2. The Feeding
Chapter two
The Feeding
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.
I reached for it instinctively, but even here my hands were bound.
“Did he take it?” I could hear the fear in my voice. “Did he take my charm?”
“The physical thing, yes.” She set down a bone and looked at me directly.
Something shifted in her expression. Sharpened.
“But you found you way here without it. That’s new.
That’s interesting.” She leaned forward.
“And you clearer than you been. I can see the room behind you. Dark wood. No windows. Smells old.” Her nostrils flared. “Smells like rot dressed up in money.”
A chill ran through me. “You can see where I am?”
“Pieces. Just pieces.” She reached across the table and gripped my wrist. Her hand was warm and real in a way that made my breath catch.
“Listen to me, child. You don’t have much time.
Whatever he gave you, it’s nigh gone. That’s why you here so clear.
That’s why you a stayin’.” Her dark eyes burned into mine.
“Tell me what happened. Tell me everything.”
The words spilled out. The abduction. Callum roaring in pain. The dark room. And then, my voice breaking; the cold, pulling sensation from my chest while he molested me with his hands.
I told her about the shadows, too. How they moved. How they seemed to answer something inside me. How Marcus had jerked back like he’d been burned.
Her face went hard. Her grip on my wrist tightened.
She drew a slow breath in through her nose. Her grip on me tightened still.
“He put his roses on you again tonight.”
She said it like she already knew. I told her about the petals. About Atlanta, the rose on my pillow the morning I woke alone. About the windowsill at the rental house in Magnolia Creek. About the way he had pulled them out of nothing tonight and dropped them across the bed where I lay tied.
She listened. When I was done she put both palms flat on the table.
“That ain’t no flower,” she said. “That’s a tag. Every place one of them petals touched is a claim. Every claim on your skin, he can see, he can follow, he can find.”
“How do I get rid of them?” I asked.
“Off you. Off the bed. Out of your hair. As soon as your hands come free, you brush every one of them onto the floor. Stomp on them if you can. Spit on them if you can’t.
He don’t get to keep no road to you, child.
Not one more. What you need is a good cleansing spell to get his curses off you skin. ”
His curses, his touch a mark on my skin. My stomach revolted.
“I know his kind,” she said, low and fierce. “Parasites. They take what doesn’t belong to them. Feed on gifts they can’t grow themselves.”
“I don’t have any gifts.”
“Child.” She almost laughed, but there was no humor in it.
“You standing in my kitchen right now. Who knows how far away from you body, in a dream you found without my help. Shadows moved to protect you when that leech tried to drain you dry.” She shook her head slowly.
“You got more gifts than you know. He’s been takin’ ‘em. Keepin’ you weak so he could feed on you. But somethin’s changed.”
Before I could answer, something shifted. The warm kitchen light flickered. The smell of herbs faded, replaced by something darker. The corners of the room seemed to grow longer, stretched by shadows that moved wrong.
“He’s comin’,” she said. She released my wrist and began sweeping the bones into a cloth bag, her movements quick and efficient. “You need to wake up, but remember this time. Fight the forgettin’. Hold onto somethin’.”
“I don’t know how—”
“The taste of my coffee. The feel of this table under your hands. Choose somethin’ real and hold it.” She tied the bag shut. “I’m goin’ to find help. My granddaughter, she’s been waitin’ for you, I think. And those wolves you been runnin’ with, I suspect they looking too.”
The shadows were pooling now. Rising up the walls like dark water.
“Tara,” I said. The name felt like an anchor. “She gave me the charm.”
“And it’s led you back to me.” She stood, and even in the growing darkness, her eyes found mine. “You keep findin’ you way here. Even through his fog, through his hooks. That means somethin’. Don’t you forget it.”
The world lurched. The bright kitchen blurred, colors bleeding into each other.
“Wake up, child. He’s coming. Remember what I told you. Don’t let him—”
I woke in the dark room, gasping, the taste of chicory coffee still on my tongue.
The petals were still on me. On my hair. On my shoulders. On the sheet around me.
I shook my head once, hard, trying to get them off. The silver in the rope bit and burned when I moved. A few petals slid down to the bedding. The rest stayed where he had put them.
And I heard the lock turning in the door.
***
This time I was ready.
Not ready to fight. Not ready to escape. But ready for the fear, at least. Ready for the way my heart would slam against my ribs, for the cold sweat that would break across my skin. Ready for Marcus.
The door swung open. Light spilled in.
He looked even better than before. Younger, somehow. More vital. Like whatever he’d taken from me had filled something that had been empty in him.
I hated him with a purity that surprised me. Not the complicated, tangled hatred of our relationship, woven through with guilt, self-doubt and memories of the man I’d thought he was. This was simple. Clean. He had taken something from me. He was going to take more.
And I was going to find a way to stop him.
“You’re awake.” He smiled, stepping inside. The door closed behind him. “Good. We have so much to discuss.”
I didn’t answer. I was watching the shadows in the corners of the room, the way they seemed to lean toward me even as Marcus approached. The way they felt like a held breath, waiting for permission.
Not yet, I thought at them. Not yet. But soon.
Marcus sat on the edge of the bed, close enough that I could smell that wrong sweetness beneath his cologne.
He brushed a few of the petals off my shoulder with the back of his hand. Deliberate. The way a man clears a space on his own table for the work he is about to do.
“You look beautiful with my roses on you,” he said, almost pleased. “Good girl.”
His gray-green eyes studied my face with an intensity that made my skin crawl.
“You’re a little too…” he drawled, “Something’s changed.”
I stayed silent. The taste of chicory coffee lingered on my tongue, and I held onto it like a lifeline.
A warm kitchen. A lady with… A pain shot through my head, like being stabbed in the temple with an ice pick.
The shadows came closer. The feel of worn wood.
The ice pick stabbed at my temples again, but the shadows rushed in and the pain receded. The smell of herbs. Real. Remember.
“No matter.” Marcus reached for my face. “We have plenty of time to figure out what to do about it. And in the meantime...”
His fingers touched my cheek.
His thumb dragged once along my lower lip and stayed there. He looked at my mouth the way a man looks at a meal before he picks up the fork.
Everything in me went cold. Here it was again, the thing I could not stop, in the place I could not leave.
My body went rabbit-still the way it always had with him, hoping that if I was quiet enough and good enough the hurting would be over faster.
I hated that stillness more than I hated him.
It was the last thing I owned that he had not taken, and even it was on his side.
The pulling started.
But this time, I didn’t just endure it. This time, I reached for the shadows.
They answered.