Page 98 of Wretched Thorns

The weight of the darkness around my bones was not part of me. And yet, it was completely mine.

Marcus fired the sigil from his left wrist.

It hit me in the chest and opened the mark at the inside of my thigh where Eli had laid the trail, and the mystic warmth in the mark went taut against my skin, and Eli was about to take the hit with me, and I did not have the breath to apologize.

Marcus’s knife came for my throat.

The shadow in my palm answered before I did.

It snaked up the inside of my arm like a black whip and caught Marcus’s wrist mid-arc and snapped the bone at the joint.

His knife dropped.

He did not scream. He had been working pain into his own body for centuries, and he did not waste a scream on a wrist.

He came in with the other hand.

The other hand had a sigil on it, too. Smaller. Older. The type of working a warlock reserved for the worst night of his life because some night of his life was eventually going to be the worst one. The sigil glowed dirty yellow in the candlelight, and Marcus pressed it flat to my collarbone where Callum had put his mouth in the dream space.

It tried to pull the mark out of my thigh, the mark at my collarbone and the nip on my jaw, attacking both the silver and onyx threads of my bond.

The gold thread went warm, then hot.

It was not comfort. It was not a hand on the back of my neck. It was fire and heft. A force that should not have been able to travel that thread at all, and arrived anyway because Jasper willed it. I was quickly learning that Jasper wrote his own fucking rules and that dark, feisty rebel that lived somewhere deep in me loved him for it.

***

Somewhere to the south, where the main gate ran in, a sound went up that was not the storm.

Then it cut off.

Callum had gone still at the head of the line. Not the stillness of listening. The stillness of a wolf who had just heard something he did not want to hear.

Tara was wired into Dex enough by now to catch the edge of it secondhand, and what was vibing off the brothers was not the storm. It was Jasper, down at the gate, doing a great deal more than merely clearing a path. The bond the brothers shared was something she would never be a part of, and only through Dex did the residue reach her. Right then, he was bracing Callum as his brother reached down that private line toward Jasper and found something that made him hesitate.

Whatever Jasper was doing to the men at the main gate, Tara got the feeling he had quite being nice about it. The feeling that was sliding through Dex was not triumph. Not satisfaction. It was the sharp recoil of someone realizing a line might have been crossed more than a few miles back.

Tara couldn’t see what Callum saw. She didn’t even have the right words for it. But she recognized the concern all the same. The fear was not that Jasper would fail. It was that he would not stop.

It was written on Callum's face when the sounds at the gate finally ceased, and the description for his expression was not relief.

***

Marcus took the hit at his wrist and rolled with it. He had been taking hits for centuries and it showed. He kept his footing.

His off-hand snapped to his own forearm. He broke a sigil there; I had not seen him draw it. The air around his palm turned dirty yellow, and the room grew thick with the smell of something that stank worse than the dead-rat-in-a-barrel dark liquid that had been in the copper basin.

A shape materialized out of the yellow. Small. Evil. Pulled up out of somewhere a man had no business reaching into.

He pointed it at me.

It hit me below the ribs.

A flash of gold streaked out of my chest and ripped it in half before it could climb me. The air went sour where the halves dropped. The room got darker for a breath.

Marcus did not stop. He took the next step in.

A breath later, the silver thread grew warm.