Page 63 of Wretched Thorns

***

Then his head turned a quarter-degree on its own.

Something moved near the eastern property line.

Callum’s head turned automatically.

Gone already.

But not animal.

And not anyone invited onto Thornwood land.

He didn’t turn his head further.

He didn’t say anything to his brothers yet.

They had bled enough into this stretch of the dark. Whatever had stood at the eastern line and watched and gone, it had not come closer, and his brothers were in no shape to chase it, and a thing that watches and leaves is a thing gathering, not a thing striking. Callum kept his worries to himself and held his face still. There would be a time to say it, in the kitchen, with the maps out and his mother’s eyes on him. This was not that time. This time belonged to the three of them and the woman who had just walked back across a bridge into a cage, and he was not going to let a watcher at the fence take even a piece of it from them.

***

Jasper spoke first.

“We’ve got to get her out now.”

Eli, not opening his eyes: “We are.”

Callum laid his palm down flat in the spot where the unnamed stranger had set him down two days before. The ley lines came up to meet it.

Somewhere south of New Orleans, Marcus was looking at fingerprints he hadn’t put there.

They held the silence a long time.

When they got up, Eli stood last, leaning on Callum’s hand for half a second. They walked back through the cypress in a formation as familiar as the land they walked on with a vow that didn’t need words. Their wolves stayed at the surface.

Callum took his brother’s weight without remark, the way he had taken it a thousand times, the way he would take it a thousand more. None of them spoke about what the night had cost, or about the burden all three of them were carrying now with the wolf and the want, which was the plain truth of it. She was still in that room. Every bridge they built for her was a comfort and a danger both, a hand held across the dark that also told the dark exactly where to look. They could not keep doing this. They were going to have to go and get her, soon, into the actual world with its actual mud and its actual guns, and bring her home in a body and not a dream.

Chapter thirteen

The Dreamwalk

Marcus left yet again with his lips pressed in a tight line and white around the mouth.

He slammed the door so hard the bolt complained on the way home. I lay on the bed and listened to him disappear down the hallway while my body slowly caught up to everything that had just happened.

Three sets of fingerprints rising. Jasper’s at my throat. Eli’s at the inside of my thigh. Callum’s at the back of my neck. Callum’s nip on my jaw. I was still soaking wet from the memory.

The bond was singing.

I choose them, I thought. They get to. He doesn’t.

I pushed the thought through the bond hoping it carried through in full. I choose you.

The shadows had pulled in close around me like a second skin. The candle in the sconce had burned almost to the cup. I was not, in any sense Marcus would have understood, alone.

***

For a long while I did nothing but breathe and let my body settle. The marks went from hot to tender to a low warm ache. The candle in the sconce burned down past its own grease, guttered, steadied, and burned down again. I let the darkness have the room. I had learned in this house that the dark was the one thing in it that did not belong to Marcus.