Page 95 of Wretched Thorns

Chapter nineteen

The Worst Night

Ihad stopped trying to count.

I had stopped trying to tell the time. After Eli had brought me into his library construct, my body had decided I had been awake for as long as I was going to be awake, and it had taken me down between one breath and the next without asking.

I dreamed of a kitchen.

I had been here before. Blue walls faded to winter-sky pale. Herbs hanging from the beams. The taste of chicory on my tongue anchored me to a memory. Tara’s grandmother.

She was at the table.

She was not sorting bones tonight. She was sitting with both palms flat to the wood, and her dark eyes were on mine the second I came through, and she stood up when she saw me.

She crossed the kitchen to me. She took my face in both her wrinkled hands. The warmth of her followed me out of the dream and into my physical body.

“You found you way back, chère.”

I had been finding my way to this kitchen for months without knowing I was doing it, despite Marcus’s fog, his hooks and his stolen rose-petal moments, and every time some remnant of his had dragged me back before she could tell me anything that would have helped. Not tonight. Tonight the fog was burned down to almost nothing, because tonight I had taken back enough of myself to stay, and she looked at me across that warm impossible kitchen and I watched her decide that the time for gentleness was over. She had been kind to me in the other dreams. Careful. The way you are careful with a person who does not yet know how badly they have been hurt. She was not careful now. There was no time left, and we both knew it, and the knowledge sat between us at the same table where she had taught her granddaughter to read the patterns of fate.

She did not waste time.

She told me what I was. Not the genteel version. The version a witch tells a woman who's been through enough to accept the truth. She told me my line was old, and the dark answered me because I was made of the dark, and she told me there were things my body knew how to do that I would not fully understand yet.

Some things I would learn later, she said.

Tonight I needed to learn two.

The first one was that the shadows could undo spellwork and ethereal workings. It could dispel the bespelled and render it just another inane object. Something could be broken, moved, or undone.

She did not explain how, and I did not ask, because I had already done it once without the shadows, without being taught, lying under a bed in the dark scratching a warlock’s hum out of the wood with a wet thumb. Some things you do not learn. You remember them from a place older than the part of you that learns, and the light bulb flickers on, and the knowledge comes to you when you need it most. Like breathing, or riding a bike, both are muscle memory, even if you have to learn the latter. She watched the understanding land on my face and she nodded, once, the way Tara’s grandmother nodded, the way Rowena nodded, the way every woman I had met since I drove into this part of the world nodded when a thing requires no further explanation.

The second one was that the shadows could do the same thing to a person, but that could have harsher repercussions.

“What he took from those women,” Celie said. “And from you. He didn’t make any of that power himself. He stole it.”

Her fingers moved once against the table.

“The dark knows who belongs to it, chère. You call those pieces home, and the dark will take them back.”

Her eyes lifted to mine.

“You take back what he stole; set those girls free, but be careful not to become what he’s become.”

I understood her without asking.

I understood it because I had been watching it happen to me for days. The flat quiet where horror should have been. The way a man’s face coming apart across a room had moved me about as much as a fly hitting a window. That was the road. That was the first mile of the exact road Marcus had walked all the way to its end, the road that turns a person into a thing that drops roses on what it eats. The dark could give me back what he stole. It could also, if I let it, give me a reason to stop counting the costs, and the not-counting was entirely what was wrong with him. Celie was not asking me to embrace the horrific. She was teaching me where the cliff was, in the dark, so my foot would know to stop before the edge.

“How?”

She showed me what she knew.

***

I woke up.

The cypress was quiet around me. The sigil at my thigh was warm. The candles were where they had been when I went down. The door remained bolted.