Page 6 of Wretched Thorns

Idon’t know how long I lay there after Marcus left.

The petals were still on me.

They lay scattered across the coverlet and across me, on my hair and my chest and the sheet around my legs, soft, white and obscene against the dark fabric. Their smell sat in the air the way a man sits in a chair he does not plan to leave.

I wanted them off me. My hands were bound. I flailed around a bit, but many of them stayed where he had put them.

Then the panic took me whole. I thrashed against the rope until the silver bit down past the burn into something that wept, and a sound came out of me I had never made in my life, high and thin and not all the way human, and nobody came. Nobody was meant to come. That was the thing that finally broke something loose in my chest. I could scream in this room until my voice gave out, and the only person who would ever turn that lock was the one I would be screaming about. I lay there, shaking, and made myself swallow the next scream before it started, because the screaming was using me up. I suspected, used up was exactly how he wanted me.

The single candle he’d abandoned on the dresser burned low, its flame guttering in some draft I couldn’t feel. Shadows pooled at the edges of its light, and I watched them with new eyes. They moved like living things, stretching toward me, retreating, stretching again. A tide of darkness with its own rhythm.

And somewhere deep in my chest, something answered.

The hollowness Marcus had left behind ached like a bruise. I felt emptied out, scraped hollow, my edges raw and tender. Whatever he’d taken from me, it had left a void. A space where something used to be.

But the shadows seemed to fill it, just a little. When they reached for me, the ache eased. When they retreated, it sharpened again.

I didn’t understand it. I didn't want to understand it. I was too exhausted to push them away, and they weren’t hurting me. If anything, they felt protective. Worried, almost, in some way I couldn’t explain.

The candle flame sputtered and died. Darkness swallowed the room.

I closed my eyes. There was no difference anymore between seeing and not seeing. Just black, thick and complete, and the strange comfort of shadows that moved without light.

Sleep took me before I could fight it.

***

The light was wrong.

After so much darkness, it hurt. I squinted against the brightness, blinking until shapes resolved themselves out of the glare. A kitchen. Small, cluttered, warm. Blue walls. Bundles of dried herbs hanging from exposed beams. A window over a deep porcelain sink, letting in light that was golden, soft, and utterly impossible.

I knew this place.

The realization hit me like a wave of vertigo. I knew this kitchen. The way the afternoon sun slanted through that window. The smell of chicory coffee and something green, herbal, alive. The feeling of worn wood beneath my bare feet.

But I’d never been here. Had I?

“You back.” The voice came from behind me, warm and knowing. “You keep findin’ you way here.”

I turned.

An old woman sat at a wooden table, her dark hands busy sorting through a pile of small bones and beads. She was small, delicately built, with skin the color of polished mahogany and silver hair pulled back in an intricate wrap. Her eyes, when they met mine, were sharp and patient. Old eyes. Eyes that had seen things.

Eyes I’d seen before. In dreams I couldn’t quite remember. In moments that slipped away like water through fingers, the moment I woke.

“I know you,” I breathed.

“You do.” She gestured to the chair across from her. “Sit. We’ve done this dance before, child. You find you way to my kitchen, we start to talk, and something pulls you back before we get anywhere useful.”

I sat, my legs moving before my brain caught up. Up close, I could see she was working with yellowed bones, too small to be human. Bird, maybe. Arranging them in patterns I almost understood.

“Why can’t I remember?” My voice sounded strange in this space. Distant.

“Because he no’ want you to.” She didn’t look up from her work. “That leech of a man done put his hooks in deep. Keeps you foggy. Keeps you from knowing what you are, what you can do.” A bone clicked against another. “Keeps you from remembering me.”

The charm.

The knowledge surfaced like something rising from deep water. This woman’s hands had made the charm Tara gave me. I could feel it now, the echo of her energy, the same warmth that had radiated from my pocket and comforted my fist for months. The signature, the stamp if you will of the maker on the made.