12. The Magnolia Grove
Chapter twelve
The Magnolia Grove
Callum reached the grove before dawn.
The preserve was still dark enough that the magnolia stood only as a deeper shadow against the trees. The ley lines were already humming beneath the moss. He felt them through the soles of his boots before he stepped into the clearing.
He crossed to the center automatically.
Two days ago a stranger with silver-streaks at his temples had laid him down here half-dead and vanished before Callum could even ask his name.
Callum knelt in the same place now and pressed both palms to the moss.
Warmth moved up through the ley lines and into his hands. The glossy charcoal thread in his chest tightened hard enough to ache.
He closed his eyes.
Serena was still gone.
The wolf in him had not settled since the night Marcus took her.
He had not let it settle. There was a difference, and Callum knew it even if no one else in his family would have said it out loud.
A wolf left to itself will scab over any wound given enough nights.
He had refused his the nights. He kept the wound open on purpose, kept the memory of the bathroom tile and his own throat blistering under Marcus’s sigils close enough to touch, because a closed wound forgets and he could not afford to forget.
Forgetting was a thing for after. After he had her back.
After the man who took her was no longer drawing breath on the same earth.
The dark thread sat low in his chest, the way it always sat, steady where his brothers ran hot and sharp.
He was the one the other two set leaned on without thinking about it, had been since the three of them shared a womb, and he had spent his life being the still waters, the foundation, the sanctuary.
Being the shield had its own cost. It meant that when the bond with Serena went thin and absent, he could not howl it out the way Jasper did, could not bury it in work the way Eli did.
He had to face the reality of it, and somehow still be the anchor.
He found himself in the grove before dawn with his hands in the moss like a prayer.
***
He heard Jasper before he saw him.
Jasper came down the path stripped down to the wolf parts of himself. He stopped at the edge of the moss circle. Then he crossed it and knelt beside Callum on the same stretch of warmth and ethereal power.
Their shoulders didn’t quite touch.
Their breathing came up to the same tempo.
“Couldn’t sleep,” Jasper said.
“No.”
“Didn’t think you could.”
“No.”
A long silence.
Eli came up the path, eventually. His glasses had fogged at the bottom of the lenses from the walk through the dew and humid morning air. He was rubbing them clear with the hem of his shirt as he came onto the moss.
He knelt on Callum’s other side.
Three brothers in a semicircle. The old magnolia above them. The ley lines warm beneath.
They had knelt like this in this grove their whole lives, for smaller things and larger.
Skinned knees. A dead dog when they were nine.
The night their mother told them, once and never again, the crime she and their father committed, the burden they were born to.
The grove took whatever you brought it and helped you navigate the complexities of it, asking nothing in return.
Their ancestors had paid the price for this place and the three of them had learned to bring the things they should not carry into the house where their mother would have to watch them bear it.
Callum brought it Serena now and the torment that came with her absence.
He did not have to say so. Jasper’s shoulder came a half inch closer to his on the left, and Eli’s breathing dropped into the same slow tempo on the right, and the question Eli asked out loud was a courtesy.
“Are we doing this?” Eli asked.
“Yes,” Jasper didn’t hesitate.
Callum laid his other palm flat against the moss beside the first.
The chord that made up that most sacred of bonds opened.
***
She came through fast.
The onyx thread went from a hum to a wire pulled tight. The silver thread on his right and the gold thread on his left lit at the same instant.
Serena was on the other end.
She reached for them differently this time.
Not panic.
Choice.
Then she was in the grove with them.
On the moss between them in the strange, folded geometry of the bond. Naked. Warm. Dark hair spread beneath her on the moss. Her eyes met his.
“How is this…” Her mouth moved. “Is this real?”
Her voice came through both ears and through his chest all at once.
It went through him like the first warm day after a hard winter, the kind of thing a body has no defenses against because it has spent so long bracing for the opposite.
She was here. Not a memory of her, not the thinned far signal he had been pressing at for days until his chest ached with it, but her, the weight and warmth and particular frequency of her, close enough that the onyx thread had gone from a wire to a river.
He had to lock his jaw against the sound that wanted to rip out of him.
A wolf who thinks his mate might die does not get to make that sound in front of her.
He turned it into a breath and let the breath be enough.
“It’s a world between worlds,” Callum replied. “What happens here can be as real as any other plane of existence.”
“How are we here?”
“Anyone can enter the realm of dreams,” Eli answered. “And pretty much everyone does. But we’re in the grove, and that gives us a little more power here.” He reached out and touched her cheek. “This is more substantial than what I’ve experienced before. I don’t know if it’s the bond or just you.”
Serena placed her hand over Eli’s. “Does it matter? I just need to feel something that isn’t him.”
Callum heard everything under the words.
He always did; it was just who he was. She was holding herself together with both hands, and her hands were tired.
The exhaustion came down the dark glossy thread in a long gray wash, and under the exhaustion was the part she was holding back, that for days the only hands on her body had been a thief’s, that she had been touched the way a meal is touched, and that she had come here, across whatever distance the grove folded down to nothing, to be touched as a person instead.
He could give her that. He understood, in the slow, certain way he understood most things, that this was not about wanting, or not only.
It was about giving her back something Marcus had spent three years taking: the plain animal knowledge that her choice, her consent, still meant something, that a hand on her could be a question instead of a tax.
So he did not reach for her like a man starving, though the wolf in him was.
He reached for her the way you reach for something you mean to keep safe, and he let her watch him make that decision.
***
Then Callum had her mouth.
Serena turned toward him immediately, one hand sliding into the hair at the back of his neck as he kissed her slow enough to let her breathe through it.
Slow enough to let her choose it.
She kissed him back hard on the second pass, mouth opening against his, tongue finding his, the sound she made low and unsteady, somewhere between relief and need.
Callum held her carefully through all of it. One hand at the back of her neck. The other spread wide against her spine. Letting her set the pace and following wherever she pulled him.
Jasper’s mouth settled against her throat and stayed there for a second too long, breath hot against her pulse like he was trying to remember how to not bite.
His mouth pressed to her pulse and held there, restraint radiating off him so hard it almost felt violent.
One hand buried in her hair while the other slid over her breast, rough enough to drag another sound out of her against Callum’s mouth.
Eli stayed close behind her, one hand steady at her waist while he spoke quietly into her ear.
“Here,” he murmured as his hand slid along her hip.
Serena nodded immediately.
“Here.”
His fingers moved higher against the inside of her thigh.
Another nod. Another breathless yes against Callum’s shoulder.
Eli’s control broke first in his voice. Just a little. Enough that Serena felt it.
His hand slid between her thighs, and the breath that left him against her ear wasn’t entirely steady anymore.
Of the three of them, Eli was the one who lived furthest back from his own body, the one who narrated a thing while it happened to him so he could analyze the moment and not simply be inside it.
Callum had watched his brother do it their whole lives.
He watched the habit fail him now. Whatever Eli had built to keep the wanting at arm’s length, she burned straight through it, and the part of Eli that always stood off to one side taking notes came down off its perch and into his hands, and his hands were not steady, and the silver thread that was always so precise had gone ragged with how much he wanted her.
Callum had never once seen Eli want anything past the point of his own control. He was seeing it now.
Jasper’s thumb found her at the same moment Eli’s fingers did, and Serena’s whole body arched between them.
The chord lit up instantly. A cacophony of fireworks, more explosive than the grand finale at the festival.
Callum felt the surge hit his chest a split second before Serena came apart against him, fingers tangled hard in Jasper’s hair, mouth open against Callum’s throat.