18. Dark Clouds
Chapter eighteen
Dark Clouds
Callum had not slept.
He had been on the back porch since the bond bridge had risen in his chest, silver and insistent, answering something deep in the basement.
The bridge had closed some long while later.
It was not the closed bridge that kept him on the porch.
It was her. She was still there on the far end of their dark threaded bond, steady, awake; he could lay a finger on her the way he had for days.
But somewhere in the last twenty-four hours she had pulled a door shut between them.
Not the thread. She left him the thread.
She had stopped reaching down it, and she had stopped taking anything that came back up it.
He would push warmth toward her the way he had a hundred times and find it sitting at the threshold of her like a plate left outside a locked house, and he understood, because he was built the same way, that she had decided to spend herself down to nothing before she spent one more ounce of them.
It was the loneliest thing anyone had ever done to him for his own good. He held the thread open anyway, in case she changed her mind. He knew she would not, still he held it open, anyway.
When he finally came through the back door at first light, the kitchen was quiet.
Tara was at the table. Her hair was down. She was wearing an inside-out shirt under one of Dex’s flannels. He wondered if she was aware that she wore Dex’s scent just as openly as his flannel. She had a mug of tea in front of her and a second mug across, half-drunk, in front of his brother.
Eli looked up when Callum crossed the threshold. He did not stand. He nodded once.
Callum crossed the kitchen and put his hand on the back of Eli’s shoulder.
He sat down.
Tara slid a fresh mug to him without asking if he wanted one.
***
The kitchen filled pretty quickly after that.
Bodie next, with coffee already in his hand and a folder under his arm. Grandmère after that, slow on the back steps, carrying her wooden box of working tools. Miss Delphine behind her with the small leather book.
Jasper came downstairs in jeans he had been sleeping in for three days, when he slept at all, and his hair was still damp from the shower.
Rowena came in last. She did not say good morning. She wrapped her arms around Eli’s shoulders, embracing him as she assessed her son’s well-being the way all mothers do, and she went to the stove to put on a second kettle.
Tara laid the diagram out on the table.
“This is her,” Eli said.
His voice was rough but steady. The tremor in his off-hand was back and bad enough that he had moved his coffee cup to his right and was keeping his left out of the diagram.
“Real time. The signal is constant.”
The diagram had three things on it. A map of South Louisiana. A pencil line running sixty miles south-southeast along the gulf road. A chalk circle at the endpoint, drawn by Tara around the trail-sigil’s signature in the air above the cypress.
“Where is it?” Callum’s voice.
“Just inside the barrier island, past the Lacombe cut. There’s a plantation on the back of the property. LaRoche-owned for four generations. Sold to a shell company in ‘96. The same shell company has owned it since.”
“Marcus.”
“Marcus.”
Rowena turned from the stove.
“Cypress garconniere at the back of the main house,” Bodie said. He opened the folder. “Property maps from the parish, mid-century. The main house has been derelict since the storms of ‘05. The garconniere has been kept up by hand. I suspect that’s where he’s holding her.”
Callum looked at the map.
A garconniere. The way the back of a plantation in this country had been making people disappear for two hundred years.
He did not look up from the diagram.
“And I suspect you can’t come with.”
“Not officially,” Bodie said. “Unofficially, you’re never alone, Callum."
Callum did look up at that.
“When do we leave?” Jasper’s wolf was still at the fore, his eyes shining gold for days now.
***
Tara reached for the row of pouches at the edge of the table.
The three of them had been working since first light.
Tara at the table. Grandmère at the counter. Miss Delphine in the chair by the window with the leather book open in her lap.
What was laid out in front of Callum now had not been there an hour ago.
A row of small leather pouches along the edge of the cypress table.
A second row of folded paper packets sealed with wax that was still warm in the seam.
A third row of carved bone tokens the length of his thumb.
Tara picked one up from the first row and turned it over in her hand.
“Protection,” she said. “One for each of us going. Worn over your heart, inside the shirt. You don’t take it off until you’re back inside the wards at Thornwood. If you take it off in the field, you don’t get to put it back on.”
She set it down.
“These,” she said, picking up one of the paper packets, “are sigil destruction. You drop one on a ward sigil and the ward unwinds. Ten seconds, but count to twenty to be safe before you move.”
She set it down.
“These,” she said, picking up one of the bone tokens, “are dispel enchantments. Marcus has been laying that property with workings for years. Lock spells on the doors. Binding sigils all throughout the property, no doubt. Who knows what nasty little traps he’s laid.
When you trip one, and you are going to trip one, you drop one of these on it. The spell work breaks.”
She set it down. She looked at Callum.
“And these,” she said, indicating the small clay dish at her elbow with three rough black stones in it, “are shields. One for each brother. You hold it in your off-hand when you go in. If you get hit with a spell blast that is intended to inflict injury, the stone takes the blast. The stone breaks. You don’t get a second one. They’re not easy to come by.”
“How many do we have?”
“Three.”
