7. Eli
Chapter seven
Eli
The coffee in front of Eli had gone cold an hour ago.
He had not bothered to refill it.
He pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose with one knuckle.
Glenn’s interrogation was laid across it now in three columns, in his own handwriting, copied clean from the notes he had taken on the drive back from the barn.
The scratch of the pen had been the only sound in the truck the rest of the way home.
He had not lifted it since they walked in the front door.
Eli hadn’t slept.
The Beaumont files were spread across the table untouched. That conspiracy was decades deep and tangled enough to drown in. He couldn’t think about that tonight.
Tonight he focused on Marcus.
Every sighting they could verify. Every missing woman. Every unexplained death that smelled wrong once you looked close enough. Eli fed it all into the map until the screen became a web of dates, highways, and patterns.
And there were patterns.
Marcus drifted south in winter. Chose women who lived alone. Stayed just long enough to feed before disappearing again.
Forty years of it. Maybe more. He’d broken the pattern with Serena. Eli needed to know why.
Eli rubbed a hand over his face and stared at the pins glowing across the screen. His coffee had gone cold an hour ago. He drank it anyway.
Callum was upstairs.
Rowena always left the bedroom door cracked when she didn’t want someone feeling trapped behind it, and it still sat open a few inches. Eli had stood in the hallway listening to Callum breathe. Slow and steady breaths; real sleep for the first time since they’d brought him home.
Jasper was in the hall, pacing the house with the kind of careful quiet that set Eli’s teeth on edge.
Playful, fun-loving Jasper was gone. Had been gone since the truck rolled onto the 37 mile property and the man waiting on the porch hadn’t run. This version of his brother moved differently. Stealthy. Apex predator. Like violence was already sitting just under his skin waiting for permission.
Rowena was out on the porch.
Her voice drifted through the screen door in fragments. Bodie must’ve been on speaker or video call. His voice carried clearly. Hers stayed low. Careful.
Eli caught a few things anyway.
“Mel is coming up from town tonight. She’s closing the shop early.”
“And the property?” Rowena asked.
“Sheriff’s calling it electrical. Payroll runs deep enough up there to keep it electrical through the inquest. Mel pulled the local press contact for me on Saturday.
There won’t be a story before Tuesday. After Tuesday I won’t be able to hold it without burning a favor, I’m not ready to burn. ” Bodie’s reply was clear.
“Do what you can. We need to keep my boys’ names as far from all of this as possible.”
“Agreed.”
“And our suspicions? Did your sweep find anything?”
A pause.
“Yes, Glenn was an archiver. Fireproofed lockbox buried under stone in the smokehouse the fire missed. Three notebooks and bone tools. I can give you twenty-four hours of access and then I have to turn these in.”
“Understood.”
Up.
Eli frowned at the notebook in front of him. Mel had lived in town the entire time he’d known her. Nobody in Magnolia Creek said coming up unless they meant Thornwood land.
Then Rowena said, quieter this time, “Three more confirmed sightings at her service spots in the last two weeks. The contact rate has jumped. Something’s changed.”
Eli’s pen stilled.
Service spots.
Not her job. Not her route. Service spots. Like this woman had regular locations they monitored closely enough to build language around. Who was she? Why was she being monitored? And how long had Bodie been using his mother for surveillance?
***
The pen had been on the wood for less than ten seconds when the silver thread in his chest jerked.
His whole body went still. The pen dropped out of his hand and rolled across the wood. He did not notice it.
The silver thread had never done this before. Not warmth. Not hum. It had gone wire-tight, like something on the other end had grabbed it and pulled. Hard.
It was her.
He knew before his brain caught up. The heart of him knew before he did. Serena.
Two words came through without sound. Help me. Like she had run out of options and reached blindly into the dark, and the dark had turned out to be him.
His hands shook. He stood up. The bench knocked back against the floor.
He had a half-second to be aware of his own body — the way the silver thread was singing at the heart of him, the way the air in the kitchen had gone too thin, the way his glasses had slid down again — and in that half-second, before he could decide what to send her, the onyx thread fired.
The spark went from his own chest the way a spark jumps a gap. Callum.
Upstairs, his brother’s wolf had moved before Callum was fully conscious of waking.
Eli could read Callum’s answer going through the onyx thread the way he could read his own breath going out.
Warmth. Strength. Hold. The wolf-language of I am here.
I have you. I am the body between you and what is hurting you.
The onyx thread carried it whole. Callum’s wolf had not needed permission to answer.
The gold thread fired next.
Eli read Jasper’s response light up gold like a struck match in his peripheral vision. Fire. Courage. Steel. I am coming for you. I will go through anything that is in my way. Jasper did not think. The avenger never thought. The avenger answered.
