I’m fighting. I’m yours and I’m mine. And I am ready.”

There was one more thing, and I did not send it down the bond.

I had learned what reaching for them cost. The tremor in Eli’s hand. The playfulness that was missing from Jasper’s every move. Every time I pulled, one of them paid, and not one of them would ever tell me how much.

I was done pulling.

I would hold the bond. I would keep them close enough to find me. But I would not spend one more piece of them to buy myself an inch. I had spent three years being a dredge on anyone who was close to me. I would get out of this room on my own, or I would not get out at all.

They were carrying enough of me already.

The bond hummed.

I closed my eyes.

The shadows kept watch.

Chapter sixteen

The Caretaker’s Cottage

Tara couldn’t sleep, and after she’d given the guest room three full hours of trying, she stopped lying to herself about it and got up.

The Thornwood house was quiet the way old houses got quiet when the people in them had finally stopped making sounds. The hallway floorboards under her bare feet were warm with the day’s heat. She didn’t bother with shoes. She crossed the hall in the t-shirt and sleep-shorts she’d been not-sleeping in, and she went down the stairs the way she had learned in her teenage years when she tried to sneak out, weight on the outside edge of each step because the inside was where the boards would squawk and tell on you.

The kitchen was empty. Somebody had turned the stove light off. The maps were still on the massive cypress table where the family had left them at one in the morning, weighted with the salt cellar and an inkwell and a smooth river stone Miss Delphine had set down to hold the corner of the Marcus map.

Tara stopped at the table for one breath and looked at the work they had accomplished in a day.

Eli’s trail-magic prototype had stretched past the new pin Grandmère had given them at noon and was already reaching for the southern location Marcus had moved Serena to, a careful seam of ink running across the chart in handwriting that had stayed steady, even when his hand hadn’t. Beside it, the bayou stabilizer Tara had drawn for Eli was drawn out in chalk in two concentric circles. The thrum at her chest was humming low and warm, the way it had been humming in some register since the moment she’d walked back up the path from the cottage the night before.

Past the window over the sink, the night felt off. The air had been thickening all day, the pressure dropping the way it always dropped before the gulf threw a storm inland. Somewhere out over the water a storm was brewing, but the storm alone wasn’t what kept her awake.

It was the thrum that had her not-sleeping.

That, and Marcus, and the things her grandmother had been talking about in the kitchen all afternoon. Tara had been all ears. Grandmère wasn’t one to ignore, and the woman who had been her friend since their freshman year of college was still in the clutches of a sadistic madman sixty some-odd miles south down a gulf road. She was probably also not sleeping right now. Tara choked back a sob and rubbed at her chest.

Tara had a long list of reasons not to sleep tonight. The thrum just guaranteed it. She didn’t even want to pretend anymore.