Page 104 of Wretched Thorns

Serena turned her wrist over in Tara’s hand. The shadow on her palm settled. The hunger went quiet.

“Hi, T.”

“Hi, Reen.”

It was the voice. That was what broke something loose in Tara’s chest that she had been holding clamped shut since the morning the phone went to voicemail. Not the shadows, not the ash she could smell coming off the open door, not the bruises or the blood dark on the torn blouse. The voice. The same flat dry two syllables Serena had been answering her with since they were eighteen and broke on a cracked sidewalk in Savannah, the voice that meant I am still in here, the one Tara had been terrified that she would never get to hear again. Whatever else had happened in that building, whatever Serena had become to walk out of it through those wards, she was still the same girl Tara knew. She held the raw wrist in both hands and let that one fact be bigger than all the others for a moment, because she had earned the moment, and so had Serena.

Tara did not let go.

She did not let go for a long beat.

When she did, it was to take her jacket off her own shoulders and put it around Serena’s, and Serena let her.

Callum spoke without lifting his head from Serena’s hair.

“We need to get off this property.”

Dex nodded.

Tara took her first full breath since the door of the garçonniere had opened.

***

They went back the way they had come.

Through the cypress. Through the rain. Around the wards that had unwound under Serena’s feet on the way out. The garçonniere stood behind them with its door open into the wet dark, and the pile of ash on the cypress floor inside it stayed where Serena had left it, and the storm came down across the back of the Webb plantation and started washing the wooden steps clean.

Callum carried Serena the last fifty yards.

She let him.

Her head settled against the curve of his shoulder. Her bare feet hung over the inside of his elbow. The shadows that had been moving around her hands and her torso eased back into the line of her body and went quiet. They did not retreat. They settled.

Tara walked behind them through the cypress and watched the massive wolf carry her friend like something handed back to him after he had given it up for lost, and she thought about the call to Grandmère all those months ago, the long silence on the line and then the words, your friend has stumbled into something good. Tara had laughed at the time. She was not laughing now, but she understood it now in a way she had not then. Good had not meant safe, and it had not meant easy. It meant this. Three men, a packless wolf, two old witches and a coffee-shop woman who turned out to be more than coffee, all of them bent for days to the single work of bringing one woman home out of the dark. Serena had spent her adult life with no one but Tara to call her own. She had driven into Magnolia Creek with a duffel bag and walked into a family without having a clue what she was walking into. Tara had known, and yet she hadn’t known. Still she had been so happy she could not say it. She was even happier now.

A second truck was parked near theirs. Mel was standing next to it.

She did not say anything. She opened the back door. She had laid a thick blanket across the seat and a hot water bottle on the floor mat and a wet cloth in a bowl on the dashboard. She looked at Serena through the rain and her eyes did the little thing they had always done when Serena walked into the Daily Grind for her morning coffee.

Serena recognized her.

It was a little startling. The kind of recognition that travels from the back of a memory to the front of one. The woman behind the counter at the Daily Grind. The woman who had poured her coffee every morning since her first day in Magnolia Creek. The woman she had thought was a coffee shop owner and nothing more.

Serena’s mouth opened.

“Mel.”

“I got you, girl.”

Tara did not know the whole story of the woman with the blanket and the hot water bottle and the wet cloth set out in a bowl like she had been getting a room ready for a sick child, but she knew enough to read what passed between the two of them. The coffee-shop woman had been watching over Serena, from behind a counter, pouring her morning cup and saying nothing, keeping a quiet eye on a regular she was never going to be allowed to claim out loud. There was love that worked like that, Tara was learning. Done from a distance. Done in silence. Done without ever once getting to say it was being done. Tara was not going to forget the woman with the blanket.

Serena let Callum help her into the back seat.

Tara got in beside her.

Mel closed the door.

Jasper sauntered into view when Mel closed the door.