Page 1 of Threadbound

Chapter

One

Jamie Weaver sighed as he tried to find a comfortable way to sit while the plane soared through the darkness over the Atlantic. At six-four, Jamie was tall enough that his economy seat was the equivalent of the medieval ‘Little Ease’—a torture chamber whose only feature was that it was too short to stand up in and too narrow to sit down. His knees ached from being pressed into the folded-up tray table in front of him, his back burned from trying to keep his shoulders within the boundaries of his seat, and there were occasional flares of nerve pain down his arms from keeping his elbows tucked into his body.

He hated flying.

As he did every year, he’d gone back home, to Maynardville, Tennessee, to place a purple thistle and a pink rose on his mother’s grave on the anniversary of her death. He couldn’t really afford it and knew his mother would tell him to stop wasting the money to visit her decaying body, but it was a compulsion he couldn’t resist.

He hadn’t visited his step-father. Not that Bill Eckel would have stopped drinking long enough to notice. If he had, he’d likely as not have tried to put Jamie in the hospital. Again.

The last time had been right after Jamie’s momma, Nelly Eckel née Weaver, had died from the long-term effects of brain damage, manifested as rapid-onset dementia. She’d been diagnosed with CTE a few years before that, most likely from all the times Bill had slammed her head into things. Like car doors. The kitchen counter. The wall.

When things were particularly bad, when Jamie woke in the middle of the night in a cold sweat with the sound of his mother’s sobs ringing in his ears and the ache of broken-and-healed bones in his hand and arm, Jamie sometimes fantasized about killing his step-father. But he knew it wouldn’t be worth the clean-up or the possible prison time. Or the more-than-likely guilt he’d feel for the rest of his life at having killed someone, even if that someone was as horrible as Bill Eckel. So Jamie just did his best to avoid his step-father as much as humanly possible.

He’d moved out of his mother’s house at sixteen, living in an old trailer that one of his teachers let him stay in rather than see Jamie show up to school with black eyes and busted lips. Jamie would visit his momma when he knew Bill would be gone, every time he knew Bill would be gone. He loved his momma. He just… couldn’t take it anymore.

When he would fight with Bill, his mother would try to get in the way, and she’d end up in worse shape than Jamie. Not that Bill didn’t hit her if Jamie wasn’t around—it just didn’t seem to be as often or as bad.

When his momma had died, Jamie’d come back to the house after the reading of the will because he wanted the things she’d left him. He’d also wanted to collect what little he owned that he hadn’t already moved out. Bill had been pissed as hell that Jamie had dared to take anything at all from the house, never mind the will Nelly had written when she first got sick that stated that Jamie was entitled to the things he’d packed up—his own stuff,of course, and a few old Weaver family photo albums, a pile of blankets his momma had crocheted that Bill always complained were dowdy, and a tea set with roses and thistles on it that his mother had bought on her fateful trip to Scotland.

The trip she’d been on when she’d gotten pregnant with Jamie.

That was six full years before she’d met Bill Eckel, but the asshole thought he deserved everything Nelly had left behind because he’d conned her into marrying him and then cowed her into staying through four more kids and countless beatings.

When Jamie had come to claim what his momma had left him, Bill had tried to stop him. Jamie had won the fight, but not without needing a couple dozen stitches and a cast for his broken wrist.

Bill Eckel wasn’t a small man, although not as big as Jamie, coming in at five-ten with quite a bit of bulk. Bill knew how to fight and had no problem doing it. Jamie didn’t know how to fight, and he didn’t particularly want to. But Jamie was six-four and broad-shouldered, in decent shape, and with natural muscle he maintained by chopping wood and running. Whoever Jamie’s dad had been, he’d been big, because Nelly Weaver had been slight, around five-two and thin as a willow-switch.

Even without skill, Jamie’d had enough weight and strength that he’d been able to physically force his way out of the house with everything that was rightfully his. Then he’d driven one-handed and bleeding to the hospital in Knoxville to get cleaned up. And then he’d gone to a shitty motel and planned out what to do next.

He’d used almost all the money he had—and a little more scraped together from selling some of his grandmother’s jewelry—buying a one-way ticket to Edinburgh and putting down a month’s rent on a tiny studio apartment.

When she had still been lucid, his mother had made him promise to go back to Scotland because she couldn’t. And so when he’d been accepted to graduate school at the University of Edinburgh, that was where he’d decided to go, after taking a year deferral so that he could be at his mother’s side while she sickened and died.

She hadn’t known him for most of the last six months. He stayed and talked to her about Scotland anyway.

And, every time, she’d told him his eyes were blue like a Scottish loch.

Jamie’d had no idea if that was true—or what color a loch even was—until three years ago when he’d packed up two suitcases and gotten on a plane to Edinburgh for the first time, his arm in a cast and the stitches still in his skin.

Sometimes, he knew now, lochs really were the same bright, vibrant blue of his eyes. Sometimes they were grey. And sometimes brown.

Just like lakes pretty much everywhere.

He’d wanted Scotland to be magical, the way his mother had insisted it was.

But it was just a place. A lot nicer place than Maynardville, he’d be the first to admit, but just a place all the same.

It wasn’t that he didn’t like Scotland—he did. He liked the University. He liked his professors and research project, and now that he was done with his Masters coursework and two years into his Ph.D. research on the history of folk medicine, he had a much deeper appreciation for being far, far away from Maynardville and the University of Knoxville, where he’d gotten his undergrad degree in history.

Every summer, he went back to put the rose and thistle on his mother’s grave, and every summer he was reminded how much he hated Tennessee. Not that it wasn’t beautiful—the mountains, the Tennessee River, the wide sky and the summer cicadas thatsang him to sleep. But he felt like an outsider, unwelcome and unwilling to adapt to the expectations that pressed in on him, demanding that he go to church, meet a nice girl, settle down, find a job that required muscle and not much else, and start making babies—and maybe moonshine.

For one thing, Jamie didn’t like girls.

And that was probably at least a good solid quarter of his problem, according to pretty much everyone in Maynardville.

Jamie also wasn’t a fan of church. He’d learned his mother’s odd brand of paganism at her hip. Paganism that was just one of the many reasons Bill Eckel had taken a fist or belt to both of them over the years. Nelly had gone to church, just as Bill had demanded, every Sunday, but she also kept a small wooden bowl that she filled with milk and honey that she left out on Jamie’s windowsill for the fairies and snuck out with Jamie to dance under full moons.

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