19. The Worst Night #2
Tara had grown up at her grandmother’s elbow reading work like this, and the first thing Grandmère ever taught her was that you could tell a great deal about a person by the spells they left between themselves and the world.
These told her about a man who expected company and intended to make the effort expensive.
There was nothing defensive in them, nothing that simply said keep out.
Every layer was built to take a piece of whoever crossed it, to bleed, weaken, and frighten.
The oldest one, the one she could not read, sat under decades of others like scaffolding, holding the layered structure up.
Her witch-eye watered looking at it. Her stomach turned.
Somewhere in that small cypress building her best friend had been living within the reach of the man who made these, and Tara had been sixty miles north drawing charms and not getting there fast enough.
She forced herself to read through the magics slowly.
There were three wards she could see and a fourth she could feel the edge of but could not yet read.
The first was a binding circle laid around the garconniere itself — a ring at the foundation of the raised piers, drawn into the wood, set to lock anything walking up to the door inside it once they tripped the inner line.
The second was a hex she did not know the origins of or even its kin.
It was laid across the path between the tree line and the garconniere steps.
The third was a lock spell on the door itself, the kind that did not just refuse a hand on the handle but pushed the hand back hard enough to break the bones in it.
The fourth one was much older, darker. She did not have a label for it yet. All of them were nasty pieces of work, intent on weakening any who crossed them.
She turned her head a fraction toward Callum.
“Three I can read. One I can’t.”
“The one you can’t?”
“Older. Deeper. I want to dispel it last.”
Callum did not argue.
She reached into the inside of her jacket and pulled out the first of the paper packets sealed with wax that was no longer warm. She passed one to Callum, one to Dex, and kept one for herself.
“Binding circle at the foundation. Drop one as you cross the threshold where the pier meets the ground. The hex on the path is mine. I’ll drop it as we step across. The lock on the door is —”
None of them knew the bolt had already slid.
***
Marcus came in.
He had taken his shirt off somewhere. He had a working knife in his right hand and a sigil drawn fresh on the inside of his left wrist, and his eyes had gone the gray-green color they went when he had decided.
He had not fed recently. The skin at his temples had gone thin and paper-pale.
But he still outweighed me by enough to matter.
My ribs hurt when I breathed. The rope burn at my wrists was raw to the muscle.
My legs were under me only by sheer will alone.
He stopped in the doorway.
He saw me on my feet.
He saw the silver rope on the floor.
He saw, I think, what he had always seen in me. A woman weak and vulnerable.
That was his last mistake, and it was the same mistake he had been making since the first night, the one all men like him make eventually because their power depends on it being true.
He looked at a woman standing in the wreck of a room he had built to break her, free of bindings he had tied himself, wreathed in a dark he could not touch, and his eyes still slid past all of it to land on the only thing he knew how to see, which was prey.
He had fed on me for three years and learned nothing about me.
He had locked me in the dark for days and learned less.
He had been so busy taking what I was that he never once looked at who I was, and now there was no time left for him to learn the difference, and that mistake was going to cost him dearly.
His mouth opened.
I smiled.
It was the same smile I had given him in the wood-paneled room after a romp in the grove, and the same smile I had given him in the chair room when he meant to torture me, and the same smile I had given him in this very room before he attacked me.
But this time the smile carried something the other three had not.
Three years of fucking enough; the storm that raged in me dwarfed that of the one kicking up outside. Armed with secrets from Tara’s grandmother, and a handful of hungry darkness, I was done.
He came at me.
***
The first thing I realized was that my body was going to fold.
The second thing I realized was that the shadows were not going to let it.
They came up the inside of my legs in a cold weight that was not warmth and was not muscle and was not mine, exactly, but was completely mine, and they took the load my knees had been about to drop.
They came up my spine. They settled around the rib Marcus had cracked yesterday.
They held everything that was about to fail.
I was standing on borrowed time, in borrowed armor, with borrowed support.
The weight of the darkness around my bones was not part of me. And yet, it was completely mine.
Marcus fired the sigil from his left wrist.
It hit me in the chest and opened the mark at the inside of my thigh where Eli had laid the trail, and the mystic warmth in the mark went taut against my skin, and Eli was about to take the hit with me, and I did not have the breath to apologize.
Marcus’s knife came for my throat.
The shadow in my palm answered before I did.
It snaked up the inside of my arm like a black whip and caught Marcus’s wrist mid-arc and snapped the bone at the joint.
His knife dropped.
He did not scream. He had been working pain into his own body for centuries, and he did not waste a scream on a wrist.
He came in with the other hand.
The other hand had a sigil on it, too. Smaller.
Older. The type of working a warlock reserved for the worst night of his life because some night of his life was eventually going to be the worst one.
The sigil glowed dirty yellow in the candlelight, and Marcus pressed it flat to my collarbone where Callum had put his mouth in the dream space.
It tried to pull the mark out of my thigh, the mark at my collarbone and the nip on my jaw, attacking both the silver and onyx threads of my bond.
The gold thread went warm, then hot.
It was not comfort. It was not a hand on the back of my neck.
It was fire and heft. A force that should not have been able to travel that thread at all, and arrived anyway because Jasper willed it.
I was quickly learning that Jasper wrote his own fucking rules and that dark, feisty rebel that lived somewhere deep in me loved him for it.
***
Somewhere to the south, where the main gate ran in, a sound went up that was not the storm.
Then it cut off.
Callum had gone still at the head of the line. Not the stillness of listening. The stillness of a wolf who had just heard something he did not want to hear.
Tara was wired into Dex enough by now to catch the edge of it secondhand, and what was vibing off the brothers was not the storm.
It was Jasper, down at the gate, doing a great deal more than merely clearing a path.
The bond the brothers shared was something she would never be a part of, and only through Dex did the residue reach her.
Right then, he was bracing Callum as his brother reached down that private line toward Jasper and found something that made him hesitate.
Whatever Jasper was doing to the men at the main gate, Tara got the feeling he had quite being nice about it. The feeling that was sliding through Dex was not triumph. Not satisfaction. It was the sharp recoil of someone realizing a line might have been crossed more than a few miles back.
Tara couldn’t see what Callum saw. She didn’t even have the right words for it. But she recognized the concern all the same. The fear was not that Jasper would fail. It was that he would not stop.
It was written on Callum's face when the sounds at the gate finally ceased, and the description for his expression was not relief.
***
Marcus took the hit at his wrist and rolled with it. He had been taking hits for centuries and it showed. He kept his footing.
His off-hand snapped to his own forearm. He broke a sigil there; I had not seen him draw it. The air around his palm turned dirty yellow, and the room grew thick with the smell of something that stank worse than the dead-rat-in-a-barrel dark liquid that had been in the copper basin.
A shape materialized out of the yellow. Small. Evil. Pulled up out of somewhere a man had no business reaching into.
He pointed it at me.
It hit me below the ribs.
A flash of gold streaked out of my chest and ripped it in half before it could climb me. The air went sour where the halves dropped. The room got darker for a breath.
Marcus did not stop. He took the next step in.
A breath later, the silver thread grew warm.
Eli. Pushing strength to me even as I could tell he had little to give.
The dark thread went warm last.
Callum. He had waited longer than the others because he was the shield, because keeping the rest of them standing had become so instinctive he no longer knew how to stop, and because giving anything over put more than just him at risk.
Three threads of wolf-strength were not going to be enough.