chapter 20 sister of thread

Odessa

The circle didn't pull me in. It opened, like a mouth.

One moment I was standing in the farmhouse kitchen with Evan's arm locked around my waist. The next, the floor dropped out and the silver came up, and we were falling through a place with no walls, no ceiling, and no sound. Only light, thin and cold, and a thousand glittering threads stretched in every direction like the inside of a loom.

I hit something soft. Grass, I thought. Silver grass, tall and pale, rippling in a wind I couldn't feel.

"Evan?"

No answer. I turned in a full circle. He was gone. The bond, which had been humming in my chest for days like a second pulse, had gone quiet.

My heart started to pound.

"He's not here," said a voice behind me. "It's only us."

I spun.

She stood ten feet away in the same grey coat, but the scar down her cheek had faded to a pale line, and the thin silver ring around her pupils shone like a coin. Without the cold mask, she looked younger. Frightened, even. Her hands were open at her sides, empty.

"Kessa," I said.

"Aurelia." A small, bitter smile. "You can use it. I haven't heard it in a long time."

"I don't care what your name is. Where's my husband?"

"Safe. Your brother and Mia are safe too." She held up both palms. "I know you won't believe that. I wouldn't. But it's true. My father needs them alive, which means he can't hurt them. And he can't hurt me." She stopped. "Not while I'm still useful."

I took a step toward her. The grass whispered around my ankles.

"You lied to me. You looked a little girl in the eye and told her I'd fix everything. You let me walk into a trap with thirty-one people who trusted you."

"Yes."

"Seven of them are dead."

"Yes." Her voice cracked. "I counted them. I count them every night."

I was so angry my hands were shaking. And I could feel the silver rising, rising, ready to take her apart, strand by strand, the way I'd taken the Priestess's puppet apart in the courtyard.

Then she dropped to her knees in the grass.

"Do it," she whispered. "I won't stop you. I've wanted someone to for forty years."

I stared at her.

"I was four," Aurelia said. "I watched my mother turn into a thing with no face. He told me if I was good, she'd come back. I believed him until I was twelve. Then I believed him because I had nothing else." She looked up, and her eyes were wet. "I'm not asking you to forgive me. I'm asking you to understand why I'm the one who has to say this to you. Because I'm the only person alive who knows exactly what happens if you open the door."

The silver in my chest slowed. Not gone. But slower.

"Tell me."

Evan

I woke in the farmhouse, on the floor, with my cheek pressed against cold chalk.

My arms wouldn't move. My legs wouldn't either. Threads had wound around every limb while I lay unconscious, fine as hair and strong as steel, pinning me to the kitchen floor in a perfect spiral. Beside me, Odessa lay on her back at the center of the circle, eyes closed, lips parted, silver pouring slowly out of her chest like smoke from a candle.

"Odessa."

Nothing.

"Odessa."

"She can't hear you, my boy."

Silas stood at the edge of the circle with his hands folded, calm as a man waiting for a train. His brown coat was brushed clean. His face was mild, almost kind. Only his eyes gave him away, frost on glass, with no warmth anywhere behind them.

"What have you done to her?"

"Nothing she wouldn't have done herself, given time." He tilted his head. "The Lunara walks between the threads when she sleeps. It's a gift. Aurelia is meeting her there now. They have so much to discuss."

Evan.

The old wolf's voice was low and urgent, a growl through the back of my skull.

Listen to me. He wants you angry. He wants you to fight the threads. Don't.

Then what do I do?

Remember the field. A pause. Remember what I told you about locks.

I thought. Hard. Past the rage, past the helpless thrash of my pulse, to that grassy place under the pearl-colored sky.

I was built to hold something out, the wolf had said. Not in.

And all at once, I saw it.

Silas thinks I'm a lock he can turn. But I'm not the lock at all. I'm the door.

Closer, said the wolf approvingly. Keep going.

A door doesn't need to be opened to do its job. It just needs to be shut.

And who's the only one who can shut it?

The answer came slowly, and then all at once, and my heart nearly stopped.

Her.

I looked at Odessa's still face and understood what Silas had never told his daughter, what four hundred years of planning had been built to hide.

He didn't need her to open the door.

He needed her to die at it.

Odessa

"Here is the truth," Aurelia said.

We sat side by side in the silver grass, not touching. She had her knees drawn up and her arms wrapped around them, and for a long time she didn't speak. I waited. I was learning how.

"The thing beyond the moon isn't a god. It isn't a demon. My mother called it the Hollow." She swallowed. "It wants thread. Life, in the shape of a wolf. It has been scratching at the edges of the world since before the first pack howled, and the only thing that ever held it back was a line of women whose threads were strong enough to bar the way."

"Lunara."

"Yes. Every one of them held the door, from the other side. They weren't prisoners. They were guards." Her mouth twisted. "Until Silas learned what they were. He thought it was the greatest power in the world, and he wanted it for himself. So he caught them, one by one, and he cut their threads, and each time one fell, the door got weaker."

"Then why would he want it open?"

"Because he doesn't think it's evil." She laughed, short and ugly. "He believes it's a promise. That whatever lives behind the door will grant the one who frees it anything he wants. He's wanted to see his wife again for four hundred years."

I turned to stare at her. "His wife?"

