Page 3 of Thorn Season
“Locks only stop Wholeborns. Maybe Marge had family she didn’t tell us about.” Tari spoke with tentative encouragement, but I trampled my flaring hope.
Tari had spent her early childhood in Bormia, where the small Wielder population lived unprosecuted; though a Wholeborn herself, she’d already met more Wielders than I would knowingly encounter in my lifetime. I’d once petitioned Father to arrange for our passage there. But Bormia didn’t accept refugees, he’d said, and even if it did, Daradon’s ships couldn’t cross the choppy waters into their territory.
Since then, I’d imagined finding a fellow Wielder in this prison of a kingdom. We could learn from each other,confidein each other. We wouldn’t be alone.
But Marge had been here all along, and I’d never guessed that we’d been concealing the same secret. She’d always seemed so free with her laughter—so different from everything I’d expected to find in another Wielder... So different from me.
Even if I miraculously crossed paths with a Wielder again, it would lead to the same painful ending: I wouldn’t recognize them as an ally until it was too late.
Swallowing a knot of emotion, I reached for Marge’s dusty table—
I gasped, my specter heaving me backward at the first touch.
“What is it?” Tari asked.
I scrubbed my hand across my trousers, gaping. The dust hadn’t felt like dust. And now my specter coiled deep inside me, squirming with the effort to get out, out,out—
A silhouette darkened the curtains. “Anyone in there?”
Tari and I shared a panicked look. Then we clambered under the table, elbows digging into ribs. The dust-flurry threatened to tickle up a cough, and my specter twisted again.
The door handle rattled. “Hello?”
“I’ll go,” Tari murmured. “Stay inside.”
I grabbed her wrist. “No.”
“It’s fine. I’ll feign parch fever.”
“And do what? Sneeze all over them?”
She rolled her eyes. “Parch fever makes people disoriented. I’ve seen it at Mama’s clinic.”
“Disoriented people don’t scrub Hunters’ Marks off doors.”
“No?” She flung a hand to her forehead, eyes saucer-round. “But I thought this was my house, sir.” Her whisper pitched up and down in hysteria. “The vandals must’ve come overnight!”
I gave her a deadpan stare. “They’ll never buy that.”
“Then I’ll spend the night in the town jail. It’ll be my first arrest.” A wicked grin. “My parents might throw me a party.”
She wasn’t exaggerating. Tari’s parents would reward this rebellion the way my father might reward me for going a day without Wielding. Not that I’d ever lasted that long.
But I knew the real reason she didn’t want the guards to catch me here. Because while Tari’s crime began and ended at Marge’s doorstep, my crime began at birth.
“Quickly,” Tari said. “Before they bring the locksmith.”
She tugged away, and my hand smacked the floor. Something nipped my skin, and I hissed. Tari paused as I turned my hand over.
Horror glued me to the spot.
Because stuck to my clammy palm was a human tooth.
The sharp points dug into my skin, revealing the pink, fleshy underside where the gum still plastered the root. I glanced farther down, and nausea choked me. Dark, dried spatter-marks covered the floor.
This was why there hadn’t been signs of struggle elsewhere. Because Marge had crouchedhere, too frightened to face the Hunters. They’d found her anyway.
And they’d hit her hard enough to knock out a tooth.
