9. Rule Four #3
It was not the hollow Marcus left. Marcus left an absence, a clean, cold theft, life sucked out through the skin.
This was different. This was the ache of having lifted something far too heavy and set it down again, the burn that lives in a muscle the morning after you have asked more of it than the usual.
The shadows had answered me, and the answer had exacted a price.
Part of it had settled in my body; the rest, I was still trying to understand.
I sat on the edge of the bed and let the room finish tilting and thought, with a clarity that scared me worse than the tilting, that I was going to have to get very good at this very fast, and that getting good at it was going to take pieces of all of us.
Not like before. I wasn’t disappearing into that terrifying emptiness the way I had after Marcus fed and my hand went through the bedpost. But the cost had landed somewhere else this time.
My head swam. The chord felt weaker now, thinned down to a faint ache in my chest.
And I knew — instantly, horribly — that I wasn’t the only one paying for what happened to the basin.
Someone on the other end of that golden thread had absorbed part of the blow.
I had not asked the gold thread to spend itself.
That was the part I kept turning over. The shadows had lashed at Evil One, and the basin had cracked beneath a streak of gold light, and somewhere someone had taken the bill for it in his own body without being given the chance to refuse.
Whatever I was becoming, it was not free, and it was not only mine to pay.
That changed the weight of every decision, of every door I was going to have to walk through to get out of here.
I sat on the edge of the bed and waited for the room to stop tilting.
Then I pressed my bound hands against my chest and reached carefully for the threads.
The onyx thread answered first.
Steady. Heavy. A grounding weight in the dark.
The gold thread came next — dimmer than before, strained around the edges, but still carrying that banked heat underneath it. Fury held on a leash by sheer force of will.
Hurt. Ready to do it again, anyway.
The silver thread answered last. Focused attention narrowed instantly onto me. Listening. Waiting.
Tell me what you need.
I closed my eyes.
The shadows curled at my wrists like animals that had decided where they belonged.
I wanted to respond; I didn’t know how.
I made a list because I didn’t know what else to do.
Rule one: Marcus is afraid of me.
Rule two: Marcus is afraid of me or someone named Basile, and I’m taking that name with me.
Rule three: something on the other end of these threads is paying for what I do, and I need to be careful.
Rule four: when Evil One’s face came apart on my floor, nothing came up in me. I don’t know yet what that means.
I sat with rule four for a while.
I didn’t have an answer.
Here is the thing nobody warns you about surviving.
You do not get to choose which parts of yourself the surviving keeps and which parts it spends.
I had wanted for years to stop being afraid.
I had prayed for it on the worst of nights, when fear was the only company I had.
Now something had walked into the empty place where the fear used to live, and it did not flinch, and it did not grieve, and it broke a man’s face across a room and went looking afterward for remorse and came back with nothing, and I understood that this was not the same as being brave.
Marcus had been coming back with nothing for a very long time.
I had seen where that road ended. It ended in a man who dropped roses on a bound woman and called it love.
I thought about Tara, three states over, asleep in her Nashville apartment with no idea any of this was happening.
I thought about Lila, two doors down from The Daily Grind, opening her studio for the day and pulling the dust cover off her drafting table the way she did every morning.
I thought about my own hands two months ago, sketching a logo for a small business that sold honey.
Hands that didn’t crack noses across a room without being asked.
Those were the hands I wanted back.
I didn’t know if I would ever get them back.
I pressed my hands flat over the chord and talked to all three threads at once. Not loud. Loud was for ritual circles, and men who walked into rooms thinking they knew what was waiting for them. Quiet was for this.
“I’m here,” I said. “I am fighting. I am yours and I am mine.”
I sat frozen in the wreckage of the room.
The candles had burned out or gone dead, leaving only the sour smell of smoke and whatever had spilled out of the shattered basin. Thick black liquid soaked into the bedspread and dripped slowly onto the dark hardwood below, leaving behind its dead mouse stench.
The circle painted across the floor wasn’t a circle anymore. The chalk had been smeared, clumps of flesh dragged through warped symbols and bloody streaks where the shadows had moved through it like claws.
And for the first time since Marcus had taken me, I wasn’t afraid of him.
I was afraid of myself.