21. Thornwood
Chapter twenty-one
Thornwood
Iwoke to gravel crunching under tires.
The truck had stopped at the porch. The door hung open beside me, and somewhere between sleep and the humid after-the-storm air I understood that someone had opened it for me.
My bare feet were already on the running board.
Callum’s hand was already at my elbow, steady and warm through the thin sleeve of the borrowed shirt.
I had no memory of the running board, and no memory of his hand arriving there.
My body had done these things without me, the way it had been doing everything for hours, moving me from one place to the next while the rest of me lagged somewhere behind.
The gravel was wet. I stood in it in my bare feet and looked down at my own hand resting on Callum’s forearm, and for half a breath I didn’t recognize it as mine.
The knuckles were scraped. The wrist above it wore a raw red band where the rope had been.
It could have been a stranger’s hand, borrowed along with the shirt.
The rain had stopped. That was the second thing I understood, slowly, the way understanding came to me now.
The cypress at the back of the preserve was a familiar black wall against a graying sky, and the windows of the house threw long yellow rectangles out across the grass.
Better days were coming. I had been out in the dark long enough for it to end.
Tara’s hand slipped out of mine. I had not known it was there until the warmth of it was gone.
Rowena was off the porch before I had cleared the gravel.
She crossed the strip of grass between the steps and the truck without slowing, and then both of her hands were on my face, and they were shaking.
In all the strange, blood-soaked stretch of life I had spent near this woman, I had never once seen Rowena Voss’s hands shake.
She did not speak. She set her forehead against mine and let her breath break apart against my cheek, and her whole body folded a fraction toward me, as though some weight she had been holding upright for days had finally come down.
I held her. It was the wrong way around, and I knew it even as I did it.
I had come down out of that truck one bad step from being a body that could not carry its own weight, and here I stood with my arms around the brothers’ mother in the wet gray morning, holding her up against my cracked ribs while the wolves waited silent in the dark and let it happen.
I do not know how long it lasted. Long enough for both of us. That was all it needed to be.
When she stepped back she did not apologize.
Her hand returned to my cheek and stayed, her thumb moving once at the corner of my jaw.
She did not weep. She pushed her fingers into my hair the way a mother does to a child she had given up on getting back, and then she let go and stepped away the rest of the way, and the morning closed cool over the place where she had been.
There was something else in her, under all of it.
I was too far gone that morning to identify it, and I did not let myself try.
But when she stepped back, in the set of her shoulders, there was a second weight she had not set down, a thing she was holding off to the side of all this relief and letting none of us see.
Bodie stood at the bottom of the steps and did not come up.
He and Rowena did not look at each other.
In a yard full of people who could not stop putting their hands on me, for some reason all I noticed was the two of them being careful not to catch the other’s eye.
Eli stood at the corner of the porch, and he was shaking, too. His off-hand hung at his side with a tremor running through it he was not bothering to hide, or could not hide. I had seen Eli hold steady through things that would have broken a steadier man. I had not seen him like this.
I crossed to him without letting myself look at his face. I could not look at it. If I looked, I would see exactly what the bridge had cost him. I put my hand flat on his chest and kept my eyes on his collarbone.
“Eli.”
“Beautiful.” His voice came rough at the edges, worn down to something I had never heard in it before.
I leaned my forehead against his chest and breathed in his scent. I was really here. He was really here. This was real.
Two women stood behind the screen door. One of them was the woman from my dreams, the one who had poured chicory coffee grounds into my hands in a warm kitchen that did not exist. Tara’s grandmother.
I had never met her in the waking world.
The other I knew. Miss Delphine, who had woven the ribbon crown onto my head at the festival, whose name Jasper had said with fondness.
Standing there shaking in the cold, I could not have told you whether either of them was real, or whether my mind had finally started handing me the dead and the dreamed to fill in the holes the night had torn in me.
Tara’s grandmother lifted her hand toward my face, held it an inch from my cheek, and let it fall, as if touching me might undo us both.
