12. The Magnolia Grove #3
Marcus had seen her. The swollen mouth. The marks at her throat. The print of three sets of hands on a body that had been locked in a room in his house the entire time.
Serena’s voice came back through the bond. Not to him alone. To all three of them.
“I let them do whatever they wanted.” Her voice carried a grin Callum hadn’t heard since before Tuscaloosa.
It went through all three of them at once, that grin, and Callum heard Jasper make a sound that was half a laugh and half a snarl, and Eli’s breath go out of him in something close to relief.
There she was. Not the thinned and frightened signal they had been clinging to, not the woman the man in the wood-paneled room thought he was keeping.
The other one. The one who had walked up to a stranger’s garage apartment with a duffel bag and a charm in her pocket and a spine she did not yet know the strength of.
Marcus thought he had locked that woman in a room.
His dumb ass had locked her in a room and then handed her, day by day, the exact thing she needed to become someone he should have run from. Callum almost pitied him. Almost.
***
For a long stretch none of them spoke.
Eli moved first. Not well. His glasses were full fogged. A fine tremor in his off-hand. He took his glasses off, set them on the moss, and put both palms over his closed eyes.
Jasper was breathing hard. His wolf was right at his face. The claws on one of his hands had partly extended into the moss.
Callum’s own eyes were full amber.
It would ease.
He looked at the two of them, his brothers, wrecked in the moss in the gray almost-light, and the love he carried for them sat in his chest beside the love he carried for her and did not compete with it.
Jasper, with his claws half into the ground and his jaw working, Jasper who hid an assassin behind a bartender’s grin and had just spent the last of his control not putting his teeth in her.
Eli with his hands over his eyes, Eli who had given more of himself than was legal and was paying the price.
They had each given her something here that cost them, and not one of them had counted the cost, and Callum understood that this was what she had walked into on a stormy afternoon without knowing it.
Not three landlords. Three men who would unmake themselves for her by inches and call it a fair trade.
And she had chosen it. That was the part the dark thread kept handing him, over and over, warm and impossible.
She had been taken, starved and fed on. And when given a single stretch of her own will back, she had spent it here, on them.
A man could build a life on a thing like that.
Callum intended to, if the world would let him, and if it would not, he intended to make the world sorry for the position it had put him in.
***
Then his head turned a quarter-degree on its own.
Something moved near the eastern property line.
Callum’s head turned automatically.
Gone already.
But not animal.
And not anyone invited onto Thornwood land.
He didn’t turn his head further.
He didn’t say anything to his brothers yet.
They had bled enough into this stretch of the dark.
Whatever had stood at the eastern line and watched and gone, it had not come closer, and his brothers were in no shape to chase it, and a thing that watches and leaves is a thing gathering, not a thing striking.
Callum kept his worries to himself and held his face still.
There would be a time to say it, in the kitchen, with the maps out and his mother’s eyes on him.
This was not that time. This time belonged to the three of them and the woman who had just walked back across a bridge into a cage, and he was not going to let a watcher at the fence take even a piece of it from them.
***
Jasper spoke first.
“We’ve got to get her out now.”
Eli, not opening his eyes: “We are.”
Callum laid his palm down flat in the spot where the unnamed stranger had set him down two days before. The ley lines came up to meet it.
Somewhere south of New Orleans, Marcus was looking at fingerprints he hadn’t put there.
They held the silence a long time.
When they got up, Eli stood last, leaning on Callum’s hand for half a second. They walked back through the cypress in a formation as familiar as the land they walked on with a vow that didn’t need words. Their wolves stayed at the surface.
Callum took his brother’s weight without remark, the way he had taken it a thousand times, the way he would take it a thousand more.
None of them spoke about what the night had cost, or about the burden all three of them were carrying now with the wolf and the want, which was the plain truth of it.
She was still in that room. Every bridge they built for her was a comfort and a danger both, a hand held across the dark that also told the dark exactly where to look.
They could not keep doing this. They were going to have to go and get her, soon, into the actual world with its actual mud and its actual guns, and bring her home in a body and not a dream.