Page 101 of Wretched Thorns

What was not his left with it.

I want to be careful about how I say this part, because it is the closest I have ever come to something divine, and I do not have the right words for it. They were not memories. They were not ghosts, exactly. They were the last stolen pieces of women who had been taken the way I had been taken, fed on the way I had been fed on, kept the way I had been kept, and what Marcus had done to them was worse than killing them, because he had taken their life and then refused to let even the smallest part of them go on to wherever the rest of them had gone. He had held them in the dark inside himself for decades. The youngest of them had been waiting longer than I had been alive.

Each one came loose. That is the only honest way to say it. A weight I had not known I was carrying lifted off, one and then another, each one its own particular grief, each one a woman I would never know and would never stop being haunted by. A girl from a parking lot in Savannah who had loved someone enough to sign a restraining order and die for the courage of it. A woman from a hotel bar in Mobile in a year I was not yet born. A woman in a small Texas town whose name the dark knew, and I did not, and would not, and did not need to, because not-knowing was the point. He had taken their names. I was giving back everything that was left.

The pulls were not separate pulls anymore. They were one long current, and the current was running through Marcus into me into the dark, and out. The threads of our bond had settled into stillness because, for the first time since all of this began, I believed I could stand on my own.

I had stopped needing to be held up.

Marcus had stopped being able to.

The shape of him around my fist that remained deep in his chest got smaller and smaller as the stolen things came out. His gray-green eyes turned the paper-pale color they had been the last time he had stood at this door looking at me without coming in, and then they went past paper-pale into the no-color a man’s eyes go when nothing is behind them anymore.

What remained of his body folded.

It folded down through itself the way a paper crumples in a fist, and the shadows released him down to the wooden floorboards, and the shape of him on the floor was a man for one breath longer, and then it was ash.

It was ash all the way through.

The shadows lifted off the pile of ash, wrapped around me, and waited.

I was on my feet.

I stood over what was left of him, and I waited again for something that never came, the same way I had waited in the room where the first warlock’s face came apart. I waited for horror. I waited for the flat quiet that had scared me worse than horror would have. Neither one came this time. What came instead was something I had not had a name for in so long that it took me a moment to recognize it, sitting there warm and steady in a chest that was fuller than it had been in years. It was not triumph. It was not even relief, exactly. It was the quiet of a debt finally settled, of stolen things finally on their way home, of a woman standing in her own body again after a long time spent locked out of it. I had been afraid, in the dark room, of what I was becoming. Standing in the ash, I understood that I had not become anything. I had come back.

I had been on my feet through the last of the siphoning pulls.

The bond rang one long note. Three at once.

I sent it back. Across all three threads. I sent them strength the way they had sent it to me, because what they had given me was more than they could afford, and I had not been put back together in order to leave them hollow.

The bond rang again. Softer.

I lifted my hand. The black drew back into my skin the way ink draws back when you tilt a bottle and let it settle. By the count of three, my hand was just a hand again.

I was tired. I was hungry. I was standing. My ribs hurt, and they were going to hurt for a while, and the rope burn at my wrists was raw, and I was on my feet anyway, in a room where what had been Marcus Webb was a pile of ash on the floor, and the dark was steady in me in a way that felt whole, in a way I had not felt in many years.

I took a breath.

I started for the door.

***

She was on the floor before she understood that she had fallen.

The bond, the one she had been wearing for years, the one that had tied her to the male she had built a life around, was tearing in slow, long pulls. The tearing was screaming inside her chest in a register she had never heard before, and her body had folded down at the foot of the bed without asking her permission.

“Asher.”

He was not in the house.

“Asher!” She screamed.

He was not coming.

She had not called him by his name in years without already knowing where he was, and the silence in the bedroom did not give her his location back, and the tearing in her chest got louder.

She did not know why.