"The Moon Priestess who blessed your birth." Aurelia met my eyes. "Your great-grandmother. She was Silas Sorrel's wife, Odessa. Before she took the Goddess's vows, before he started cutting. She was the first woman he ever loved, and the first thread he ever severed. That's why he calls you niece."

The grass seemed to tilt.

"She tied my life to Josh's," I whispered. "She cut his mate thread to start my heart. She knew what he was."

"She was trying to hide you." Aurelia's voice went soft. "She spent her last years hiding you from him, in the only way she could. A moon-blooded child, born dead, tied to a human thread so the Hollow couldn't smell her. Silas didn't find you until you were seventeen, the night the bond with Evan snapped. After that, everything went wrong."

I thought of my father in that study, ashen, saying I thought I was saving you. Of Grayson's trembling hands. Of an old woman in grey robes handing a newborn back to a man and asking his wife to leave the room.

"Everyone lied to me," I said quietly. "Everyone. And every one of them thought they were protecting me."

"Yes." Aurelia looked at her hands. "I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. I'd have told you sooner, but I couldn't. Not without him hearing."

"How are you telling me now?"

"Because the circle is a mirror." A thin, hard smile. "In here, we're alone. The threads don't carry sound. He can't hear a word of this."

We sat in silence. The silver grass stirred around us, whispering in a language I almost understood.

"What happens if I do nothing?" I asked.

"He'll bleed you at the seal. Slowly. Over three nights, until the full moon. By the end, there'll be nothing left of you but a thread he can wind around his finger." She swallowed. "And when the door opens, the Hollow will come through hungry, and it won't stop at the packs. It will eat everything with a heartbeat."

"And if I open it myself?"

"Then you die faster, and he gets his wife."

"And if I burn it down?"

Aurelia looked at me for a long, long moment.

"Then we both die," she said. "Together. But the door stays shut."

My breath caught.

"There is a way," she whispered. "My mother told me, in the last year, before the thread took her. A mother-line and a daughter-line, wound at the seal. It isn't meant to open the door. It was built to lock it. For good. But the price..."

"A Lunara for every lock."

"Two." Her eyes were bright with tears. "Two women at the seal. It's the only thing that works. I've known since I was twelve that I would have to be one of them." She laid a hand, very gently, over mine in the grass. It was warm. Real. "I just never thought I'd meet the other one."

I looked at her hand. At the ring in her eyes that matched my own.

I thought of Evan on the quarry stones, saying I'll make it slow. Of my mother's face on the gravel. Of a little girl with a missing tooth telling me, so sure, that I was going to fix everything.

Everything, she'd said.

"No," I said.

Aurelia flinched. "Odessa..."

"No." I turned my hand over and held hers tight. "I'm not doing it. I'm not dying at a door because four hundred years of men decided women were disposable. And you aren't either."

"There isn't another way."

"There's always another way." My voice shook, but I held it steady. "I just haven't found it yet. And neither have you, because you've been alone for forty years, and nobody should have to solve this alone."

Her face crumpled. For the first time, she looked every one of her fifty-eight years and every one of the four she'd been when it began.

"I don't know how to do this," she whispered.

"Neither do I." I pulled her into my arms. She was stiff for a second, and then she shook, huge silent shudders that went through both of us. "But I have a husband with two wolves, a brother who can't stay out of trouble, and an ex-fiancée with a sword who's frankly terrifying. We're going to figure out the rest."

"You'd forgive me?"

"I didn't say that." I held her tighter. "I said we're going to figure it out. Forgiveness is a longer road. But I'll walk it, if you're still walking when we get there."

She laughed through her tears, wet and broken.

Then the silver grass went still.

Every blade straightened at once. The light turned colder. And from somewhere behind us, from the far edge of the loom, a voice that wasn't Silas's rolled across the threads like the toll of a bell.

Found you, it said.

Aurelia went white.

"Oh no," she breathed. "No, no, no. It wasn't supposed to be able to hear us in here."

"What is it?"

She turned to me, and I had never seen anyone look so afraid.

"The Hollow," she whispered. "It's already awake."

Evan

Odessa's eyes snapped open.

She sat straight up in the circle, gasping, with silver pouring from her mouth like breath in winter. The threads around my limbs snapped one after another like rotten twine, and the old wolf roared up out of the dark in my chest.

NOW, PUP.

I was on my feet before I understood I'd moved. Gold fire poured across my skin. The walls of the cocoon flared bright and began to burn, and Silas stumbled back with a cry, hands raised against the glare.

"What have you done?" he shouted. "The ritual isn't ready, the seal isn't prepared..."

"It's not me," I said, and my voice was layered and enormous in the broken kitchen. "It's her."

At the center of the circle, Odessa rose to her feet. Her hair stood up in the wind. Her eyes were twin moons. And standing at her shoulder, translucent and shining, was a second woman in a grey coat, one hand on Odessa's arm, her face set and terrified and resolved.

Aurelia.

"Father," she said.

Silas's face went slack.

"I'm done being your counterweight," his daughter said. "And the door doesn't open tonight."

Behind her, the walls of the farmhouse began to peel back like paper. Past them, where the farmyard should have been, there was only dark. Not night. Not shadow. Something older, hungrier, stretched thin across the sky like the skin of a drum.

And in the dark, something very large turned its head.