Page 9 of Wretched Thorns

He pressed at it again. And again. Alive each time.

His brother was somewhere hurt, and Jasper was in his mother’s kitchen about to lose his mind. The only thing keeping him somewhat steady was the confirmation that Callum was alive.

It was not enough, but it was not nothing.

It was the only thing that had kept him from putting his shoulder through the back wall of the house when the bond had first gone wrong; that and their mother. She was still the only thing that kept him from running northeast on four legs until he found who or what had taken Callum. He was going to tear their throat out with his teeth.

He pressed at the bond again.

Alive.

His hand came down on the kitchen counter hard enough that the dishes in the rack rattled. He had not meant to smack his hand down. The wolf was so close to the surface his vision kept doubling. He had been moving between the counter and the window and the sink, the same twelve feet of floor in a circuit he could not break.

His charm had gone offline the second the bond had lanced fire through his chest. They’d all caught it. Mom. Eli. The whole house had felt the pain, followed by the terrifying sense of loss as the connection with Callum thinned to almost nothing. They’d run into their share of problems before. Nothing like this one.

The grin, the easy storytelling, bartender voice he had spent a lifetime building into a weapon you could not see coming were all somewhere else tonight, packed in a drawer he could not get to even if he wanted to. What was at the surface instead was the wolf, and the wolf had no jokes.

Eli sat at the table with a stack of dead women.

He hadn’t stood. Hadn’t eaten. Hadn’t blinked, as far as Jasper could tell. Just turned pages. Moved photographs around. Worked through whatever system he’d built in his head that Jasper couldn’t see.

He pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose with one knuckle.

That was a tell. Jasper knew that motion. He had been watching Eli make it his entire life, the small tell that came just before his brother answered a question whose answer he did not like. He pushed those dang glasses so many times in the past few hours that he was going to blister the bridge of his nose.

Catherine Reyes. 2019. Atlanta society page, smiling at a charity dinner six weeks before she walked out of her apartment building and never came back.

Miranda Chen. 2015. Local news. Restraining order paperwork signed, submitted, and ignored. Disappeared from a parking lot in Savannah on a Tuesday in June.

Four other names. Four other faces. None of them were ever found.

A 1987 newspaper clipping at the bottom of the stack; the photograph yellowed and brittle. A man at a hotel bar with a young woman whose name Jasper had stopped trying to read because the man’s face was the face of the man he believed had taken Serena, and was no doubt the reason his brother was out there somewhere injured and hurting.

Same jaw. Same mouth. Same cold ease in the set of the shoulders.

Age twenty-five was where the paper trail started. Before twenty-five, there was nothing: no driver’s license, no high school, no birth record. Twenty-five years old, fully formed and walking into a hotel bar and walking back out with a woman who would be dead in three weeks.

“Forty years,” Eli said. He had not looked up. His voice had the flatness it took on when something cost too much for inflection. “At least. Eighty-seven is the earliest paper. It is not the earliest he existed.”

“I know,” Jasper said.

He did know. Eli had walked him through every page on the table, methodical and quiet, while the day turned to night. Neither of them had said the thing they were both thinking.

Forty years of the man’s pattern.

Serena in his hands for hours now.

His wolf wanted to rip the kitchen apart: the cabinets, the walls, anything within reach. He pressed both palms flat against the counter and did not let it.

Alive.

He pressed at the bond again. Found it. Buried. There.

Callum was the one who never moved without purpose. The brother Jasper had measured himself against his whole life. Without Callum at the table, everything was wrong. The kitchen was wrong. The night was wrong.

The familial bond with Callum was something Jasper rarely had to think about. They were brothers. The bond had existed as an essential part of him since they’d been three boys in the same womb. It had never gone this quiet before. Ever.

Tonight it had been quiet for a long time.