Page 99 of Wretched Thorns

Eli. Pushing strength to me even as I could tell he had little to give.

The dark thread went warm last.

Callum. He had waited longer than the others because he was the shield, because keeping the rest of them standing had become so instinctive he no longer knew how to stop, and because giving anything over put more than just him at risk.

Three threads of wolf-strength were not going to be enough.

I knew what it was costing them to send it. I had learned the price of this by now, learned it in the basin that cracked, and what I was pulling through the threads tonight was so far past a cracked bowl. I was terrified of what it would do to them. Out in the storm somewhere, three men were emptying themselves into me through the only door Marcus had not managed to shut, and they were going to keep doing it until there was nothing left in them, because that was who they were, and because none of them would have forgiven the others for stopping. Knowing did not slow my hand. It did the opposite. I was not going to let them spend themselves to the bone and have it be for nothing. If they were going to bleed for me, I was going to be worth the blood.

Marcus had been alive for only fuck knew how long, and he had been saving up for the worst night of his life that whole time. The worst night had come. He reached behind himself to the cot without looking at it.

He came up with a vial.

He broke it on the cypress boards at his feet.

Smoke rose. Not gray. Reddish-black.

My shadows recoiled. They came off my legs and my ribs and the column at my back like they had been touched by a hand from hell.

My right knee went. The cypress floorboards were against my left palm before I knew I had put it there.

The bond rang. All three threads at once. Hard. The brothers had felt the shadows go.

Marcus stepped forward to pick up his knife.

I had two seconds.

Celie’s voice rang in my ears. The dark do no run from old things. The dark, it eats old things if you let it.

I hadn’t fully understood at the time. I understood her now.

I opened my mouth and breathed the smoke in.

There are no words for what it is to take a thing like that down into yourself on purpose. It went in like winter water, like swallowing the bottom of a lake, every dead and rotten thing he had ever folded into his work pouring down my throat at once, and yet it burned. For one endless second I was certain I had been wrong, certain it would fill me the way it had filled him, certain I had just done the one thing Celie warned me not to do. And then the dark in me opened the way a drain opens under standing water, and the rot went through me instead of into me, and I understood the difference she had been trying to teach me in her kitchen of herbs, bones and chicory coffee. Marcus kept what he took. That was his whole curse: the holding, the hoarding, the centuries of stolen things rotting inside him because he could not bear to let one of them go. The darkness in me was not built to keep. It took his poison and did not hold it for even a breath. It moved it along, out, gone, and came back to me clean, hungry, and mine.

The shadows came back to my body in a rush.

They came back darker.

My knee held me again.

I came up off the floor.

Three threads continued pouring supernatural wolf strength into a body that should not have been on its feet.

The shadows tightened around my ribs.

I stayed standing.

Marcus had the knife in his hand again. He stopped half a step before he reached me.

Taking in what I had just done. Trying to process it.

His face wore the same expression as it had in the wood-paneled room the first time he had realized I was not what he had thought I was. Three years of plans rewriting themselves on his face in a second.

Still, he came at me.

I caught Marcus’s second sigil-hand at the wrist before he could shoot it my way, and the shadow on my hand drank the sigil out of his palm in one pull, and the dirty yellow went out, and the trail-mark in my thigh resealed warm.