I whimpered when a thread wound its way over my chin and lower lip. When it tugged at the threads I’d been working to shred, I had one of those proverbial light bulb moments.
Tía Mari made the jumpsuit for me. There was a reason she left out a front closure. She did that to protect me. And the thing that felt like a snake wasn’t a snake. It was a heavy thread, a master thread, spelled by my aunt and doing what she asked it to do.
Or so I hoped.
I exhaled in gratitude, then froze. The snakelike thread mimicked my actions before it shrank, retracting down my body until I lost the feel of its location in the glare of the light shining right into my eyes.
“Trying to chew your way out of this, Clementine?”
“Yes. We came here to warn you, to help you.”
“Is that so? Weren’t you instructed to go home, forget we existed, and especially to never contact us again?”
“Yes, but—”
“You have put us in danger, Clementine Brodeur. Which gives us no other recourse.”
Water lapped against the pebbly sand, beating out the moments. The fine, net-like mask covering my eyes made it impossible to see clearly, and I couldn’t tell by their voice if it was Gosia or Jadzia speaking. How was I going to negotiate us out of this predicament?
“No other recourse about what?” I asked. I turned my head and spat out the bits of thread clinging to the sides of my tongue. I wasn’t very successful.
“We’re taking you and your sister with us.”
“Where’s our friend?”
“The demon?”
“Yeah, Laszlo.”
“Laszlo is tied up at the moment.”
I pressed my eyelids closed. I had to clamp down on my body’s wholly new, wholly instinctual response to go to the demon and make sure he was okay. The charm Mari had given me, the one that muted the Demesne’s influence, was either tangled in Gosia’s threads or floating slowly to the bottom of water-filled cavern. The channel in my brain devoted to the connection between me and my Demesne was clamoring, loud and clarion-like, inside every cell.
Laszlo. Laszlo.
“Where are you taking us?”
One of them laughed, a cruel edge to her voice. Jadzia. “How stupid do you think I am?” She crouched next to me and rubbed her hand across my face. The threads responded by creating a stronger gag and reinforcing the area around my eyes. “We’re leaving now.”
She—or one of their group—grabbed the fabric behind my neck and dragged me along the ground. They picked up Alderose at the same time. Every other step, her body bumped against mine. She whimpered once. I longed to free my fingers and hold on to her, any part of her. I was starting to feel like all of this was somehow my fault.
It was me that had urged my sisters to gather in Northampton to meet with the lawyer, rather than having only one of us make the trek to Massachusetts and represent the others.
Once we agreed to assemble, it was me that pushed for us to make the time to go through Mom’s shop together. I wanted the three of us to touch her things, tell stories, donate pieces of our childhoods to a verbal memory quilt. With each of us following very different paths, we hadn’t spent quality time together since our mother’s death.
It was—and always had been—me who pushed, me who jumped first, me who considered consequences as an afterthought. And my family had always been there to catch me.
The hand holding the neck of my coveralls was entangled with some of my hair. My scalp was stinging. I had no patience for self-pity, but it hurt. So did my entire backside. And so did my heart. The thread I identified as one of Tía Mari’s slithered up my leg then my belly and coiled itself underneath my collarbone, comforting me with its steady thrumming.
My eyes watered even more.
The being dragging us stopped, dropping me without warning. My head thudded against the ground. We were shoved onto a boat. Fabric flapped overhead, muffling the sounds of preparation. The vessel was narrow and I tilted toward my sister’s body.
This could work in our favor. Closed in as I was, I opened my senses to any story threads that might have been able to cling to me, opened myself to the potential my aunt had stitched into the soaked coveralls, and drew a picture in my head.
Little scissors, little knives, sharp points, cutting away at the bad threads keeping us unable to see, unable to speak, unable to touch or communicate. I asked for help and swore I’d never jump again without considering all the ramifications of my actions.
I backed down from the enormity of that promise. I swore instead to try to modify my behavior, to temper my joy and enthusiasm and think things through, to get a handle on the idea of reviewing the possible consequences of my actions before actually acting on my urges.
Alderose’s head bumped against my forehead. She pressed into me and whispered, “Clemmie, stop grinding your teeth.”
Heart pounding, I smiled at no one and nestled closer, hoping my mouth was somewhere close to one of her ears. “Rosey, you’re okay.”
“I’m not okay. My head hurts like a bitch and there’s sand in my underwear.”
I laughed as softly as I could. “They captured us.”
“No shit.”
That reignited the fires of guilt burning a hole in my gut and pretty effectively shut me up. Humor wasn’t going to get us out of this.
“Clemmie? I’m sorry. You remember how much I always hated getting sand in my bathing suit?”
“Yeah,” I whispered.
“This is a thousand times worse because I have my period.”
“Channel your rage, sister.”
She snorted. We were good.
“What’s the plan?”
“I’m done with
