20. No One’s Victim
Chapter twenty
No One's Victim
The wards still stood between the tree line and the garconniere. The brothers had been holding out in the storm longer than any of them wanted to. They poured everything they had through their bond into a fight on the far side of a door they could not reach, and then it flowed back to them.
Dex had gone very still beside her. His hand had come up to his chest.
“Dex.”
He did not answer.
Callum spoke first.
He spoke so quietly she almost missed it.
“She’s coming out.”
The door of the garconniere opened.
Tara had been picturing the door coming open the way doors come open in a rescue — a measure of caution, then a body half-collapsing across the threshold, the rescuers running forward to catch what came out. That was not what came out.
Serena walked out.
She came down the steps of the garconniere into the rain in the manner of a woman walking out of her own house at the end of a long day.
Bare feet on the cypress steps. The torn cotton blouse she had been wearing for days hung off one shoulder and was dark with what appeared to Tara as a mixture of dried blood and dirt.
Her hair was loose. Her hands were down at her sides.
There were burns at her wrists, seeping and raw to the muscle, and there was a mark that strongly resembled a hickey at the dip of her collarbone visible through the open neckline.
There were shadows moving around her and with her, like a halo of darkness.
They moved at her hands and at her feet and around the line of her ribs in a slow steady tide that did not stop at the edges of her body. She wore them as if they were a part of her, a natural, flowing part of her like the curls that cascaded across her shoulders and down her back.
Tara had been braced for a victim. She was ashamed of it later, but it was the truth; some part of her had spent the whole drive south building the picture, the half-collapsed woman, the one who would need carrying, the one whose eyes would not quite be with them all the way home.
That was not the woman who came down the steps of the garconniere into the rain.
This woman walked. She walked through wards that should have flayed the skin off anyone who touched them, and they died under her bare feet like candles pinched out, one after another, and she did not so much as glance down at them.
Tara stood at the tree line with the rain running into her collar and understood that she was looking at something she did not yet fully comprehend, and that the closest label her grandmother had ever given her for it was not an assumption you said out loud about a person you loved.
She crossed the binding circle without seeming to notice it.
Tara watched the circle burn out at her feet like a wick going through to the dry end.
She crossed the hex at the center of the path the same way.
The hex unwound under her bare heel before the heel had finished landing.
The lock spell on the door hanging open behind her, the nasty one which had been there a moment ago, was simply no longer there.
The fourth working — the older one, the one Tara had not been able to read — flickered once in the air around the garconniere and went out, and Tara understood with a small, clean punch to her gut what had killed it.
It was Marcus’s anchor. Marcus was not holding it anymore.
She did the math. An anchor that old does not simply fail.
Somebody powerful enough to lay it had to die, or be unmade, or be carried so far past the bounds of his own body that holding a spell was the least of what he had lost. There was no third option that ended with that man still walking.
The anchor had gone out like a pilot light, and the whole back of the property had gone dark with it.
Tara looked at the open door of the garconniere, black and dripping into the storm, and she did not need to step inside to know what she would and would not find standing in there.
***
Callum stepped out of the treeline first.
He moved the way he had moved on the back porch in Magnolia Creek the night Serena had arrived at the garage apartment with a duffel bag over her shoulder and a charm in her pocket. Slow. Steady. Hands open at his sides.
Serena saw him.
She did not stop.
She did not speed up either. She came across the wet grass at the same walking pace she had come down the steps; the shadows moving at her hands and her feet and her torso, and Callum met her halfway across the open ground and rested his hand at the base of her neck, and Serena leaned her forehead against his chest. They spoke no words.
They didn’t need to. The bond sang.
The echo of it came to Tara through Dex.
That was the strangest part of the last three days, stranger even than the spells and the wolves.
The way she had started to read his feelings, an understanding of things that came to her through him.
