Page 84 of Wretched Thorns

Her eyes filled up. She didn’t let them spill.

“Comfort is not a betrayal. Anybody who told you such is a liar.”

She didn’t say anything.

Then she leaned her forehead into his collarbone.

He held her there.

“What about yours?” he asked, tracing a line under her rib. “This one here.”

She turned her body a little so the lamplight fell across her own ribs. She lifted her arm. The scar she’d carried since she was eight years old was the small white crescent under the soft skin of her left ribcage where Grandmère’s old beagle had bitten her on a hot afternoon; she’d been too small to know better.

She told him about it.

She told him about the dog and the heat and the way Grandmère had cleaned the wound with rum. Dex traced the scar the way she had traced his, slowly, with one knuckle.

He wrapped one arm around her shoulders and the other across the curve of her hip. The lamp burned itself out without either of them getting up to stop it. Louisiana dawn arrived soft and gray through the cottage window. The cypress trees emerged slowly from the dark, and a cardinal started up somewhere near the live oak beyond the garden.

Tara’s hand stayed on the swell of his massive chest.

She didn’t move. He didn’t ask her to. The bond between them had settled into something low and steady by dawn.

Not demanding.

Just there.

Beside her, Dex slept heavily on his side of the bed, one arm thrown across his stomach. His breathing a soft breeze against the top of her head.

Tara lay listening to his breathing and, for the first time in days, allowed herself to rest without keeping part of her attention on the door.

She had almost drifted off when the wind changed.

It came up off the gulf and leaned on the cottage, and the cardinal cut off mid-note, and the gray at the window went a shade darker instead of lighter. Tara opened her eyes. Feet on the path, a man’s voice, Bodie’s maybe, low and fast, not the register a man used for good news. A screen door banged in the distance, and an engine turned over. The storm had made up its mind out over the water. The thrum in her chest had gone tight where it had been warm all night. Whatever grace this borrowed dark had bought them was spent, and the thing they had all been racing toward was close enough now that it leaned on the windows like the weather.

She put her mouth to the scar on Dex’s shoulder. She did not let herself stay in the warmth a breath longer than that.

“Wake up,” she said. “It’s time.”

Chapter seventeen

The Library That Isn’t A Library

Three in the morning was the hour Eli had been telling himself he’d wait for.

He went down to the archive without telling anyone where he was going. Through the dark kitchen. Past the kitchen table where the maps were still weighted with salt and stone. Down the back stairs, past the bookshelf his great-grandfather had hinged in 1908 so the family papers had somewhere to ride out hurricanes in safety, and made his way into the archive.

The trail-sigil was already on the workbench. He’d drawn it slow, the tremor in his off-hand pressed against the underside of the wood so the working hand could draw clean. The ink at the outer ring was still wet. Tara’s bayou stabilizer ran around it in two concentric chalk circles. He’d used her chalk. He’d asked her if he could.

Take whatever you need from this box, Voss, she’d said. The voice she’d been using for him since the comforting brush of understanding hand in the afternoon. The voice that wasn’t committed to anything and had stopped pretending it wasn’t committed to something.

He bolted the door at the top of the stairs from the inside.

He sat at the workbench. He laid his palms flat on either side of the spellwork.

He breathed.

The silver thread at his center tightened a quarter degree. He let it tighten.