Page 90 of Wretched Thorns

“Eli.”

“Yes, beautiful.”

“I’m going to walk out.”

“I know you are.”

“Tell Tara I’m coming home. Tell Callum and Jasper that you guys have been my anchor, the only reason I haven’t lost my mind in here.”

“I will.”

She pressed her hand briefly to his face.

The architecture began to fold.

***

Eli came back to his body in the basement archive with sweat through his shirt and the silver thread still wrapped in shadow and singing.

The candles in the room had burned down a quarter inch each. The chalk circle of the bayou stabilizer was scuffed at the outer ring where his palm had been when the trail-sigil completed. The mark at the center of the workbench wasn’t wet anymore. It had set.

He laid his palms flat on either side of it. He breathed once, slow.

The tremor in his off-hand was quiet for the first time since the barn at the 37-mile property. The spell work had cost him, but the price was not the same. The bond was thinner than it had been; it would recover. His glasses were fogged at the bottom. The muscles in his neck and shoulders had a deep ache that was going to stay there for a few days. But the cost was a clean one, and the trail-sigil he had laid into the inside of Serena’s thigh was warm under whatever she was lying under in her prison, and the bond was stable.

He stood. His knees held. He walked up the basement stairs.

He slid the bolt back at the top of the stairs and went to the kitchen.

***

Tara was at the table.

She had a mug of tea in front of her. The kitchen was quiet around her. Her hair was loose, and her shirt was inside out, and she was wearing one of Dex’s flannels over the inside-out shirt. She looked up at Eli when he came through the basement door. She didn’t say anything about the sweat through his shirt or the fog on his glasses.

“It’s done,” he said.

He sat down across from her. She slid a second mug of tea across without asking if he wanted tea. He drank it. His hand on the mug was steady.

The kitchen held them both inside the gray dawn.

He didn’t say anything else. She didn’t either.

The bond kept humming, and somewhere south and sixty miles down the gulf road, a woman in a cypress room of an old plantation outbuilding had a sigil at the inside of her thigh that was warm and waiting and pointing the way home, and Eli Voss laid his palm flat to the cypress of his mother’s kitchen table and let himself rest.

Chapter eighteen

Dark Clouds

Callum had not slept.

He had been on the back porch since the bond bridge had risen in his chest, silver and insistent, answering something deep in the basement.

The bridge had closed some long while later.

It was not the closed bridge that kept him on the porch.

It was her. She was still there on the far end of their dark threaded bond, steady, awake; he could lay a finger on her the way he had for days. But somewhere in the last twenty-four hours she had pulled a door shut between them. Not the thread. She left him the thread. She had stopped reaching down it, and she had stopped taking anything that came back up it. He would push warmth toward her the way he had a hundred times and find it sitting at the threshold of her like a plate left outside a locked house, and he understood, because he was built the same way, that she had decided to spend herself down to nothing before she spent one more ounce of them.