Callum picked one up. The weight of it was weird, heavier than the stone should have been.
“Grandmère,” Tara said over her shoulder, “do you want to go over the salves?”
Grandmère turned from the counter.
She was working in three small bowls. Something dark and ground in one, something the color of dried blood in another, and something pale and oily in the third.
“For her, when you find her,” she said quietly. She tapped each jar in turn. “The dark one for bleeding. The red one for fever or rot setting into a wound. The pale one for silver burns… or fire.”
She slid the three small jars across the table to the brothers.
“You travel with them in your jacket. Cool side.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“And I will be here when you bring her home.”
Grandmère turned from the counter again. Miss Delphine, from the chair by the window, lifted her head once but did not speak.
“Expect the worst from this warlock,” Grandmère said. “He is old. He is strong. He can do much more damage than these salves can heal. Get her to us as fast as you can.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“And take this.” Grandmère reached into the pocket of her apron and brought out a small dark thing the size of a peach pit.
She set it on the cypress in front of Callum.
It was warm. It hummed. “Pocket. Inside breast. If she is bleeding when you find her, and you are going to find her, you press this against her chest. It will not heal her, but it will prevent any damage from spreading.”
Callum looked at her.
“Thank you.”
“You don’t thank me. You bring her home.”
***
Bodie laid two more things on the table.
“Mel’s at the rest stop south of Lacombe with the vehicles,” he said. “Two unmarked. Med kit in each. She’ll move ahead and stage on the parish road that comes in from the north side of the property. We come in from there. The plantation’s main road is watched.”
“By who.”
“I don’t know. The shell company has men. I don’t know how many. Mel will read it before we get there.”
Callum nodded.
Eli had not said anything.
Callum turned his head.
Eli’s hand was flat against the top of the table now. His right hand. The working hand.
He was sitting very still.
“I can’t go,” he said.
Nobody spoke.
“I am paying the price for my efforts and will only be a liability.”
His eyes moved to Callum. Then Jasper. Then back to Callum.
“I can hang out in the grove and hold the trail-sigil from there.”
The bond had been carrying Eli’s depletion for hours. Callum had felt it all morning. Jasper had felt it. Rowena had taken one look at him when she walked into the kitchen at first light and had known immediately. Even Dex, half-hidden in the back hall, had clocked it without a word.
Callum studied him for a long second.
“You sure you can maintain it alone?”
“Yes.”
“Can you defend yourself if something breaches the line?”
A pause.
“Yes.”
Callum’s eyes narrowed slightly at that answer. Not because he believed it. Because Eli had chosen to defend instead of fight.
Rowena turned from the stove.
“How bad?”
Eli flexed the fingers of his right hand once against the cypress. Careful. Controlled.
“I burned deeper than I intended.”
“Then I stay.” Rowena stated immediately. “Wolf at the gate. If anyone moves against this property tonight, I’ll hold the line.”
“You won’t be alone,” Celie reminded her.
Rowena reached out and took her friend by the hand.
Jasper’s hands closed slowly at his sides. The wolf was too close to the surface now, visible in the hard set of his face. He pushed off the wall.
But he didn’t argue.
“Dex, Jasper, and me,” Callum said.
“And me,” Tara answered immediately.
Callum looked at Dex. Dex nodded.
“I don’t need any wolf’s fucking permission, and I sure as hell ain’t askin’.” Tara’s temper flared hotter than an August afternoon as she pushed past both of them through the screen door onto the porch.
Dex blew out a breath. Callum pulled a face that could only have been an apology. The remaining women in the room had suspiciously turned away and grouped together.
Callum looked back at Eli.
“You lose the read, you tell me immediately.”
“I know.”
“Eli.”
That pulled Eli’s eyes back to him.
“I mean it, immediately.”
Something moved hard through the bond then. Fear beneath command. Fear for all of them.
Eli gave one short nod, and he kept his hand pressed flat to the top of the table while the sigil beneath it began pulsing.
***
They went out to the trucks.
The light had come up enough that the cypress at the back of the preserve was again a black wall against gray.
The air was thick. The barometer had been dropping since Eli came up the basement stairs, and the storm sitting in the gulf had decided sometime in the last hour that it was coming inland today.
Bodie had already left. Dex drove with Tara in the passenger seat; Callum and Jasper in the back.
Callum did not speak for the first thirty miles.
Jasper did not speak either. Callum’s eyes were on the road. The bond had been running steady on Serena’s signal all morning, and as they crossed the parish line and got into the marsh country south of the lake, the signal shone clearer than ever.
He could pinpoint her now. Bearing south. Distance closing.
“She’s still alive.”
“Yes,” Jasper said behind him.
“Eli’s holding.”
“Yes.”
The first lightning was a low slow flash over the gulf horizon. The wind shifted. The rain that had been holding in the south came across the marsh in a gray sheet and met the truck on the road five minutes later.
Dex did not slow down.
The dark clouds of the gulf storm rolled ever closer to the narrow back road.
The truck moved south.