6. Three Threads #2
A small pool of dark gathered in my palm.
About the size of my thumbprint. It breathed, the way a small animal breathes.
When I moved my fingers, it shifted. When I opened my hand wider, it spread.
When I closed my fist, it didn’t crush. It just stopped being a pool and became a presence inside my hand. Weight without mass. Cool but not cold.
Hi, I thought at it, and then laughed at myself, but the sound broke halfway through, turning into something dangerously close to a sob.
It didn’t answer in words. It pushed back against my palm, the way a cat pushes back against a hand.
I almost laughed again, a spark of joy flared inside me; but I was so enthralled.
I looked at the candle in the iron sconce. The flame stood there doing what flames do, small and steady on its wick. The shadow it threw on the wainscoting behind it was big, almost too big for the size of the flame.
Bigger, I asked.
The shadow stretched. It climbed the paneling, doubled, then doubled again, dark and impossibly wide for the candle that had no business throwing it. The flame didn’t change. Just the shadow.
Smaller, I asked.
The shadow pulled back to where it had been, neat as a tide going out.
I sat back on the bed. The dark in my hand had stayed. It had been with me the whole time. I looked at it and finally let myself think the word that had been growing in my thoughts, in my being.
Mine.
Not his. He’d been pulling on me for years, calling what he stole his, and he’d been wrong about every part of it.
The dark in my hand pulsed once. Like agreement.
I closed my fist around it. It stayed.
***
The shadows in the corners shifted before I heard him.
Not a lot. Just a small lift, the way an animal lifts its head when something walks past the door it’s been guarding. They were paying attention to something on the other side of the wall.
I held my breath and watched them.
Then I heard it too. Footsteps in a hallway, muffled by wood and distance. A door opened and closed somewhere far enough off that the sound came in pieces. A voice, low.
I pressed my back to the paneling beside the bed and listened.
Marcus was one of them. I’d know the timbre of his voice with my ears stopped up and my head underwater. The other voice was a man I didn’t know. Older. Cultured the way Marcus was cultured, but drier, less swamp in it.
I couldn’t make out most of what they said. The walls were too thick, but I caught one word.
Beaumont.
The voice that wasn’t Marcus said it low, the way you say something that wasn’t supposed to leave the room.
Marcus answered in a tone I’d never heard him use before.
Not the velvet voice. Not the fond voice.
Not the voice that called me sweetheart.
This one was quieter. The voice of a man talking to someone he was wary of.
The voices stopped.
I stayed against the paneling and watched the candle burn lower. The shadows in the corners started moving on their own, not because I was asking. They were curious about the men on the other side of the wall.
I lifted my hands off the paneling.
Good, I told the shadows. We listen together now.
They pulled back into their corners like animals called to heel.
I kept the name. Beaumont. I had heard it somewhere before. I committed it to memory along with every other piece I picked up. Like my life depended on it. Because it did. The next ritual. The next feeding. The next time he said my name like it belonged to him. I would be ready.
***
He didn’t knock.
Big fucking surprise. The door swung open the way it swings open when somebody on the other side owns the house, and he was in the room before I was ready for him.
He’d come in different clothes than the last time. Black silk, open at the collar, the way he wore a shirt when he wanted me to look. His hair was a little mussed, the way it got when he’d had his face down close to someone for a while.
Then I caught the perfume on his collar. Not mine. Something sweeter. Citrus.
He’d been feeding.
It hit me cold and clean. Some other woman, in a room I couldn’t see, was sitting hollowed out the way I’d been hollowed out in here, in our house in Atlanta, for years. No doubt, she was telling herself it was deadlines, or bad sleep, or hormones, the way I’d told myself for three years.
He’s psycho, Serena, you’re searching for logic in the illogical. Tara’s words again. She had to have realized I was missing by now. A small wellspring of hope opened in my chest.
He walked across the room toward the bed. Sauntered. The way he’d always walked toward me, like a man who had all the time in the world to arrive. He sat down on the edge of the mattress beside me, hip against my hip, the weight of him too familiar. I wanted to puke.
His hand came up to my shoulder.
