It’s difficult to focus when everytime she looks down, she sees strings of light webbing out from her hands. Brilliant gold threads wind around and away from her, leading to fuck knows where and god knows who. Those are bad enough, especially the ones that flicker and fray and fade, tugging at her the way Waverly used to tug at her arm when they were little, demanding her attention. Some of them gleam purely gold; some of them are wound around with scarlet or black. Some glow like string lights, some flicker like a flashlight with a battery that’s going bad.
Also bad: the threads dark as this never-ending night. She’d lightly touched one with her thoughts and got a brainful of chatter back, and now she does her best to ignore them, along with the thin white thread that spins out far away to the east.
But worst of all by far is the thread that unspools, blood-red and brilliant, from her fingertips; the only one of its kind. The second she’d focused on it, her stomach had tightened abruptly up, cramping with anxiety. There had been the sensation of fingers drifting over fine wool, the faint warmth of sunrise shyly kissing her cheek.
She’d dropped it like a piece of white-hot cast iron and gone looking for a distraction and an excuse to get the hell away.
Fortunately, she knows someone who’s always up for providing one, and who never wastes time worrying about whether an idea — like, say, following the frying pan sized pawprints left in the snow by something a lot bigger than either of them — might be a bad one, which is how she’d ended up in the woods with Holland March, following a line of tracks.
Another thread stretches easily between them, firm as cord: comfortingly warm seventies sunshine gold, slashed here and there with cherry-red accents, like a sports car with racing stripes. She breathes in the familiar scent of lingering cigarette smoke, almost able to feel the bristly brush of an unshaved cheek against hers, the bite of well whiskey sliding over her tongue. It’s March, through and through.
Wynonna glares at the place where the prints vanish, again, leaving nothing but creamy, unbroken snow. “This thing is really starting to get on my nerves.”
Does she mean the bear? Does she mean the string? Yes.
—Holland March
Also bad: the threads dark as this never-ending night. She’d lightly touched one with her thoughts and got a brainful of chatter back, and now she does her best to ignore them, along with the thin white thread that spins out far away to the east.
But worst of all by far is the thread that unspools, blood-red and brilliant, from her fingertips; the only one of its kind. The second she’d focused on it, her stomach had tightened abruptly up, cramping with anxiety. There had been the sensation of fingers drifting over fine wool, the faint warmth of sunrise shyly kissing her cheek.
She’d dropped it like a piece of white-hot cast iron and gone looking for a distraction and an excuse to get the hell away.
Fortunately, she knows someone who’s always up for providing one, and who never wastes time worrying about whether an idea — like, say, following the frying pan sized pawprints left in the snow by something a lot bigger than either of them — might be a bad one, which is how she’d ended up in the woods with Holland March, following a line of tracks.
Another thread stretches easily between them, firm as cord: comfortingly warm seventies sunshine gold, slashed here and there with cherry-red accents, like a sports car with racing stripes. She breathes in the familiar scent of lingering cigarette smoke, almost able to feel the bristly brush of an unshaved cheek against hers, the bite of well whiskey sliding over her tongue. It’s March, through and through.
Wynonna glares at the place where the prints vanish, again, leaving nothing but creamy, unbroken snow. “This thing is really starting to get on my nerves.”
Does she mean the bear? Does she mean the string? Yes.