Miss Delphine came around her and set her hand at the small of my back, and without a word she steered me through the screen door and into the hall.
The warmth of the house came up around me all at once, like a hug.
A sound came out of me I had not meant to make.
Miss Delphine kept her hand where it was.
“Upstairs, baby. One step at a time.”
The stairs were harder than I had braced for.
Each step took both hands on the banister and an effort I had to talk myself into.
Whatever I had found inside myself to stand against Marcus had burned down to nothing on the drive home, and what it left behind was this weak, scraped-out woman hauling herself up a staircase one riser at a time.
Tara came up behind me. Miss Delphine stayed at my elbow.
The brothers were somewhere below us in the warm, bright belly of the house, and they were not following me up, because they knew the climb was mine to make and that watching me struggle through it would only cost me more.
We reached the top. Tara opened the door to the guest bath.
“Tara.”
“I’m in the next room when you’re done.” She did not hug me, and she did not reach out to put a hand on me the way people do when they are afraid you might come apart. She stepped back into the hall and gave me the one thing I needed more than touching, which was room.
Jasper leaned in the bathroom doorway with his hands shoved in his pockets, waiting for me to look up at him. He did not ask me to. He did not crowd the doorway or rush to fill the quiet. I kept my eyes on the floor tile.
“I need to be alone for a minute.”
He did not move.
“Jasper.”
“Yeah.”
“I need to get in the tub before you come back in.”
He did not ask why, and he did not nod like he was granting me something.
He stepped clear of the doorway, drew the door most of the way shut behind him, and stayed on the other side of it, close, because going any farther away wasn’t what I wanted either, and Jasper had always had a knack for reading me.
I stood in the bathroom longer than I had intended.
The shirt was worse to get off than it had been back in the garconniere; my arms shook the whole way, and my ribs lit up where Marcus had cracked one.
I worked it over my head and held the warm cotton bunched in my fists for one slow breath before I let it fall.
The bra came off easier. I lowered myself into the tub.
The water was hot enough to hurt. It found the rope burn first and then the rib, and the sound I made as I sat down into it was not a sound I had given permission for. I let it out and let the water close over the worst of the ache.
The door opened a quarter inch.
“Serena.”
“I’m in.”
“Yeah.”
“You can come back.”
He came in. For a long while he did not look at my body at all.
He looked at my face, then at the lip of the tub, at the basin and the folded cloth Tara had set out, at the soap, and only then did he let himself look at the rest of me.
The gold rose in his eyes a quarter of the way and went straight back down.
He did not take the half-second he usually took. He did not need it tonight.
He knelt at the side of the tub. “Tell me when to stop.”
“I know.”
“Tell me anyway.”
“Okay.”
He picked up the cloth and started at my hands, working each finger one at a time, slow and silent, cleaning away the lines of dirt and ash and the dark crescent of a bite.
Then he moved to my wrists. When he reached the rope burn he stopped, and held the cloth in the air above the raw band of it, his eyes turning a bright gold.
“Jasper.”
“Yeah.”
“Lay it down.”
“Yeah.” He laid the towel down. His eyes stayed gold. He poured more salve into the tub. The water carried the salve into the burn, and the sting at my wrists eased by a degree, and he moved on up my arm to my throat.
When he came to the bruise at my collarbone he stopped again.
I looked at his face for the first time since he had stepped into the room.
He could not touch it. The wolf riding just under his skin was not the wolf I had watched tear across the field at the end.
This one was looking at the place where two of his brothers and the man we had killed had all put their hands on me inside of two days, and it could not bring itself to touch it. Not tonight.
I lifted my hand out of the water, took his wrist, and moved his hand to the bruise myself.
“Touch it.”
“Serena.”
“Touch it.” He did. His thumb came down so carefully it was almost not there at all. I kept my fingers wrapped around his wrist. “That one is mine,” I said.
“Yeah.”
“Marcus didn’t get to keep it. None of you did either. I’m the one wearing it.”
“Yeah.”
“So touch it like it’s mine, like it’s me.”