Sage, barking and wagging his tail, chased the ball that had rebounded off one of the lacquered pieces of wood that curved over Graysen’s bed and bounced lazily toward the large leather armchair.
Graysen kept a close eye on me as he reached for another shirt to fold.
Holding a hand across my mouth, I hid the wide-ass grin. What he didn’t realize was that I’d marked almost every single shirt he owned with the invisible pen I’d found in his arts and crafts box. At some point, as he had with‘Meet Mr. Limp Dick’,he’d discover the other messages I’d scrawled over his clothes.
The brand-new-yet-old bedside tables—because from the look of them, they were antiques from a variety of time periods and cultures—he’d already moved into place beside the birdcage bed of his.
My finger made a dull sound as I absentmindedly tapped it against the glass. I had numerous questions. Which one first? Tabitha. “How do you know your mother is still alive? It’s been twelve years.”
Graysen stopped folding, straightening, but his gaze had gone distant in thought, and something warred on his expression as ifhe were hesitant at how much he could divulge. He took so long in answering, I wasn’t sure if he was going to. Finally, his dark eyes sharpened. “There’s a connection between us. We know she’s still alive.”
I frowned, tilting my head. A connection?
“We canfeelthat she is still alive,” he elaborated.
“How?”
“When she’s in pain, we can feel it.”
I pushed off the gentle curve of the countertop, taking a couple of steps across the sunbaked tiles. “We? You all feel it?”
“One of us.” Glancing at the shirt in his hands, he kneaded it uneasily. “A shadow, if you like. A sort of echo. A reverberation. Specifically pain…whenever she feels it…” He swallowed thickly before saying in a rush, “Whoever orwhateverholds her captivehas been hurting her.”
Dipping my head, I lowered my gaze to the glass in my hands, rotating it around as guilt stung the back of my throat.
Gods. Twelve long years she’d been gone…
And that shadow, the reverberation of her pain, meant one of the brothers was connected to Tabitha. I was sure of it. Graysen—no. I thought with all the time we’d spent together I’d have known.
“My mother’s been hurt badly over the years. That’s how we know she still lives,” Graysen said quietly, putting the t-shirt on top of those he’d already folded before picking up a pair of jeans from the basket.
I looked at him beneath my lashes, my breath tight in my chest, feeling awful. “Does it hurt her when she steals pain?” How does herotherability work?
“She’s a conduit, so she channels the pain into something else, like an object, a rock, something inanimate. It still hurts her, but not as intensely as if she doesn’t have something to channel it into.”
“So maybe her being in pain is just that. Her stealing someone else’s pain?”
His gaze turned flinty. A tick in his jaw. “It goes on for too long. Someone’s forcing her, using her, hurting her.”
Heaviness plunged through my entire body, as though a chain had been wound around my ankle and the earth was tugging at it, trying to swallow me whole.
“And you have no idea who has her?” I rasped, briefly squeezing my eyes shut.
“None.”
Just the redheaded Horned God, who I assumed could have kept Tabitha. Or she’d given the Crowthers’ mother away. And if they couldn’t hunt down this Horned God in all these years, then indeed, their only hope was at the Witches Ball.
Right this moment, I didn’t know who I felt more sorry for—Tabitha or myself.
There was a hard lump in my throat, making it painful to drink the water I consumed in big gulps. I cradled the empty glass in my hands. “Why do you think the Horned Gods wanted your mother? She can steal pain, but she can also detectothers.” When I was a child, she’d known even then that I was something special. “Maybe that’s why they wanted her. Anotherhunter of sorts.” I was clutching at straws, and we both knew it.
The corner of his mouth turned down. “Why hurt her?”
Why indeed? What Horned God suffered enough to need someone with Tabitha’s skill set? I ran my mind through everything and everyone I knew within the world of Horned Gods. I had an extensive library’s worth stored in my head, centuries of information, but there was so much of it unknown to us, to me.
“Does Master Sirro know she’s still alive?”
“No.”
