Chapter 74 Vengeance
The cut was quick though It was not painless, the blade was sharp enough that the pain arrived a half-second after the fact, a bright clean line of blood formed across the heel of her palm, and Grace's breath pulled in sharply before she could stop it. She pressed her lips together and held her hand steady as the blood welled up along the cut, dark and immediate.
"Sorry," Mrs. Marsh said quietly, and she sounded like she meant it.
"It's fine," Grace said. It was, mostly.
“Let a few drops on the map,” Grace obeyed, “Now take my hand," Mrs. Marsh said, and Grace placed her bleeding palm into the older woman's and felt the warmth of the grip close around it. "Close your eyes. Think about him. Not about finding him, just about him. His face, the way he stands, the sound of his voice, the feeling of being near him. Let it be specific and let it be real. Don't try to direct it anywhere, just, be in the memory of him."
Grace closed her eyes.
She hadn't let herself do this since he’d left. She'd been keeping him at a careful distance in her thoughts, managing the space around his memory. But now she let the distance go.
Maddox.
His face came immediately, which told her something about how present he'd been just below the surface of her thoughts all along. The jaw she'd memorised without meaning to. The eyes that had looked at her in a way that she still didn't have a clean category for, that sat somewhere between fierce and careful, and something she hadn't had enough time to name properly before he was gone. The way he stood, like someone who had learned to take up exactly the space required and no more, not from smallness but from a kind of controlled exactness. The sound of her name in his voice, which she could still hear with embarrassing precision if she let herself.
And, she let herself.
She was so focused on holding the image that she almost didn't notice the change in the air around her. The slight drop in temperature, the low murmur of Molly's mom’s voice beginning beside her in a language that wasn't English. The syllables were unfamiliar and rhythmic, not quite like anything Grace had heard before, and they had a quality that was different from ordinary speech, she could feel them, faintly.
She kept her eyes closed and held Maddox in her mind and felt the warmth of her own blood, the grip of the older woman's hand, and the strange thrumming quality of whatever was being spoken beside her, and she focused.
The murmuring continued for a while. Long enough that she lost track of the time, long enough that Molly, standing at the edge of the room watching, had time to move from one foot to the other twice.
And then something changed.
Grace felt it, it was a sort of pull in the hand Mrs Marsh was holding, not painful but present, like a compass needle swinging to find north. It moved through her palm and up through her wrist and then it was gone, transferred or completed or whatever the word was, and then she heard the sound.
Movement on the map.
A soft, liquid sound. She knew without being told what it was.
"Open your eyes," Mrs. Marsh said.
Grace opened them.
On the map, a trail of dark red had moved across the paper in a line that curved and adjusted. It had stopped on a small point marked on the map where the line had ended, dark and definite against the printed geography of the paper.
Grace leaned forward and looked at it.
She looked at the name of the area, committed it to the part of her memory that held things she needed not to lose, and then she straightened up and looked at Mrs Marsh.
"That's where he is?" she asked.
"That's where he is," Mrs. Marsh confirmed. Her voice was steady but her eyes held a sharpness that had more layers in it. Grace couldn’t quite place it.
"Then we should go," Grace said.
Mrs Marsh nodded. She muttered something and Grace’s blood became solidified on the map as Molly’s mom folded the map deliberately, she held it for a moment before setting it on the table. "Get your things," she said, addressing both of them. "We'll leave within the hour."
She looked at Molly.
"You'll stay here," she said.
Molly's expression responded immediately, like she had expected this and was prepared for it. "No," she said, her voice was flat yet clear.
"Molly—"
"No, Mum. I'm not staying here." She stood with her arms at her sides and her jaw set in a way that Grace recognized from years of knowing her. It was the expression of a Molly who had made up her mind and was not going to change it for anything.
"You just told me today that I'm a witch. You just turned our kitchen lights off with your hand and told me my entire understanding of what our family is has been wrong since I was born. And now you want me to stay here while you go somewhere that matters, in a house by myself?" She let that sit for exactly a moment. "Try a different suggestion."
Mrs Marsh looked at her daughter for a moment, then sighed.
"You stay close to me," she said finally. "You don't go ahead, you don't go anywhere alone, and you do exactly what I say immediately and without argument."
"Fine," Molly said.
"Fine," her mother said.
Grace looked between them and said nothing, recognising a negotiation that had just concluded and not needing to add to it.
They went upstairs to gather what they needed, and Grace wrapped her palm with the bandage Molly found in the bathroom cabinet and picked up the small bag that still had everything in it from the night she'd left the pack, because she'd had enough practice at being ready to leave at short notice that she'd never fully unpacked it.
Downstairs, the front door opened and closed.
Mrs. Marsh stepped out onto the path in front of the house, pulling it mostly shut behind her. The morning was still grey and quiet, the street holding its ordinary morning stillness, she walked a few steps away from the door, stood on the path, and took out her phone.
She found the contact and pressed call.
It rang twice.
"Ryan," she said, when he picked up. Her voice was low and even, it was completely composed, "I need you to listen to me carefully. Gather as many officers as you can, as many as you can reach quickly. I know where he is." A pause, just long enough to let the weight of the next words land properly. "We found Maddox's location."
She listened to whatever Ryan said.
Then she looked up at the grey morning sky and said, quietly and with absolute steadiness, "Daniel will be avenged."
She ended the call and stood on the path for a moment in the quiet, and then she turned and went back inside to collect the girls.