Not words. Just knowing. What came through Dex now, standing at her shoulder with his hand at the small of her back, was a flood of something so large and so relieved it nearly took her knees, and it was not even aimed at her; it was Callum’s, bleeding through the pack the way a struck note will set a second string humming across a room.
Tara had not asked for this. She had spent her whole life keeping a careful distance from exactly this kind of tangling-up with other people’s hearts.
And here she stood in a storm at the edge of a dead man’s property, wired into a family she had known for mere days, reading a wolf’s relief in her skin, and she could not for the life of her make herself want to be anywhere else.
She was also starting to recognize the individual bonds. That myriad of threads that built the tapestry of a pack.
Through Dex she felt the pack itself: the broad current that connected all of them, everybody's emotions bleeding into everybody else's.
It was the widest bond and the easiest to make, the thing that had let a packless reject, a coffee-shop woman, and a witch from Nashville throw themselves into the same night's work.
Beneath it ran something she could not touch. A private bond between the three brothers, older than the rest and closed to outsiders. Whenever she brushed against it through Dex, she found the door shut.
And then there was whatever existed between Serena and the three of them.
It was not pack. It was not blood. It was something else entirely. Something that looked and felt an awful lot like a complex form of the hum in her own chest.
The kind of thing the wolfing world had spent a thousand years of laws and treaties trying to prevent, and would have no earthly idea what to do with now that it had walked barefoot out of a dead man's house.
Dex moved next. He did not crowd them. He moved half a step out and stood at Tara’s shoulder. His hand came down to the small of her back.
The cypress and live oaks dripped around them.
Tara made herself walk forward.
She crossed the wet grass to where Serena was standing inside the half-circle of the wolves.
Her boots squelched. The rain ran down her face.
She had not cried since the night of the sigil-burned brake line, and she was not going to cry now if she could help it, but she was going to put her arms around her friend and she was going to do it before another minute passed.
She reached them.
She put her hand on Serena’s wrist near where the rope burn was raw.
Serena turned out of Callum’s chest just enough to look at her.
In the gray storm light, beyond the ash and blood on her torn blouse and the shadows still moving around her hands, Tara saw the face she had known since they were eighteen—standing on a cracked Savannah sidewalk, sharing greasy french fries from the diner two blocks from the dorms.
Tara did not say what she had been planning to say.
She just held Serena’s wrist.
Serena turned her wrist over in Tara’s hand. The shadow on her palm settled. The hunger went quiet.
“Hi, T.”
“Hi, Reen.”
It was the voice. That was what broke something loose in Tara’s chest that she had been holding clamped shut since the morning the phone went to voicemail.
Not the shadows, not the ash she could smell coming off the open door, not the bruises or the blood dark on the torn blouse.
The voice. The same flat dry two syllables Serena had been answering her with since they were eighteen and broke on a cracked sidewalk in Savannah, the voice that meant I am still in here, the one Tara had been terrified that she would never get to hear again.
Whatever else had happened in that building, whatever Serena had become to walk out of it through those wards, she was still the same girl Tara knew.
She held the raw wrist in both hands and let that one fact be bigger than all the others for a moment, because she had earned the moment, and so had Serena.
Tara did not let go.
She did not let go for a long beat.
When she did, it was to take her jacket off her own shoulders and put it around Serena’s, and Serena let her.
Callum spoke without lifting his head from Serena’s hair.
“We need to get off this property.”
Dex nodded.
Tara took her first full breath since the door of the garconniere had opened.
***
They went back the way they had come.
Through the cypress. Through the rain. Around the wards that had unwound under Serena’s feet on the way out.
The garconniere stood behind them with its door open into the wet dark, and the pile of ash on the cypress floor inside it stayed where Serena had left it, and the storm came down across the back of the Webb plantation and started washing the wooden steps clean.
Callum carried Serena the last fifty yards.
She let him.
Her head settled against the curve of his shoulder. Her bare feet hung over the inside of his elbow. The shadows that had been moving around her hands and her torso eased back into the line of her body and went quiet. They did not retreat. They settled.