Page 33 of Wretched Thorns

“She’s alive.”

Not a question.

Callum came in two steps behind him. Barefoot. Hair flat from the pillow. His wolf still at the surface of his battered face.

“Does she know?” Callum asked. “It felt like she knows.”

“I don’t know,” Eli said. He said it slowly because it was the truest word he had. “But she reached out, and she responded.”

Jasper closed his eyes. “She’s alive.”

“She’s alive.” Callum, very quiet.

***

The screen door banged open.

Rowena entered the kitchen.

“Dex is heading back with the Toussaint priestess,” she stopped, scanning their faces. “What has happened?”

Eli was already moving.

He shoved Marcus’s files aside hard enough to send papers sliding across the table and dragged the old Louisiana map out over the top of them. His hands shook as he flattened it against the cypress wood.

The silver thread pulled from somewhere deep in his chest. Not hard. Not enough for direction. Just pressure. Recognition.

Eli moved his hand south across the map. The pull strengthened.

South and east. Stronger.

“Eli,” Rowena said carefully. “What are you feeling?”

“Her.”

His voice barely sounded like his own.

“She reached back.”

Callum went completely still.

Jasper stepped closer to the table. “What do you mean, reached back?”

Eli swallowed hard.

“The sigil.” His eyes stayed on the map. “I sent her a sigil. She’s holding onto it somehow. Pushing it through the bond.”

Rowena’s hand came up to her chest.

“Sweetheart…”

Eli dragged the pencil in a rough circle south of New Orleans. The line wavered with the shake in his hand. He didn’t stop drawing.

“Somewhere here.”

Jasper was moving for the door before the pencil left the paper.

“No.” Rowena’s voice cracked through the kitchen, sharp as a whip.