19. The Worst Night #4
The shadows lifted off the pile of ash, wrapped around me, and waited.
I was on my feet.
I stood over what was left of him, and I waited again for something that never came, the same way I had waited in the room where the first warlock’s face came apart.
I waited for horror. I waited for the flat quiet that had scared me worse than horror would have.
Neither one came this time. What came instead was something I had not had a name for in so long that it took me a moment to recognize it, sitting there warm and steady in a chest that was fuller than it had been in years.
It was not triumph. It was not even relief, exactly.
It was the quiet of a debt finally settled, of stolen things finally on their way home, of a woman standing in her own body again after a long time spent locked out of it.
I had been afraid, in the dark room, of what I was becoming.
Standing in the ash, I understood that I had not become anything. I had come back.
I had been on my feet through the last of the siphoning pulls.
The bond rang one long note. Three at once.
I sent it back. Across all three threads. I sent them strength the way they had sent it to me, because what they had given me was more than they could afford, and I had not been put back together in order to leave them hollow.
The bond rang again. Softer.
I lifted my hand. The black drew back into my skin the way ink draws back when you tilt a bottle and let it settle. By the count of three, my hand was just a hand again.
I was tired. I was hungry. I was standing.
My ribs hurt, and they were going to hurt for a while, and the rope burn at my wrists was raw, and I was on my feet anyway, in a room where what had been Marcus Webb was a pile of ash on the floor, and the dark was steady in me in a way that felt whole, in a way I had not felt in many years.
I took a breath.
I started for the door.
***
She was on the floor before she understood that she had fallen.
The bond, the one she had been wearing for years, the one that had tied her to the male she had built a life around, was tearing in slow, long pulls.
The tearing was screaming inside her chest in a register she had never heard before, and her body had folded down at the foot of the bed without asking her permission.
“Asher.”
He was not in the house.
“Asher!” She screamed.
He was not coming.
She had not called him by his name in years without already knowing where he was, and the silence in the bedroom did not give her his location back, and the tearing in her chest got louder.
She did not know why.
She held the front of her shirt over her chest with both her hands as if her hands could hold the bond inside.
The bond could not be held inside.
It tore.
She screamed.
She folded over her knees on the bedroom floor and shook, but did not weep because she had not been the kind of woman to weep in years, and her body could not remember how.
She had built her life on that bond. Whatever it had cost to get, whatever she had told herself in the early years to make the getting sit right, she had laid every brick of who she was against the fact of it, and now that fact was coming apart in her chest like wet paper and taking the walls down with it. She did not know why.
There was no reason for it, no wound she could point to, no slow cooling she could have watched coming.
It simply began, all at once, on an ordinary night with thunder shaking the windows, as though somewhere far off a hand had pulled a thread and the pulling had found her by accident, a thing she had been standing too close to when it broke.
The bond pulled again. Another thread of it left her. She rocked on the floor, her arms wrapped across her chest as pain sliced again against that which she held most sacred. She screamed again, but the thunder drowned it out.
She did not know that on a gulf road, in the midst of the storm, four people were navigating a derelict plantation to find a woman who had just turned a centuries-old warlock to ash.
She did not know the warlock was dead.
She did not know there had been a warlock.
She knew the bond was tearing. She knew the man she loved was being torn from her. She knew she was going to be alone or worse if she didn’t let them know.
She did not know about the swamp. She did not know about the garconniere, or the ash on the cypress floor, or the woman who was walking out through wards that should have killed her.
She did not know how many strands ran through the dark between her bedroom and the other room, or how old some of them were, or that when a strand that ancient burns away, the whole web shudders.
She only knew that she was on the floor, and that the man whose name she was screaming was not coming, and that something she had spent years certain she would never have to feel was happening to her, anyway.
For the first time in longer than she could remember, Naomi was afraid in a way she could not plan her way out of.