And Eli was still standing there.
His brothers’ wolves had answered before he could decide what to give her.
That was how it had always been. Callum was the shield.
Jasper was the blade. Eli was the one who had to figure out what was needed that the shield and the blade could not give.
He had the silver thread, the historian’s brain, and the half-second more it took to think.
He thought.
He reached for the only thing that came fast enough.
The family sigil.
The mark Serena had once asked him about on the wrought iron curling around the old cemetery in town. The one he'd sketched for her on the porch during the storm, rain drumming overhead while she listened with that fierce, intent focus that always unraveled him enough to say more than he meant to.
He’d been drawing the symbol in the margins of notebooks since he was twelve.
Eli pushed it toward the bond more on instinct than intention.
The sigil flared through the connection between them — iron, roots, old blood, Magnolia Creek. Thornwood.
And the meaning hit him a second later. It wasn’t just a family mark. It was a claim. A signature left behind by generations.
A beacon.
The kind a witch could use to find someone if she had enough power and a thread to pull.
If Serena could hold on to it long enough, maybe it would be enough to anchor her somewhere real. Somewhere they could reach.
He pushed the sigil through the silver thread. He did not know how he was doing it. He just did it.
It went.
His knees almost went with it.
He grabbed the edge of the table.
For a good minute, the silver thread was quiet in his chest. Empty. Like he had spent something he was not built to spend. His own pulse came up in his ears and crowded out everything else.
Sigil work didn’t come free. He had known it before he could read.
His great-grandfather had bought a week of sleep for the front-gate ward.
His mother paid a slow drain to keep the perimeter trail-magic alive.
The forbidden runes Eli had pulled across Glenn three days ago had bought him the tremor in his off-hand that wasn’t going away any time soon.
He had just pushed the family sigil through a bond across two parishes.
He was going to pay for that one too. Who knew what the bill would be.
Then she sent back.
Not words. Just her. Gratitude. Fear. Determination.
Hope. All four at once, more than any one of them could hold alone, and she did not curate which came first. The bond did not deliver curated content.
It delivered her. Eli’s historian brain had to break the wave apart afterward to even know what he had received, but it was worth any fucking bill headed his way.
He sat down hard on the bench. His eyes were wet, and he did not care.
She had reached all three of them. She had answered them back. She was alive; she was reaching, and they had just touched her, three threads at once, fingers to fingers across the long dark miles.
The kitchen door banged open.
Jasper. Did not ask Eli a question. Came across the floor in three steps and put his hand flat to his own chest where the gold thread was still ringing.
“She’s alive.”
Not a question.
Callum came in two steps behind him. Barefoot. Hair flat from the pillow. His wolf still at the surface of his battered face.
“Does she know?” Callum asked. “It felt like she knows.”
“I don’t know,” Eli said. He said it slowly because it was the truest word he had. “But she reached out, and she responded.”
Jasper closed his eyes. “She’s alive.”
“She’s alive.” Callum, very quiet.
***
The screen door banged open.
Rowena entered the kitchen.
“Dex is heading back with the Toussaint priestess,” she stopped, scanning their faces. “What has happened?”
Eli was already moving.
He shoved Marcus’s files aside hard enough to send papers sliding across the table and dragged the old Louisiana map out over the top of them. His hands shook as he flattened it against the cypress wood.
The silver thread pulled from somewhere deep in his chest. Not hard. Not enough for direction. Just pressure. Recognition.
Eli moved his hand south across the map. The pull strengthened.
South and east. Stronger.
“Eli,” Rowena said carefully. “What are you feeling?”
“Her.”
His voice barely sounded like his own.
“She reached back.”
Callum went completely still.
Jasper stepped closer to the table. “What do you mean, reached back?”
Eli swallowed hard.
“The sigil.” His eyes stayed on the map. “I sent her a sigil. She’s holding onto it somehow. Pushing it through the bond.”
Rowena’s hand came up to her chest.
“Sweetheart…”
Eli dragged the pencil in a rough circle south of New Orleans. The line wavered with the shake in his hand. He didn’t stop drawing.
“Somewhere here.”
Jasper was moving for the door before the pencil left the paper.
“No.” Rowena’s voice cracked through the kitchen, sharp as a whip.
Jasper stopped. Barely.
“We finally know where she is,” he said.
“Roughly.”
“That’s enough.”
“Not if he’s warded the place.”
Silence hit the room.
Jasper looked like he wanted to tear the walls apart with his bare hands.
“If you go in blind,” Rowena said more quietly, “you could get her killed.”
That landed.
Nobody moved for a second after that.
Then Jasper turned and drove his fist through the drywall beside the pantry hard enough to rattle the cabinets.