A white rose petal was on it. He must have done the small motion at his hip, the one I’d watched him do for the first time the night he brought me here, the one that pulled his roses out of nothing. I never saw him do it anymore. I just saw the petals after, where he placed them.
Three left on me now, I counted. The one he’d just put on my shoulder. One I’d missed in my hair, and one on the coverlet by my hip.
“You look tired, sweetheart,” he said.
I didn’t answer.
He waited.
“You should sleep,” he said. “I’m not going to feed tonight.”
He said it the way another man would say I’ll be late for dinner.
Casually. The not-feeding paired with the perfume on his collar, paired with the way his hand stayed still on my shoulder.
He wasn’t hungry tonight. He’d already eaten.
I was the thing he was keeping. The thing he’d put in a cage he’d spelled with his own hand, but oh, he’d kindly lit a candle for.
Fuck you. The thought rang out through my mind even as my veins filled with fire.
He didn’t lie down beside me. He sat on the edge of the bed and waited until I lay down. The coverlet came up to my collarbone under his hand, the way you’d tuck in a child. Then he didn’t move.
He sat there.
I closed my eyes.
He stayed.
I kept my breathing even. I counted my breaths, keeping them light and steady.
The shadows in the corners wanted to come up.
I kept them down. The chord in my chest hummed against me.
I kept that down too. The hum under the mattress was quieter than it had been when I’d woken up.
He didn't know it yet, and that was the first thing he didn’t know about me tonight. There would be more.
He sat on the edge of the bed and watched me sleep.
I didn’t sleep. I’ll never sleep again, I thought, with a wild certainty that wasn’t true and wouldn’t last, but was true enough for that moment in that room with that man’s hand resting two inches from my hair.
What do you fucking want with me? My mind was screaming.
Eventually, he stood up. The mattress shifted. He didn’t say anything. He walked across the room. The door opened. The door closed.
I didn’t open my eyes for a long time.
***
When I did, the candle was shorter than before. Same room. Same nothing.
I sat up. I lifted the petal off my shoulder between two fingers.
I held it up and debated for a moment. Then I crossed the room and laid it on the dresser with the other two I had taken off earlier.
Three petals in a row; white, small and harmless-looking.
I stared at them. I did not crush them. I did not throw them.
They were tagging the dresser now instead of me. That was the best I could do tonight.
I climbed back onto the bed and pressed my bound hands to my chest.
Help me, I prayed in my mind.
To whom, I didn’t know. The shadows maybe. The threads still humming low in my chest. Onyx, gold, silver. Still humming. Still mine.
It came.
The onyx thread vibrated. Low, steady, weighted. Then the gold. Sharp, fast, hot. The silver answered last, a tingle that crept up my arm to my palm and spread to my fingers.
The silver wasn’t asking. The silver was the one doing it.
Somewhere far away from this dark wood room a man I had spent the better part of a stormy afternoon with on his mother’s back porch was reaching for me through the only thread he could push down, and the thread was pushing my hand the way a teacher’s hand moves a child’s across a first letter.
I knew it, like I knew the sound of my own voice, it was Eli. Somehow, someway.
I opened my hand, my heart racing as I watched a streak of light form a sigil I knew. The Thornwood family sigil, he had told me. It was on nearly every old building in Magnolia Creek as well as the gates of the Thornwood Estate.
I traced the outline of it on my hand as it disappeared.
And then it came to me.
“Come,” I whispered to the shadows, and I watched as they slowly reached out toward me.
“Please,” I begged. “Come.”
And they came as a horde. The darkness peeling away from the wainscoting and the ceiling and pouring over me like a blanket, and because words were all I knew I continued speaking.
“Help me.” I moved my hand in the shape of the Thornwood sigil, and summoned the shadows to form it. Continuously moving my hand in the shape in the air above the bed until a great Thornwood sigil made of shadow hung in the air above me.
My hand was not entirely mine. Eli’s was over it. I could feel his presence, he was that silver thread of light woven through every motion, and I let myself follow it. Be guided by it. I don’t know what would have happened had he not been the one drawing through in the dark with me.
“Stay,” I whispered, and pressed at the threads in my chest.
The response was overwhelming. Warmth. Comfort. Strength.
I wept.