Page 91 of Wretched Thorns

It was the loneliest thing anyone had ever done to him for his own good. He held the thread open anyway, in case she changed her mind. He knew she would not, still he held it open, anyway.

When he finally came through the back door at first light, the kitchen was quiet.

Tara was at the table. Her hair was down. She was wearing an inside-out shirt under one of Dex’s flannels. He wondered if she was aware that she wore Dex’s scent just as openly as his flannel. She had a mug of tea in front of her and a second mug across, half-drunk, in front of his brother.

Eli looked up when Callum crossed the threshold. He did not stand. He nodded once.

Callum crossed the kitchen and put his hand on the back of Eli’s shoulder.

He sat down.

Tara slid a fresh mug to him without asking if he wanted one.

***

The kitchen filled pretty quickly after that.

Bodie next, with coffee already in his hand and a folder under his arm. Grandmère after that, slow on the back steps, carrying her wooden box of working tools. Miss Delphine behind her with the small leather book.

Jasper came downstairs in jeans he had been sleeping in for three days, when he slept at all, and his hair was still damp from the shower.

Rowena came in last. She did not say good morning. She wrapped her arms around Eli’s shoulders, embracing him as she assessed her son’s well-being the way all mothers do, and she went to the stove to put on a second kettle.

Tara laid the diagram out on the table.

“This is her,” Eli said.

His voice was rough but steady. The tremor in his off-hand was back and bad enough that he had moved his coffee cup to his right and was keeping his left out of the diagram.

“Real time. The signal is constant.”

The diagram had three things on it. A map of South Louisiana. A pencil line running sixty miles south-southeast along the gulf road. A chalk circle at the endpoint, drawn by Tara around the trail-sigil’s signature in the air above the cypress.

“Where is it?” Callum’s voice.

“Just inside the barrier island, past the Lacombe cut. There’s a plantation on the back of the property. LaRoche-owned for four generations. Sold to a shell company in ‘96. The same shell company has owned it since.”

“Marcus.”

“Marcus.”

Rowena turned from the stove.

“Cypress garconniere at the back of the main house,” Bodie said. He opened the folder. “Property maps from the parish, mid-century. The main house has been derelict since the storms of ‘05. The garçonniere has been kept up by hand. I suspect that’s where he’s holding her.”

Callum looked at the map.

A garçonniere. The way the back of a plantation in this country had been making people disappear for two hundred years.

He did not look up from the diagram.

“And I suspect you can’t come with.”

“Not officially,” Bodie said. “Unofficially, you’re never alone, Callum."

Callum did look up at that.

“When do we leave?” Jasper’s wolf was still at the fore, his eyes shining gold for days now.