Page 32 of Wretched Thorns

Upstairs, his brother’s wolf had moved before Callum was fully conscious of waking. Eli could read Callum’s answer going through the onyx thread the way he could read his own breath going out. Warmth. Strength. Hold. The wolf-language of I am here. I have you. I am the body between you and what is hurting you. The onyx thread carried it whole. Callum’s wolf had not needed permission to answer.

The gold thread fired next.

Eli read Jasper’s response light up gold like a struck match in his peripheral vision. Fire. Courage. Steel. I am coming for you. I will go through anything that is in my way. Jasper did not think. The avenger never thought. The avenger answered.

And Eli was still standing there.

His brothers’ wolves had answered before he could decide what to give her. That was how it had always been. Callum was the shield. Jasper was the blade. Eli was the one who had to figure out what was needed that the shield and the blade could not give. He had the silver thread, the historian’s brain, and the half-second more it took to think.

He thought.

He reached for the only thing that came fast enough.

The family sigil.

The mark Serena had once asked him about on the wrought iron curling around the old cemetery in town. The one he'd sketched for her on the porch during the storm, rain drumming overhead while she listened with that fierce, intent focus that always unraveled him enough to say more than he meant to.

He’d been drawing the symbol in the margins of notebooks since he was twelve.

Eli pushed it toward the bond more on instinct than intention.

The sigil flared through the connection between them — iron, roots, old blood, Magnolia Creek. Thornwood.

And the meaning hit him a second later. It wasn’t just a family mark. It was a claim. A signature left behind by generations.

A beacon.

The kind a witch could use to find someone if she had enough power and a thread to pull.

If Serena could hold on to it long enough, maybe it would be enough to anchor her somewhere real. Somewhere they could reach.

He pushed the sigil through the silver thread. He did not know how he was doing it. He just did it.

It went.

His knees almost went with it.

He grabbed the edge of the table.

For a good minute, the silver thread was quiet in his chest. Empty. Like he had spent something he was not built to spend. His own pulse came up in his ears and crowded out everything else.

Sigil work didn’t come free. He had known it before he could read. His great-grandfather had bought a week of sleep for the front-gate ward. His mother paid a slow drain to keep the perimeter trail-magic alive. The forbidden runes Eli had pulled across Glenn three days ago had bought him the tremor in his off-hand that wasn’t going away any time soon.

He had just pushed the family sigil through a bond across two parishes.

He was going to pay for that one too. Who knew what the bill would be.

Then she sent back.

Not words. Just her. Gratitude. Fear. Determination. Hope. All four at once, more than any one of them could hold alone, and she did not curate which came first. The bond did not deliver curated content. It delivered her. Eli’s historian brain had to break the wave apart afterward to even know what he had received, but it was worth any fucking bill headed his way.

He sat down hard on the bench. His eyes were wet, and he did not care.

She had reached all three of them. She had answered them back. She was alive; she was reaching, and they had just touched her, three threads at once, fingers to fingers across the long dark miles.

The kitchen door banged open.

Jasper. Did not ask Eli a question. Came across the floor in three steps and put his hand flat to his own chest where the gold thread was still ringing.