My Marionette Lover novel · Chapter 8 of 24

Chapter 8: Slack

I didn't go home.

I walked across the river bridge with my grandmother's knife in my fist and my eyes burning.

The Annex was the old carriage house behind the fine arts building, half a mile from Redfern Hall.

Birdie had a key.

It held a daybed, a workbench, and every puppet I had ever carved hanging along the walls.

I was sitting in the dark among them when the door opened.

Arlen came in with his coat flapping, pale and tight-jawed.

"Brad drove me," he said. "She's asleep. I think she's asleep. It's thin out here."

"My grandmother made her cabinet."

He stopped.

"Imogen told you."

"She told me everything." My voice cracked. "My grandmother carved the one that holds you."

"Hazel."

"She told me never to tie a person, and she spent thirty years tying them for her."

"You didn't know."

"I should have known."

He crossed the room slowly and knelt in front of me on the floorboards.

"Listen to me," Arlen said.

"I was a nine-year-old with a dead mother and a woman's hand in my back, and I thought I was going mad."

He took my hands, knife and all.

"You're the first person who ever looked at me and saw a thread."

"You made me say sorry, and then you stopped the thing from hitting a window."

"Your grandmother may have built the cage."

"You're the one who showed me it had a door."

I was crying, and I hated it.

"I want to feel something that isn't her," I said.

"Me too."

"I'm twenty."

"Twenty-one, in March." A shaky smile. "I know, I'm trying not to look too eager."

"Don't try."

I put the bar on the nightstand.

It was a small black crossbar, the jester's, with his silver thread trailing off it onto the floor.

I let the thread lie there and pushed it away with my foot.

"Look at it," I said. "It's off. All of it. Whatever you do tonight is yours."

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