Page 105 of Wretched Thorns

Blood at the cuffs of his jeans where he had shifted back into the man. Blood across the line of his jaw where he had not bothered to clean it. The wolf was at the surface of his face, banked, satisfied in a way Tara had not seen on him before.

Tara had always thought of Jasper as the easy one. The brother who grinned. The one who had made Serena laugh first, brought her pie. The man who walked out of the cypress now, with another man’s blood drying along his jaw, was not that one, and he was not sorry about it. She could read that much off him without any bond at all. Across the mud, Callum watched his brother for a long beat, and whatever ran between the two of them on their private line did not reach her, but Callum’s jaw did. The set of it said the oldest of them was taking note on how far Jasper had gone at that gate, and coming up a good way short of easy about the answer.

Jasper did not speak.

He saw Serena in the back seat. He placed a hand over his heart.

Serena made the motion back, desperately trying not to lose the tears that pricked at her eyelids.

Tara caught the gesture and the answer to it and looked away, out the streaming window, because it was not hers to watch. She had spent three days learning the shorthand these people spoke in, the nods and the held looks and the things they said by not saying them, and she had come to understand that the quiet was not coldness. It was the opposite. They loved out loud so rarely because they loved so much that saying it would have taken the roof off. A hand over the heart, across a muddy field in a storm, with a dead man’s ash cooling behind them. It said everything the howling would have and so much more. Tara put her own hand briefly against her chest, where the thrum that was Dex sat low and steady, and tried not to look too hard at the fact that she was learning the language too.

Jasper climbed into the front of the lead truck beside Callum.

***

Callum pulled the lead truck out and back onto the parish road.

Mel followed in the second.

The rain filled the ditches on either side of them. The storm tracked north and the trucks tracked north under it, and the garçonniere at the back of the Webb plantation got smaller and smaller behind them until it was gone.

In the back seat of the truck, Tara held her friend’s hand.

Serena leaned her head against Tara’s shoulder.

The shadows around her settled into the seat with her. They did not crowd Tara.

Serena closed her eyes.

She slept the rest of the way home.

Chapter twenty-one

Thornwood

Iwoke to gravel crunching under tires.

The truck had stopped at the porch. The door hung open beside me, and somewhere between sleep and the humid after-the-storm air I understood that someone had opened it for me. My bare feet were already on the running board. Callum’s hand was already at my elbow, steady and warm through the thin sleeve of the borrowed shirt. I had no memory of the running board, and no memory of his hand arriving there. My body had done these things without me, the way it had been doing everything for hours, moving me from one place to the next while the rest of me lagged somewhere behind.

The gravel was wet. I stood in it in my bare feet and looked down at my own hand resting on Callum’s forearm, and for half a breath I didn’t recognize it as mine. The knuckles were scraped. The wrist above it wore a raw red band where the rope had been. It could have been a stranger’s hand, borrowed along with the shirt.

The rain had stopped. That was the second thing I understood, slowly, the way understanding came to me now. The cypress at the back of the preserve was a familiar black wall against a graying sky, and the windows of the house threw long yellow rectangles out across the grass. Better days were coming. I had been out in the dark long enough for it to end.

Tara’s hand slipped out of mine. I had not known it was there until the warmth of it was gone.

Rowena was off the porch before I had cleared the gravel. She crossed the strip of grass between the steps and the truck without slowing, and then both of her hands were on my face, and they were shaking. In all the strange, blood-soaked stretch of life I had spent near this woman, I had never once seen Rowena Voss’s hands shake. She did not speak. She set her forehead against mine and let her breath break apart against my cheek, and her whole body folded a fraction toward me, as though some weight she had been holding upright for days had finally come down.

I held her. It was the wrong way around, and I knew it even as I did it. I had come down out of that truck one bad step from being a body that could not carry its own weight, and here I stood with my arms around the brothers’ mother in the wet gray morning, holding her up against my cracked ribs while the wolves waited silent in the dark and let it happen. I do not know how long it lasted. Long enough for both of us. That was all it needed to be.

When she stepped back she did not apologize. Her hand returned to my cheek and stayed, her thumb moving once at the corner of my jaw. She did not weep. She pushed her fingers into my hair the way a mother does to a child she had given up on getting back, and then she let go and stepped away the rest of the way, and the morning closed cool over the place where she had been.

There was something else in her, under all of it. I was too far gone that morning to identify it, and I did not let myself try. But when she stepped back, in the set of her shoulders, there was a second weight she had not set down, a thing she was holding off to the side of all this relief and letting none of us see. Bodie stood at the bottom of the steps and did not come up. He and Rowena did not look at each other. In a yard full of people who could not stop putting their hands on me, for some reason all I noticed was the two of them being careful not to catch the other’s eye.

Eli stood at the corner of the porch, and he was shaking, too. His off-hand hung at his side with a tremor running through it he was not bothering to hide, or could not hide. I had seen Eli hold steady through things that would have broken a steadier man. I had not seen him like this.

I crossed to him without letting myself look at his face. I could not look at it. If I looked, I would see exactly what the bridge had cost him. I put my hand flat on his chest and kept my eyes on his collarbone.

“Eli.”