19. The Worst Night
Chapter nineteen
The Worst Night
Ihad stopped trying to count.
I had stopped trying to tell the time. After Eli had brought me into his library construct, my body had decided I had been awake for as long as I was going to be awake, and it had taken me down between one breath and the next without asking.
I dreamed of a kitchen.
I had been here before. Blue walls faded to winter-sky pale. Herbs hanging from the beams. The taste of chicory on my tongue anchored me to a memory. Tara’s grandmother.
She was at the table.
She was not sorting bones tonight. She was sitting with both palms flat to the wood, and her dark eyes were on mine the second I came through, and she stood up when she saw me.
She crossed the kitchen to me. She took my face in both her wrinkled hands. The warmth of her followed me out of the dream and into my physical body.
“You found you way back, chère.”
I had been finding my way to this kitchen for months without knowing I was doing it, despite Marcus’s fog, his hooks and his stolen rose-petal moments, and every time some remnant of his had dragged me back before she could tell me anything that would have helped.
Not tonight. Tonight the fog was burned down to almost nothing, because tonight I had taken back enough of myself to stay, and she looked at me across that warm impossible kitchen and I watched her decide that the time for gentleness was over.
She had been kind to me in the other dreams. Careful.
The way you are careful with a person who does not yet know how badly they have been hurt.
She was not careful now. There was no time left, and we both knew it, and the knowledge sat between us at the same table where she had taught her granddaughter to read the patterns of fate.
She did not waste time.
She told me what I was. Not the genteel version.
The version a witch tells a woman who's been through enough to accept the truth.
She told me my line was old, and the dark answered me because I was made of the dark, and she told me there were things my body knew how to do that I would not fully understand yet.
Some things I would learn later, she said.
Tonight I needed to learn two.
The first one was that the shadows could undo spellwork and ethereal workings. It could dispel the bespelled and render it just another inane object. Something could be broken, moved, or undone.
She did not explain how, and I did not ask, because I had already done it once without the shadows, without being taught, lying under a bed in the dark scratching a warlock’s hum out of the wood with a wet thumb.
Some things you do not learn. You remember them from a place older than the part of you that learns, and the light bulb flickers on, and the knowledge comes to you when you need it most. Like breathing, or riding a bike, both are muscle memory, even if you have to learn the latter.
She watched the understanding land on my face and she nodded, once, the way Tara’s grandmother nodded, the way Rowena nodded, the way every woman I had met since I drove into this part of the world nodded when a thing requires no further explanation.
The second one was that the shadows could do the same thing to a person, but that could have harsher repercussions.
“What he took from those women,” Celie said. “And from you. He didn’t make any of that power himself. He stole it.”
Her fingers moved once against the table.
“The dark knows who belongs to it, chère. You call those pieces home, and the dark will take them back.”
Her eyes lifted to mine.
“You take back what he stole; set those girls free, but be careful not to become what he’s become.”
I understood her without asking.
I understood it because I had been watching it happen to me for days.
The flat quiet where horror should have been.
The way a man’s face coming apart across a room had moved me about as much as a fly hitting a window.
That was the road. That was the first mile of the exact road Marcus had walked all the way to its end, the road that turns a person into a thing that drops roses on what it eats.
The dark could give me back what he stole.
It could also, if I let it, give me a reason to stop counting the costs, and the not-counting was entirely what was wrong with him.
Celie was not asking me to embrace the horrific.
She was teaching me where the cliff was, in the dark, so my foot would know to stop before the edge.
“How?”
She showed me what she knew.
***
I woke up.
The cypress was quiet around me. The sigil at my thigh was warm. The candles were where they had been when I went down. The door remained bolted.
I lay still for a moment, listening. I looked at the silver rope on my right wrist. I summoned the shadows from the corners of the room.
I watched as they drifted from the walls, the floor and parts of the ceiling, collecting above me in a cloud of anticipation.
They were eager.
I could feel them.
I beckoned them to drain the magic from my bindings, unsure if any existed at all.
They wrapped around my wrists and ankles.
A soothing pulse of energy, growing, getting stronger.
The silver hissed against my skin, the icy burn dissipating, leaving only the throbbing sting of my injuries.
The rope at my wrists became just a rope, then with my teeth and the help of my shadowy helpers, I worked the knots.
I did the left wrist. Then the right wrist. Next, I freed my ankles. Clumsy and shaky from lack of food.
When I stood up, miraculously my legs took my weight. I bent down to the cot frame and slid one of the rope lengths into the back of my waistband.
My body was a ledger of everything the last days had spent.
The rib ground when I breathed deeply, so I breathed shallow.
The rope had taken the skin off both wrists down to something that wept and stuck.
My mouth was swollen on one side and my tongue kept finding the split on the inside of my cheek, the iron taste of it the only thing I had eaten in longer than I would let myself count.
I should not have been on my feet. A reasonable body would have stayed down, but I had lost all sense of reason and had only one goal in mind.
I picked up a second length of the multi-fiber cord that was now just a rope.
I stood there in the candlelight, ruined and upright, and I waited for the man who had done all of this to me, to make the mistake of opening that door.
The shadows had come up the walls without my asking.
They were not curling like the quiet things they had been before. They were a column of black at each corner of the room, breathing, watching me, waiting to be told.
I turned my hand palm-up.
The shadow at the corner nearest me lifted off the wall and came across the room and settled in my palm the way a pet settles in a lap it knows.
I thought about the second thing Celie had shown me.
The shadow in my palm grew hungry.
I let it. I let the hunger sit in my hand for a long moment and learned the feel of it. The hunger was clean. It was old. It was not the kind of hunger Marcus had. This one was mine.
The bolt on the door slid.
***
Tara’s boots had been soaked through since the second they crossed the property line.
The storm had come inland exactly the way the barometer at Thornwood had been promising it would, and the parish road that ran around the back side of the Webb plantation had turned to mud under the truck before they were a quarter mile from the staging point.
Bodie’s truck was nowhere to be seen, but they knew he and Mel were running the perimeter, watching whatever needed watching, ready to do whatever they were officially not here to do.
Tara had never been any good at waiting.
Give her a thing to do with her hands and she could outlast anybody; her grandmother had built her that way, had put a mortar and pestle in her fist before she was tall enough to see over the table and taught her that fear was just energy that had not been given a job yet.
The trouble was that the job tonight belonged to other people.
The wolves would do the closing. She was here to read the field, break the wards, and put her body between Serena and anything that came at them.
Until the door opened, there was nothing for her hands to do but shake, so she made fists of them inside her wet sleeves, counted cypress trunks and watched the storm throw out sheets of water up and down the coast, occasionally dousing them in its fury.
Jasper had peeled off a quarter mile back the other way, on the narrow road that ran past the main gate. He had fled the truck as a wolf without a word to anyone.
Callum was at the front of the line on foot. Tara, a step behind him. Dex at her shoulder.
The garconniere was visible through the trees.
It was a wooden structure on raised piers, the way she had been picturing it since Bodie had pointed it out on the map this morning at the breakfast table.
A small building. Three windows on the side they were coming up on, all of them dark.
The main house of the plantation sat farther up the property, derelict, roofless on one corner where the storms of ‘05 had battered it.
The garconniere was the only thing on the back of the property that looked like anybody had been living in it for at least thirty years.
Tara stopped at the tree line.
She put her hand flat to the trunk of the live oak nearest her.
A reveal rune hummed once at her wrist and showed her what was in the air between her and the garconniere.
It was bad.