Page 28 of Wretched Thorns

I looked at the candle in the iron sconce. The flame stood there doing what flames do, small and steady on its wick. The shadow it threw on the wainscoting behind it was big, almost too big for the size of the flame.

Bigger, I asked.

The shadow stretched. It climbed the paneling, doubled, then doubled again, dark and impossibly wide for the candle that had no business throwing it. The flame didn’t change. Just the shadow.

Smaller, I asked.

The shadow pulled back to where it had been, neat as a tide going out.

I sat back on the bed. The dark in my hand had stayed. It had been with me the whole time. I looked at it and finally let myself think the word that had been growing in my thoughts, in my being.

Mine.

Not his. He’d been pulling on me for years, calling what he stole his, and he’d been wrong about every part of it.

The dark in my hand pulsed once. Like agreement.

I closed my fist around it. It stayed.

***

The shadows in the corners shifted before I heard him.

Not a lot. Just a small lift, the way an animal lifts its head when something walks past the door it’s been guarding. They were paying attention to something on the other side of the wall.

I held my breath and watched them.

Then I heard it too. Footsteps in a hallway, muffled by wood and distance. A door opened and closed somewhere far enough off that the sound came in pieces. A voice, low.

I pressed my back to the paneling beside the bed and listened.

Marcus was one of them. I’d know the timbre of his voice with my ears stopped up and my head underwater. The other voice was a man I didn’t know. Older. Cultured the way Marcus was cultured, but drier, less swamp in it.

I couldn’t make out most of what they said. The walls were too thick, but I caught one word.

Beaumont.

The voice that wasn’t Marcus said it low, the way you say something that wasn’t supposed to leave the room. Marcus answered in a tone I’d never heard him use before. Not the velvet voice. Not the fond voice. Not the voice that called me sweetheart. This one was quieter. The voice of a man talking to someone he was wary of.

The voices stopped.

I stayed against the paneling and watched the candle burn lower. The shadows in the corners started moving on their own, not because I was asking. They were curious about the men on the other side of the wall.

I lifted my hands off the paneling.

Good, I told the shadows. We listen together now.

They pulled back into their corners like animals called to heel.

I kept the name. Beaumont. I had heard it somewhere before. I committed it to memory along with every other piece I picked up. Like my life depended on it. Because it did. The next ritual. The next feeding. The next time he said my name like it belonged to him. I would be ready.

***

He didn’t knock.

Big fucking surprise. The door swung open the way it swings open when somebody on the other side owns the house, and he was in the room before I was ready for him.

He’d come in different clothes than the last time. Black silk, open at the collar, the way he wore a shirt when he wanted me to look. His hair was a little mussed, the way it got when he’d had his face down close to someone for a while.