Page 103 of Wretched Thorns

Tara watched the circle burn out at her feet like a wick going through to the dry end.

She crossed the hex at the center of the path the same way.

The hex unwound under her bare heel before the heel had finished landing.

The lock spell on the door hanging open behind her, the nasty one which had been there a moment ago, was simply no longer there.

The fourth working — the older one, the one Tara had not been able to read — flickered once in the air around the garçonniere and went out, and Tara understood with a small, clean punch to her gut what had killed it.

It was Marcus’s anchor. Marcus was not holding it anymore.

She did the math. An anchor that old does not simply fail. Somebody powerful enough to lay it had to die, or be unmade, or be carried so far past the bounds of his own body that holding a spell was the least of what he had lost. There was no third option that ended with that man still walking. The anchor had gone out like a pilot light, and the whole back of the property had gone dark with it. Tara looked at the open door of the garçonniere, black and dripping into the storm, and she did not need to step inside to know what she would and would not find standing in there.

***

Callum stepped out of the treeline first.

He moved the way he had moved on the back porch in Magnolia Creek the night Serena had arrived at the garage apartment with a duffel bag over her shoulder and a charm in her pocket. Slow. Steady. Hands open at his sides.

Serena saw him.

She did not stop.

She did not speed up either. She came across the wet grass at the same walking pace she had come down the steps; the shadows moving at her hands and her feet and her torso, and Callum met her halfway across the open ground and rested his hand at the base of her neck, and Serena leaned her forehead against his chest. They spoke no words.

They didn’t need to. The bond sang.

The echo of it came to Tara through Dex.

That was the strangest part of the last three days, stranger even than the spells and the wolves. The way she had started to read his feelings, an understanding of things that came to her through him. Not words. Just knowing. What came through Dex now, standing at her shoulder with his hand at the small of her back, was a flood of something so large and so relieved it nearly took her knees, and it was not even aimed at her; it was Callum’s, bleeding through the pack the way a struck note will set a second string humming across a room. Tara had not asked for this. She had spent her whole life keeping a careful distance from exactly this kind of tangling-up with other people’s hearts. And here she stood in a storm at the edge of a dead man’s property, wired into a family she had known for mere days, reading a wolf’s relief in her skin, and she could not for the life of her make herself want to be anywhere else.

She was also starting to recognize the individual bonds. That myriad of threads that built the tapestry of a pack.

Through Dex she felt the pack itself: the broad current that connected all of them, everybody's emotions bleeding into everybody else's. It was the widest bond and the easiest to make, the thing that had let a packless reject, a coffee-shop woman, and a witch from Nashville throw themselves into the same night's work.

Beneath it ran something she could not touch. A private bond between the three brothers, older than the rest and closed to outsiders. Whenever she brushed against it through Dex, she found the door shut.

And then there was whatever existed between Serena and the three of them.

It was not pack. It was not blood. It was something else entirely. Something that looked and felt an awful lot like a complex form of the hum in her own chest.

The kind of thing the wolfing world had spent a thousand years of laws and treaties trying to prevent, and would have no earthly idea what to do with now that it had walked barefoot out of a dead man's house.

Dex moved next. He did not crowd them. He moved half a step out and stood at Tara’s shoulder. His hand came down to the small of her back.

The cypress and live oaks dripped around them.

Tara made herself walk forward.

She crossed the wet grass to where Serena was standing inside the half-circle of the wolves. Her boots squelched. The rain ran down her face. She had not cried since the night of the sigil-burned brake line, and she was not going to cry now if she could help it, but she was going to put her arms around her friend and she was going to do it before another minute passed.

She reached them.

She put her hand on Serena’s wrist near where the rope burn was raw. Serena turned out of Callum’s chest just enough to look at her. In the gray storm light, beyond the ash and blood on her torn blouse and the shadows still moving around her hands, Tara saw the face she had known since they were eighteen—standing on a cracked Savannah sidewalk, sharing greasy french fries from the diner two blocks from the dorms.

Tara did not say what she had been planning to say.

She just held Serena’s wrist.