15. FightFlight #3
A sigil. He was sketching a sigil into the air with the inside of his hand, and the line of it was glowing the dirty yellow color of fire that wasn’t fire.
The sigil dropped.
It hit me in the chest where the bond was. It didn’t break the bond, but it grabbed the silver rope at my wrists and pulled, and the silver pulled at the shadows, and the shadows hissed in a register I had never heard them in before, and they let go of him.
He came back to the cot.
He didn’t lean down this time. He didn’t have the time.
He grabbed the silver rope at my right wrist and yanked it across the cot to the corner.
He wrapped it around the wooden frame and pulled it tight with his teeth and tied it off.
He did the same with the left. My arms went spread above my head, the silver biting into my wrists where it hadn’t been biting before.
He went to the leather pouch at his belt and pulled out a length of fresh silver threaded rope.
He cut it in two with a flick of his thumb.
He bent at the foot of the cot. He wrapped the first length around my right ankle and the right corner of the frame and pulled until the thread hummed against the wood. He did the same with the left.
The whole thing took him less than a minute.
The shadows pushed at the sigil.
The sigil held.
The shadows pushed harder.
The sigil thinned.
I watched the sigil thin.
I watched Marcus watch the sigil thin.
The sigil might last the night. It wasn’t going to last a week.
He stood up.
He looked at me on the cot, bound at the wrists and the ankles, bleeding from the mouth, breathing through one side of my face because the other side was already swelling shut. He had tried to feed, but was far from fed, nor had he gotten the other thing he had walked into this room to get.
“You little bitch,” he spat again.
I laughed, despite the terror coursing through my veins. It hurt. The blood on my teeth. The swelling. The inside of my cheek where my own teeth had opened it. I smiled anyway.
He turned and walked out. He slammed the door so hard the candle in the sconce blew out from the air. The bolt was thrown so fast the metal complained. I lay in the dark with silver at my wrists and my ankles, and the bond coursing through my veins like a hit of crystal.
The candle came back to life seemingly of its own accord.
I started laughing. The sound that came out of me after that didn’t feel entirely sane. My mouth was bleeding again by the time I stopped trying to hold it back.
Marcus had come in here determined to prove he still owned me. He failed.
The chord burned warm. Every person on the other end of the bond felt it, and now I knew something Marcus didn’t.
I was getting out of here. His threads weren’t going to hold me for long.
I lay back as far as the silver bindings let me. I closed my eyes. I sent down the bond what I could. The blood in my mouth. The bindings. The sigil on my chest, already thinning. The shadows watching the sigil from the corners of the room. I sent it down dark first, the way I always sent.
Callum took it.
He gave me the only thing he had to give. He was coming. He had been coming. He was going to be coming until he got here, and there was nothing in the wolfing world that was going to stop him.
Then silver to Eli. He sent me a single line of a sigil I had never seen, in the shiny white silver of his thread, the way a man handed a woman a knife. Use this if you need it before we get there.
Then Jasper. A wild insanity, a feeling we shared at the moment. Already in the truck, Serena. Already in the fucking truck.
I lay in the dark with silver at my wrists and my ankles and a sigil thinning on my chest, mouth full of blood, one eye going to a slit, and I took the inventory a survivor takes.
Cracked rib, maybe. Cheek split on the inside.
Both shoulders screaming from the time my arms had spent wrenched up over my head.
It was bad. I made myself look at exactly how bad without flinching from it, because flinching from it was a luxury I had given up somewhere back in Atlanta, and because the three threads in my chest were reading every line of the inventory along with me and I wanted them to have the truth.
No softening it. No brave little lies. They had given me too much to be handed anything but the whole of it.
“I’m here,” I said. Quiet. “I’m fighting. I’m yours and I’m mine. And I am ready.”
There was one more thing, and I did not send it down the bond.
I had learned what reaching for them cost. The tremor in Eli’s hand. The playfulness that was missing from Jasper’s every move. Every time I pulled, one of them paid, and not one of them would ever tell me how much.
I was done pulling.
I would hold the bond. I would keep them close enough to find me. But I would not spend one more piece of them to buy myself an inch. I had spent three years being a dredge on anyone who was close to me. I would get out of this room on my own, or I would not get out at all.
They were carrying enough of me already.
The bond hummed.
I closed my eyes.
The shadows kept watch.