Page 96 of Wretched Thorns

I lay still for a moment, listening. I looked at the silver rope on my right wrist. I summoned the shadows from the corners of the room.

I watched as they drifted from the walls, the floor and parts of the ceiling, collecting above me in a cloud of anticipation.

They were eager.

I could feel them.

I beckoned them to drain the magic from my bindings, unsure if any existed at all.

They wrapped around my wrists and ankles. A soothing pulse of energy, growing, getting stronger. The silver hissed against my skin, the icy burn dissipating, leaving only the throbbing sting of my injuries. The rope at my wrists became just a rope, then with my teeth and the help of my shadowy helpers, I worked the knots.

I did the left wrist. Then the right wrist. Next, I freed my ankles. Clumsy and shaky from ‌lack of food.

When I stood up, miraculously my legs took my weight. I bent down to the cot frame and slid one of the rope lengths into the back of my waistband.

My body was a ledger of everything the last days had spent. The rib ground when I breathed deeply, so I breathed shallow. The rope had taken the skin off both wrists down to something that wept and stuck. My mouth was swollen on one side and my tongue kept finding the split on the inside of my cheek, the iron taste of it the only thing I had eaten in longer than I would let myself count. I should not have been on my feet. A reasonable body would have stayed down, but I had lost all sense of reason and had only one goal in mind. I picked up a second length of the multi-fiber cord that was now just a rope. I stood there in the candlelight, ruined and upright, and I waited for the man who had done all of this to me, to make the mistake of opening that door.

The shadows had come up the walls without my asking.

They were not curling like the quiet things they had been before. They were a column of black at each corner of the room, breathing, watching me, waiting to be told.

I turned my hand palm-up.

The shadow at the corner nearest me lifted off the wall and came across the room and settled in my palm the way a pet settles in a lap it knows.

I thought about the second thing Celie had shown me.

The shadow in my palm grew hungry.

I let it. I let the hunger sit in my hand for a long moment and learned the feel of it. The hunger was clean. It was old. It was not the kind of hunger Marcus had. This one was mine.

The bolt on the door slid.

***

Tara’s boots had been soaked through since the second they crossed the property line.

The storm had come inland exactly the way the barometer at Thornwood had been promising it would, and the parish road that ran around the back side of the Webb plantation had turned to mud under the truck before they were a quarter mile from the staging point. Bodie’s truck was nowhere to be seen, but they knew he and Mel were running the perimeter, watching whatever needed watching, ready to do whatever they were officially not here to do.

Tara had never been any good at waiting. Give her a thing to do with her hands and she could outlast anybody; her grandmother had built her that way, had put a mortar and pestle in her fist before she was tall enough to see over the table and taught her that fear was just energy that had not been given a job yet. The trouble was that the job tonight belonged to other people. The wolves would do the closing. She was here to read the field, break the wards, and put her body between Serena and anything that came at them. Until the door opened, there was nothing for her hands to do but shake, so she made fists of them inside her wet sleeves, counted cypress trunks and watched the storm throw out sheets of water up and down the coast, occasionally dousing them in its fury.

Jasper had peeled off a quarter mile back the other way, on the narrow road that ran past the main gate. He had fled the truck as a wolf without a word to anyone.

Callum was at the front of the line on foot. Tara, a step behind him. Dex at her shoulder.

The garçonniere was visible through the trees.

It was a wooden structure on raised piers, the way she had been picturing it since Bodie had pointed it out on the map this morning at the breakfast table. A small building. Three windows on the side they were coming up on, all of them dark. The main house of the plantation sat farther up the property, derelict, roofless on one corner where the storms of ‘05 had battered it. The garçonniere was the only thing on the back of the property that looked like anybody had been living in it for at least thirty years.

Tara stopped at the tree line.

She put her hand flat to the trunk of the live oak nearest her.

A reveal rune hummed once at her wrist and showed her what was in the air between her and the garçonniere.

It was bad.

Tara had grown up at her grandmother’s elbow reading work like this, and the first thing Grandmère ever taught her was that you could tell a great deal about a person by the spells they left between themselves and the world. These told her about a man who expected company and intended to make the effort expensive. There was nothing defensive in them, nothing that simply said keep out. Every layer was built to take a piece of whoever crossed it, to bleed, weaken, and frighten. The oldest one, the one she could not read, sat under decades of others like scaffolding, holding the layered structure up. Her witch-eye watered looking at it. Her stomach turned. Somewhere in that small cypress building her best friend had been living within the reach of the man who made these, and Tara had been sixty miles north drawing charms and not getting there fast enough.