Page 30 of Wretched Thorns

It came.

The onyx thread vibrated. Low, steady, weighted. Then the gold. Sharp, fast, hot. The silver answered last, a tingle that crept up my arm to my palm and spread to my fingers.

The silver wasn’t asking. The silver was the one doing it. Somewhere far away from this dark wood room a man I had spent the better part of a stormy afternoon with on his mother’s back porch was reaching for me through the only thread he could push down, and the thread was pushing my hand the way a teacher’s hand moves a child’s across a first letter. I knew it, like I knew the sound of my own voice, it was Eli. Somehow, someway.

I opened my hand, my heart racing as I watched a streak of light form a sigil I knew. The Thornwood family sigil, he had told me. It was on nearly every old building in Magnolia Creek as well as the gates of the Thornwood Estate.

I traced the outline of it on my hand as it disappeared.

And then it came to me.

“Come,” I whispered to the shadows, and I watched as they slowly reached out toward me.

“Please,” I begged. “Come.”

And they came as a horde. The darkness peeling away from the wainscoting and the ceiling and pouring over me like a blanket, and because words were all I knew I continued speaking.

“Help me.” I moved my hand in the shape of the Thornwood sigil, and summoned the shadows to form it. Continuously moving my hand in the shape in the air above the bed until a great Thornwood sigil made of shadow hung in the air above me.

My hand was not entirely mine. Eli’s was over it. I could feel his presence, he was that silver thread of light woven through every motion, and I let myself follow it. Be guided by it. I don’t know what would have happened had he not been the one drawing through in the dark with me.

“Stay,” I whispered, and pressed at the threads in my chest.

The response was overwhelming. Warmth. Comfort. Strength.

I wept.

Chapter seven

Eli

The coffee in front of Eli had gone cold an hour ago.

He had not bothered to refill it.

He pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose with one knuckle.

Glenn’s interrogation was laid across it now in three columns, in his own handwriting, copied clean from the notes he had taken on the drive back from the barn. The scratch of the pen had been the only sound in the truck the rest of the way home. He had not lifted it since they walked in the front door.

Eli hadn’t slept.

The Beaumont files were spread across the table untouched. That conspiracy was decades deep and tangled enough to drown in. He couldn’t think about that tonight.

Tonight he focused on Marcus.

Every sighting they could verify. Every missing woman. Every unexplained death that smelled wrong once you looked close enough. Eli fed it all into the map until the screen became a web of dates, highways, and patterns.

And there were patterns.

Marcus drifted south in winter. Chose women who lived alone. Stayed just long enough to feed before disappearing again.

Forty years of it. Maybe more. He’d broken the pattern with Serena. Eli needed to know why.

Eli rubbed a hand over his face and stared at the pins glowing across the screen. His coffee had gone cold an hour ago. He drank it anyway.

Callum was upstairs.

Rowena always left the bedroom door cracked when she didn’t want someone feeling trapped behind it, and it still sat open a few inches. Eli had stood in the hallway listening to Callum breathe. Slow and steady breaths; real sleep for the first time since they’d brought him home.