Page 67 of Threadbound

The green-and-black, of course, would be for Bran, although Jamie didn’t yet know if he’d manage to summon the courage to actually give it to him. He’d made plenty of things ‘for’ people he never gave them to—his momma, his half-siblings, Trixie and Rob… Once, he’d thought about the woman who’d madehis coffee that morning at 1505. It helped, when he knotted the floss and threaded the beads, to have someone in mind, even when someone paid him for custom work and chose everything in advance.

This was for Bran.

Jamie began poking his way through the beads, pausing as he rolled some abalone shell beads beneath the tip of one finger. But they were flat, so he moved on, settling on mother-of-pearl, carefully picking out a dozen—probably more than he’d need, but too many was better than not enough. To those he added amber and a small collection of tiny fish vertebrae, a set he’d bought without a clear idea of what he’d want them for. Bones and shells and polished amber—that felt right.

As he tied and looped, Jamie’s eyes mostly watched the next episode ofDeath in Paradise, and he found himself thinking of Tennessee. He didn’t often do that—part of the point in moving to Edinburgh was to get as far away from Maynardville as he possibly could. To start a new life, one based around the kinds of things that had been forbidden to him in his step-father’s house: books, macramé, murder mysteries, studying, and, well, being himself.

When he did think of the house he’d grown up in, it was usually with some amount of anger, regret, and guilt—and was mostly concentrated on his momma or his half-siblings. Or memories he’d rather forget. Which is why Jamie generally tried not to think about it as much as possible.

But he’d found himself thinking of Tennessee more and more often—of the tiny house and its brown carpet, dark and old enough to hide the bloodstains he was sure never got completely cleaned away. Of the nights spent trying desperately to keep his younger siblings quiet or muffling the sounds of fist and flesh with his pillow until it stopped or he couldn’t take it anymore.

It wasn’t all bad. He had memories of running through the woods, of going with his momma and siblings to the Tennessee River to splash in the clear water, of the feel of the new spring sun as everything around them burst into leaf and bloom. Of watching first Billy and then Nora and then Ginny take their first steps. He’d missed Tommy’s, because he’d left the house by then.

His youngest two half-siblings were young enough that Jamie didn’t really know them—Tommy had barely been alive when Jamie had left, and Ginny had only been two and a half. But he thought of Billy pretty often, wondering where he was, what he was doing, if he’d managed to get the hell out of Bill Eckel’s house.

Jamie had his own problems, of course. Being somehow connected to a fairy that other fairies wanted dead was pretty much at the top of that list, although the danger seemed less immediate the more time passed since the attack. And then there was the fact that he was still having trouble concentrating on his research, which was putting him behind.

Jamie really should have been in the library—although he had been most of the day, since it was one of his two days off from the Museums—or at least working on the book of mostly-incomprehensible recipes. He’d more or less decided to give up on the thistle-burdock-knapweed-sea-holly and had moved to another recipe, but he’d quickly discovered a similar problem. Not the same plant, but another one that he was struggling to identify—this one was a flower, with the slightly droopy shape of a snowdrop, but the leaves were nothing like the long, thin blades of that plant, instead spreading outwards in a dozen fingers each, more like a lupin. And the color Jamie could make out was a rusty brown that had probably once been a vivid blood-red. Lupins could be red, but snowdrops definitely were not, and there was no way Jamie could see the tiny drop-shapedflowers on the page being a bad rendition of the massive conical brush of a lupin.

They were beautiful—but this was definitely not the drawing of a lupin flower. Or a snowdrop, either.

So his research was continuing to infuriate him, since either the person who wrote the whole book was completely mad or they had access to plants that didn’t appear in any medieval herbal or any of the botany books Jamie’d bought second-hand that now littered his apartment floor.

Instead of applying himself to either his fairy-problem or his research-problem, Jamie was being avoidant—watching murder mysteries and making bracelets. Not even bracelets that he was supposed to be making for his online shop, either, although he wasn’t worried about finishing them within the promised deadlines.

