19. The Worst Night #3
I knew what it was costing them to send it.
I had learned the price of this by now, learned it in the basin that cracked, and what I was pulling through the threads tonight was so far past a cracked bowl.
I was terrified of what it would do to them.
Out in the storm somewhere, three men were emptying themselves into me through the only door Marcus had not managed to shut, and they were going to keep doing it until there was nothing left in them, because that was who they were, and because none of them would have forgiven the others for stopping.
Knowing did not slow my hand. It did the opposite.
I was not going to let them spend themselves to the bone and have it be for nothing.
If they were going to bleed for me, I was going to be worth the blood.
Marcus had been alive for only fuck knew how long, and he had been saving up for the worst night of his life that whole time. The worst night had come. He reached behind himself to the cot without looking at it.
He came up with a vial.
He broke it on the cypress boards at his feet.
Smoke rose. Not gray. Reddish-black.
My shadows recoiled. They came off my legs and my ribs and the column at my back like they had been touched by a hand from hell.
My right knee went. The cypress floorboards were against my left palm before I knew I had put it there.
The bond rang. All three threads at once. Hard. The brothers had felt the shadows go.
Marcus stepped forward to pick up his knife.
I had two seconds.
Celie’s voice rang in my ears. The dark do no run from old things. The dark, it eats old things if you let it.
I hadn’t fully understood at the time. I understood her now.
I opened my mouth and breathed the smoke in.
There are no words for what it is to take a thing like that down into yourself on purpose.
It went in like winter water, like swallowing the bottom of a lake, every dead and rotten thing he had ever folded into his work pouring down my throat at once, and yet it burned.
For one endless second I was certain I had been wrong, certain it would fill me the way it had filled him, certain I had just done the one thing Celie warned me not to do.
And then the dark in me opened the way a drain opens under standing water, and the rot went through me instead of into me, and I understood the difference she had been trying to teach me in her kitchen of herbs, bones and chicory coffee.
Marcus kept what he took. That was his whole curse: the holding, the hoarding, the centuries of stolen things rotting inside him because he could not bear to let one of them go.
The darkness in me was not built to keep.
It took his poison and did not hold it for even a breath.
It moved it along, out, gone, and came back to me clean, hungry, and mine.
The shadows came back to my body in a rush.
They came back darker.
My knee held me again.
I came up off the floor.
Three threads continued pouring supernatural wolf strength into a body that should not have been on its feet.
The shadows tightened around my ribs.
I stayed standing.
Marcus had the knife in his hand again. He stopped half a step before he reached me.
Taking in what I had just done. Trying to process it.
His face wore the same expression as it had in the wood-paneled room the first time he had realized I was not what he had thought I was. Three years of plans rewriting themselves on his face in a second.
Still, he came at me.
I caught Marcus’s second sigil-hand at the wrist before he could shoot it my way, and the shadow on my hand drank the sigil out of his palm in one pull, and the dirty yellow went out, and the trail-mark in my thigh resealed warm.
Marcus’s face blanched. And I took some measure of joy that he understood what was about to happen.
The shadows in the corners of the room hit him all at once.
They came off the walls and up off the floor.
They came down from the ceiling and wrapped around him from every direction at once, like they had been waiting since the first night he had entered my life.
The sound that came out of him perhaps should have been justice enough, but I needed more.
Every woman who came before me needed more, deserved more.
He went to his knees on the cypress floor.
The shadows held him there.
I walked across the room.
I put my right fist against his chest and watched as it became one with the shadow. Then I plunged it home.
#
The first string of essence came home in a rush.
It rose through me the way tidewater rises beneath a rock left too long on dry sand.
The rock was me.
The tide was three years of lost time.
The piece settled deep in my chest, finding the hollow Marcus had carved out and fitting itself there as if it had never belonged anywhere else.
I straightened a quarter inch.
My ribs held together a little better than they had a breath ago. The shadows bracing my legs eased with them, because the leg I was leaning on no longer needed quite so much help to stay under me.
I understood Celie’s lesson then.
I had been waiting for the dark to lift me.
The dark was never going to lift me.
It was going to return me to myself, a piece at a time, and every piece it returned was another place to stand.
I pulled the next piece.
It came faster.
The cold from the dark wood-paneled room slammed back into me and locked into place somewhere behind my heartbeat. My legs took more of their own weight. The gold thread at my chest eased a fraction because Jasper no longer had to force so much of himself through it.
Somewhere, at the edge of the bond, Jasper made a sound I felt more than heard. It was more of a roar than a howl, and it echoed to the very tenets of my soul.
I pulled the next piece.
And the next.
The shadows around my body stopped behaving like scaffolding. They no longer held me upright. They gathered and shifted with a different purpose now, feeding the pull itself, because the pulls were feeding each other.
The hunger in my fist widened.
Marcus’s chest grew harder to keep solid beneath my hand.
I want to tell you I thought about mercy.
I did not. I had read somewhere, in the life I used to have, that the truest test of a person is what they do with someone who is finally, completely in their power, and I had always imagined I would be the kind of person who found something like grace in that moment.
I was not. What I found was Celie’s warning, and I held onto it, not because I wanted to spare him but because I did not want to become him on my way out of that room.
There is a version of this where I took my time.
Where I made him carry a hundredth of what he had spent three years feeding on, in me, in those women, in everyone he had ever dropped a rose on.
The dark would have let me. The darkness would have happily let me stand there and savor it.
I did not let myself, and the not-letting was the hardest thing I did that whole long night, harder than fighting with a broken rib, harder than inhaling a toxic winter smoke.
I took back what was stolen, and I let the rest of him go to ash, and I did not make a single second of it last longer than it had to.
That was the line. I walked right up to it. I did not cross it.
What was mine came home.
What was not his left with it.
I want to be careful about how I say this part, because it is the closest I have ever come to something divine, and I do not have the right words for it.
They were not memories. They were not ghosts, exactly.
They were the last stolen pieces of women who had been taken the way I had been taken, fed on the way I had been fed on, kept the way I had been kept, and what Marcus had done to them was worse than killing them, because he had taken their life and then refused to let even the smallest part of them go on to wherever the rest of them had gone.
He had held them in the dark inside himself for decades.
The youngest of them had been waiting longer than I had been alive.
Each one came loose. That is the only honest way to say it.
A weight I had not known I was carrying lifted off, one and then another, each one its own particular grief, each one a woman I would never know and would never stop being haunted by.
A girl from a parking lot in Savannah who had loved someone enough to sign a restraining order and die for the courage of it.
A woman from a hotel bar in Mobile in a year I was not yet born.
A woman in a small Texas town whose name the dark knew, and I did not, and would not, and did not need to, because not-knowing was the point.
He had taken their names. I was giving back everything that was left.
The pulls were not separate pulls anymore. They were one long current, and the current was running through Marcus into me into the dark, and out. The threads of our bond had settled into stillness because, for the first time since all of this began, I believed I could stand on my own.
I had stopped needing to be held up.
Marcus had stopped being able to.
The shape of him around my fist that remained deep in his chest got smaller and smaller as the stolen things came out.
His gray-green eyes turned the paper-pale color they had been the last time he had stood at this door looking at me without coming in, and then they went past paper-pale into the no-color a man’s eyes go when nothing is behind them anymore.
What remained of his body folded.
It folded down through itself the way a paper crumples in a fist, and the shadows released him down to the wooden floorboards, and the shape of him on the floor was a man for one breath longer, and then it was ash.
It was ash all the way through.