Page 26 of Wretched Thorns

I sat up. My legs held me. The drug he kept dosing me with, whatever it was, ran out of me faster than the time before. Either he was running short, or my body was acclimating to the dose, or something in me was answering it. I’d find out which.

The first petal came off my shoulder between my thumb and forefinger. I held it up to the candle. It looked like a petal. White, faintly damp at the edge, the curl of it perfect; a beautiful lie. Each one a fucking supernatural version of Siri.

I put it on the dresser, where I could see it. I did not crush it. I did not throw it.

The petals in my hair took longer. My wrists were still bound in the silver-threaded rope, and I had to lean my whole head down to my hands and comb them out with my fingers.

I knelt on the floor.

The floor was warm in most places but grew cooler near the bed, and under my knees the dark wood was solid, old, well-fitted. Whatever was making me cold was not the floor.

I bent down and looked under the bed.

I didn’t see it at first; I felt it.

There were marks on the underside of the bed.

Not scratches. Not the dings a piece of old furniture took over the decades it sat in a house. These were deliberate. Some carved, some burned in, some painted in something dark, or both. They ran along the inner edge of the lower rails, three of them on the side I could see, in a script I had not learned but somehow recognized. The way you recognize a face from the wrong angle.

I lay flat on my back on the floor and slid under the bed.

The hum changed.

It was the first thing I noticed. When my head came under the frame, the hum that had been a low constant beneath the mattress for weeks pressed against my skull like a hand. Not louder. Closer. The way the inside of a bell sounds different than the outside.

I lay very still and looked up.

There were more marks than I’d been able to see from the side. Three on each lower rail, that I could count. Two on the underside of the headboard. One on the headboard side of the bottom slats, big as my hand, more elaborate than the others. The big one was humming the hardest.

I stared at them. The shadows from the corners moved toward me along the floor, slow and curious, and stopped at the edge of the bed frame like dogs at the edge of a porch. They did not come under with me. They wanted to. They were not sure they could.

It’s all right, I told them. Watch.

I picked the smallest sigil first; it had mostly been painted on. The one on the lower rail closest to my left hand. Simple. Three lines meeting at a point, a curl coming off the bottom, a slash through the curl.

I wet my thumb on my tongue.

I pressed it to the slash and dragged.

The mark resisted. For a second I thought I was wrong about what I could do here, that it was burned into the wood and not painted, that I was a woman lying under a bed scratching at a stain like a child. Then the resistance broke and a smear of something black came up under my thumb. Not soot exactly. Not paint. Something that smelled, faintly, of his cologne.

The hum changed pitch.

I held still and listened. The hum was lower now in one register and higher in another, the chord broken. Not gone. Broken.

Holy shit, I mouthed at the underside of the bed.

I moved to the next sigil. This one was harder. The lines were thinner, but deeper, more careful, and my fingernail caught on the wood when I scraped, kept skipping out of the groove. I worked at it. The hum shifted again, the way a guitar string sounds when you bend it. It was vibrating my ribs now as well as in my ears. The threads in my chest were paying attention.

I picked the big one last.

The big one didn’t smudge. The big one was not painted. The big one was burned into the wood, scored into it, deep enough that the lines were a sixteenth of an inch below the surface. I could press my finger into the grooves and find no give. Whatever was making me cold lived in the big one. Whatever was holding the hum also lived in the big one. I was not going to scratch the big one out tonight.

But I had learned something. I knew where it was. I knew what it looked like. The smaller ones came down with spit and patience. The big one did not. Whatever Marcus had done to this room had been done piece by piece, with knowledge, and I could undo at least some of it, piece by piece, with the same.

I slid back out from under the bed.

I sat on the floor and breathed.