Page 69 of Wretched Thorns

I set the empty glass back on the tray, dead center, so he would know I had moved it. I left the roses where he had stood them. Let him look through every petal he wanted to. There was nothing left in this room he was going to enjoy finding.

Chapter fourteen

Bayou Rules

Eli was at the kitchen table when the bond shifted weight.

He set the pen down before he finished the sentence he was writing. The tremor in his off-hand had reached the point where the pen had stopped doing what he was telling it to do. He laid both hands flat on the cypress, palms down, and let the tremor settle.

The silver thread eased a quarter degree. It didn’t go quiet. It went blurry.

A bond was supposed to come through clean, a single clear note one could lay a finger on and know the other person by. This one had a hand pressed over its mouth.

Marcus was moving her again.

Across the table, Tara’s pen stopped midway through the protection pattern she’d been absentmindedly drawing.

“What is it?” she said.

“He’s moving her.”

Celie sat at the head of the table with one hand resting against the rim of the black scrying bowl Miss Delphine had brought out earlier. Her eyes stayed closed while the rest of the kitchen waited.

“East a little,” she said quietly. “Closer to water.”

Eli leaned over the Louisiana map. “South-southeast?”

“Mm.”

“How far?”

“Fifty miles, maybe. Sixty.”

Eli dragged the coastline map free from beneath a pile of notes. The tremor in his hand showed worse now that he was tired.

Tara reached across the table automatically and steadied the papers before they could slide.

Eli glanced at her once, then bent over the map and marked the new location.

***

By noon, nobody had left the kitchen in hours.

Around five that morning, Eli had finally said the thing none of them wanted to hear.

“We can’t break her out blind.”

Silence after that.

Then:

“She has to help us.”

So the work changed.

Eli sat hunched over a spread of journals and loose pages, trying to build something that could hold onto the sigil he’d pressed into Serena’s palm in the grove. A trail. A tether. Something that would stay with her no matter where Marcus moved her next.

Glenn’s notebooks were stacked at his left elbow. Three of them. The smallest bound in cracked leather, the other two cloth-covered and water-stained from the fireproofed lockbox Bodie’s men had pulled out of the smokehouse the night after the fire. Eli had been reading them since Bodie set them on the cypress. What he was reading kept widening. Glenn had not been a one-off corrupted wolf. Glenn had been documenting decades of his own modifications, the warlocks who had taught him, and the Beaumont names that ran through every margin. Marcus was in three of the notebooks under three different aliases across more than nine decades.