Jamie’s fingers finished the last knot, dabbed on a tiny bit of glue, then sat staring at his creation.

It was… odd. The fish vertebrae definitely made it…creepierthan his work usually ended up being, with the sharp surprising drops of amber almost but not quite like either blood or fire. It wasn’t Jamie’s usual sort of aesthetic, but there was something about it that was… Proud, maybe. Assertive. It refused to be anything other than what it was.

Jamie would have liked to say that it represented him, but it didn’t. Jamie was more like the blue bracelet he’d made the day before—optimistic, yet studded with mismatched and tarnished remnants from other places and other lives. Bits and pieces that had no business being together knotted up with thread and forced into a whole because there was simply no other way.

It was an accurate enough picture of Jamie’s life that he didn’t want to think too hard about it.

The green-and-black wasn’t at all like that. The bone and shell and amber also didn’t quite belong, but they held togetherwith far greater harmony than the tarnished shards of lost and forgotten jewelry and keychains. It was just a harmony that held some deep and minor keys.

Jamie ran his fingers over the floss and beads, his fingertips tingling slightly as the textures shifted beneath them.

A sudden surge of courage had him getting out of his chair and walking over to the window, opening the pane and setting the knotted cord carefully on the ledge before closing it again. Giving the bracelet to Bran was an impulse, and one he knew the fairy probably wouldn’t much like, but Jamie’d done it anyway, and he wasn’t going to take it back. At least according to what his momma had said, that would be much, much ruder.

And then he spent several hours staring up at the darkness of his ceiling listening for the sounds of wings and claws on the windowsill.

He never heard either.

But when he opened his eyes in the morning and threw off the covers to check, he found the food eaten—the paper towel tucked into the corner of the sill and full of little beak-holes, undoubtedly from Bran pecking it into place—and the bracelet gone. In the smooth white of the bowl sat a length of velvet ribbon, only a little stained, several pound coins, and a long, shimmering feather so black it shone with hints of indigo.

Chapter

Thirty

Jamie could hear the sounds of people celebrating out in the street, even though he himself had begged off from doing anything social, even though he’d been invited to a dinner of pumpkin curry at Rob’s flat with Rob’s two roommates—Alan and Steve—and Trixie. It was Halloween, and they’d been gearing up in both the literal and metaphorical senses for a night at the clubs, makeup, fishnets, glitter—because Trixie didn’t do any sort of elaborate get-up without it—leather, and whatever other things they’d brought to put together vaguely creepy-sexy outfits.

Jamie had no interest in either clubs or squeezing himself into leather pants that weren’t his, although Rob had pointed out that he and Alan were pretty close to the same size. But Halloween had always been more than just costumes and candy to Jamie—especially because nobody had ever come to their house, and once his momma had married Bill Eckel, more often than not Jamie hadn’t been able to go anywhere else, either. Dressing up was for little kids and sissies, at least according to Jamie’s step-father, although when his half-siblings were little, they hadn’t been allowed to go trick-or-treating, either.

But more special to Jamie was the candle-lighting his momma would do for Samhain. He had vague memories of carved pumpkins with grinning faces at school and sometimes at home, but the sad little tea-lights that went inside them weren’t what Jamie remembered best.

Late at night, Momma would come and wake him—and, in the last handful of years, Billy. They would creep outside to the back of the yard where Nellie had set up a small altar with a punched-tin lantern cut with stars and moons. Beside it, she’d place food—bread, a cup of milk laced with honey, an apple, and a piece of spiced cake that she’d baked earlier in the day. There were always extra slices of cake for her, for Jamie, and for Billy.

She would give them each a taper at the door, then lead them slowly and carefully out to the altar cradling their lit tapers, telling them about how her momma had done this with her when she was a little girl, and that they were going to send gifts to grandma and grandpa and to their momma and papa, andtheirmommas and papas, going all the way back to the beginning of time. Then they would light the lantern and eat their cake and giggle in the flickering shadows.

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