Page 43 of Wretched Thorns

Good, I thought. One of you knows what’s in here.

Fear is information. Marcus had taught me that, though he had meant it the other way around, had meant my fear as a thing he could read off me and use. I read theirs instead. The tall one was not afraid, which told me he had done this often enough to bury whatever sense a person is meant to keep about it. The young one was terrified, which told me the opposite, that some animal piece of him still understood this room better than his own hands did. I watched his throat work when the candles lit themselves. I let it teach me which of the two of them would break first if it ever came to that.

***

Marcus stood at the foot of the bed with his hands in his pockets.

“Sweetheart,” he said. The velvet voice. The fond voice. The voice that had called me sweetheart in our Atlanta kitchen. “I want you to meet the boys. They’re going to help us with something.”

I didn’t answer.

“No?” His mouth pulled at the corner. “All right. We’re past pleasantries, anyway.”

He nodded at Evil One.

Evil One set his bundle on the floor and unrolled it. White chalk in three thicknesses. A copper compass. A small pouch of something dark. He squatted, and with the practiced economy of a man who had done this enough times that his body remembered the order, he started chalking a circle on the dark hardwood around the foot of the bed.

The chord at my center began to hum.

Not the warmth from earlier. Something else. The chord was aware. All three threads, gold and silver and onyx, paying attention to the chalk scratching across the hardwood, paying attention to the man squatting in my room, paying attention to the way Evil Two was setting candles at four points around the bed without looking at me once.

Easy, I told the chord. Easy.

The chord didn’t quiet, it wasn’t like the shadows.

It got smaller. Tighter. The way a wire gets tighter when something on the other end has decided it isn’t going to break.

I had spent the time in this room learning the three of them the way you learn a house in the dark, by bumping into it. The dark one that held still and bore weight. The gold one that ran hot and wanted to move. The silver one that turned and looked at you when you came into a room. They were not mine to command; I knew that much. But they were mine to lean on, and they leaned back, and tonight, with chalk going down around my bed and a copper bowl filling with something that smelled like a dead thing, the leaning was the only steady floor under me. I set my back against it. I waited to see what these men thought they were going to take.

“What are they doing?” My voice came out flat. I was glad. Flat was better than revealing the fear that was actually coursing through me.

“A small ritual,” Marcus said. “Nothing dramatic. Think of it as taking your measurements before the dress is made.”

“For what?”

“For you, sweetheart.” He tilted his head. “We’re going to learn how big you are. How loud you are. What your edges look like. Once we know that, we’ll be able to care for you properly. The way I should have been minding you the whole time, frankly. You’ve been growing in ways neither of us are prepared for.”

Evil One had finished the circle. He stood, wiped chalk dust on his slacks, and started in on a second ring inside the first. Evil Two placed the copper basin on the bed at my feet. He filled it from a small flask. The water in the basin had a film on it. Not oil. Something thinner. Something that smelled rancid, like opening a feed bin with a dead mouse in it.

The candles at four points lit themselves.

I didn’t see who lit them. They just went up. Wick to flame in one motion, all four at once, and the air in the room dropped two degrees.

I know what this is, I thought. I didn’t know. I’d never seen anything like this before. But something in me knew. The chord knew. It’s a cage. They’re building a cage.

I had spent three years learning the ways of one dangerous man, and now there were three of them in my room with chalk, copper and patience that did not belong to people who meant me well. Evil One worked like a man laying tile. Evil Two’s hands shook, and a man whose hands shake at his own work is a man who knows exactly what the work does. I watched the second ring close inside the first and understood, in the part of me that did not need to be taught these things, that a circle is only ever drawn around something somebody intends to keep. I had been kept before. My whole body recoiled from the chalk before my mind caught up to why.

Anger warred with fear, and the shadows in my palms twitched.

***

Evil One looked at Evil Two.

“Basin’s wrong,” he said. “Spike it.”

Evil Two fumbled in the leather satchel. Pulled out a small, dark vial. His hands were shaking. He uncorked it and tipped it into the basin, and the water in the basin went a deeper color and started to move.

“Better,” the tall one said.