Page 46 of Wretched Thorns

He saw more than what he had been assessing earlier.

He saw whatever I was now.

“Out,” Marcus said again.

They went.

The door closed behind them. I could hear them retreating down the wood floors of the hallway, Evil Two saying something low, Evil One making the not-a-word sound again.

Then it was just me and Marcus.

He was still at the foot of the bed.

I hadn’t moved from my perch.

The shadows had come back to my wrists. They weren’t curling now. They were waiting.

He took his hands out of his pockets, slowly, the way a man takes his hands out of his pockets when he wants to make sure you can see he’s not reaching for anything.

“Your dogs,” he said, “are answering you.”

I didn’t answer.

“Perhaps your other dogs have been teaching you things.”

I didn’t answer.

“That changes things, sweetheart. Not us, there will always be an us, but you're changing the terms, making me work for it. I'm not as much fun when I'm forced to work for it, not as… pleasant. This is—” He stopped himself the way Evil One had stopped himself. He’d said too much. He knew it. He set his teeth. “Well, let's just say we're going to have to revisit our arrangement.”

He stepped back.

Once. Twice. Until he was at the door.

He didn’t turn his back on me until his hand was on the latch.

He turned, opened the door, stopped on the threshold, and looked at me over his shoulder.

“You’re not just pretty anymore,” he said. “but useful still. I doubt you will enjoy it as much.”

His voice was quieter now.

The door shut behind him.

The bolt slid.

***

I stayed where I was.

I counted. I needed to count. One. Two. Three. Past the point where they could come back. Four. Five. Past the point where I could trust myself to move without crying. Six. Seven. Past the point where the shadows were going to behave.

By twelve, my hands had stopped shaking.

By twenty, I climbed off the bed. My legs nearly folded when my feet hit the floor.

Using the shadows had taken something out of me again.

It was not the hollow Marcus left. Marcus left an absence, a clean, cold theft, life sucked out through the skin. This was different. This was the ache of having lifted something far too heavy and set it down again, the burn that lives in a muscle the morning after you have asked more of it than the usual. The shadows had answered me, and the answer had exacted a price. Part of it had settled in my body; the rest, I was still trying to understand. I sat on the edge of the bed and let the room finish tilting and thought, with a clarity that scared me worse than the tilting, that I was going to have to get very good at this very fast, and that getting good at it was going to take pieces of all of us.