Page 64 of Wretched Thorns

Past the bolted door, the house went on without me. Boots on the boards. Low voices that dropped when they passed my door and picked back up once they had gone by. More of them than there had been the day before. Marcus had brought people in, and people did not get brought in for a woman who was simply being kept somewhere quiet. They got brought in for a woman who was about to be moved, or used, or decided about. I lay still and listened to them settle things I could not hear, and I made myself a promise that whatever they were planning, I would be somewhere they had not thought to look.

I did not follow the threads out. Not at first.

Reaching down them in this room would have been like pulling three good men into the dark beside me, and I had spent a lot of my life learning what it cost to drag the people you loved into your worst places. So I held them the way you hold a hand in the dark without squeezing it. I waited the dark out. I paced the room. I slept. I screamed. I paced again, slept again, and wept. I waited for what felt like an eternity until the loneliness outgrew my fear of what wanting them might cost.

Then I broke. I could not wait anymore.

***

In the grove, I hadn’t just been feeling Eli touch me.

I’d been paying attention to him.

The way he warned me before every touch. The way his focus moved down the silver thread before his hands ever followed it. Careful. Intentional.

I understood it now.

Our bond could carry more than feelings, sensations, and expressions.

It could carry direction.

I pressed my hand flat against my chest and reached for the dark thread.

It answered immediately.

Of course you did, I thought.

You always do.

The room around me blurred at the edges as I followed the thread outward, feeling for the place where it led.

The shadows moved with me this time.

I let them.

Then I stepped through.

***

Callum was in the grove.

Not the real one. A softer version. The cypress trees taller than real cypress. The moss greener. The great magnolia at the center, an enormous, slow-breathing thing with blooms the size of dinner plates.

He was sitting on a fallen log at the edge of the moss circle. Flannel shirt, sleeves pushed up. Head down.

He looked up when I came through.

He stood up.

“How,” he said.

“Eli taught me without knowing he was teaching me.”

“Of course he did.”

I walked across the moss to him.

“I hate being trapped in that room. I should probably be figuring out how to get out of there, but I'm tired. And it reeks, god, it stinks so badly with whatever nastiness they spilled all over the bed. Plus the blood and yuck on the floor. It’s just fucking gross.”