Threadbound, p.1
Threadbound, page 1
Threadbound
KM AVERY
Copyright © 2024 by KM Avery
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to locales, events, business establishments, or actual persons—living or dead—is entirely coincidental.
Contents
Special Thanks
Content Warning
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Epilogue
Also by KM Avery
About the Author
Special Thanks
For my Unseelie friend and an amazing artist, Mina Corbeau, and the Teabunny Circus.
Content Warning
Dearest Readers,
This story contains frequent discussion of domestic violence and abuse of both adults and children. There are additional scenes depiction both medical trauma and violence.
If you or someone you know is a victim of domestic violence, please call the National Domestic Hotline (US) at 1-800-799-7233, text START to 88788, or visit https://www.thehotline.org/. In the UK, visit https://www.gov.uk/guidance/domestic-abuse-how-to-get-help.
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 that sang 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
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.
He’d never seen any fairies, of course, but his mother had insisted that they were real and he should always be on the lookout for them—and that if they ever did him a good turn, he had to do them one in return.
“Never owe a fairy, Jamie,” she’d warned him. “And never make one owe you. They don’t like it.”
He’d asked her why, when he was little, and she’d simply said that’s the way things were.
He didn’t actually think fairies were real, but Jamie liked the idea of his mother’s naturalistic paganism a whole lot better than the rhetoric of punishment and damnation preached by the pastor on a wave of sour breath and spittle on Sunday mornings from the pulpit at Bill Eckel’s church.
So Jamie didn’t like girls and he didn’t like church, and, on top of that, he wasn’t into sports or hunting or hitting things with his fists, and he most definitely wasn’t into the whole idea of replicating the patriarchal household run by his step-father.
Since Jamie was also rather more intellectually than athletically inclined—although he did enjoy running the mountain trails when it wasn’t hunting season—he’d taken the first chance that presented itself to get the hell out of Cumberland and Tennessee.
About the only thing he didn’t mind was the apple moonshine, but he couldn’t bring that with him on an international flight, since it most definitely wasn’t going to make it through customs.
At least Scotland had good whisky.
With a soft, mostly internal sigh, Jamie shifted in his seat, trying very hard not to knee the woman next to him and wake her up.
He wished he could sleep on planes. It would make this trip much less awful, although it pretty much always was that. Between his constant anxiety about his step-father suddenly showing up at his mother’s grave—however unlikely that was—and his overall discomfort in Maynardville, Jamie detested these visits home. If he could even call it home anymore.
He’d stayed for two nights at a Super 8 in Knoxville, driving out on July 8th to place the thistle and rose beside his mother’s small, plain marking stone in the old family cemetery off Highway 61 past the auto shop.
Nell Eckel and the dates of her birth and death. Nothing more. No beloved wife and mother, no line of scripture or poetry. No hint of her identity as Nelly Weaver, pagan, knitter, giver of kisses, and fairy-lover.
No other flowers, either.
Just the ones Jamie brought and the overgrown grass that needed mowing far more often than it got it.
With a sigh, he leaned forward to peer out the airplane window, watching the vast sweep of sky begin to shade toward pink and dawn.
Chapter
Two
Jamie had gotten pretty good at running on cobblestones over his three years of living in Edinburgh. When he’d first arrived, he’d twisted three ankles in as many weeks—and considering the fact that, like most humans, he only had two ankles, that was both bad and sadly impressive.
Practice and lots of toe-raises had made it not just possible, but almost effortless for him to navigate the rippled, twisting, and dramatically uneven sidewalks, streets, and alleys that made up the old part of the city where he lived, worked, and studied.
Jamie’s favorite route took him down the back streets parallel to the Royal Mile and out to Salisbury Crag—and then up to Arthur’s Seat and back down again. He liked to go early enough in the morning that he wasn’t dodging too many puffing tourists on the way, but he didn’t really mind as long as they didn’t scream or jump in front of him. It was a long way down if you went over the edge, and Scotland—unlike so many parts of the US—didn’t bother putting safety rails on its mountains. Jamie honestly preferred it that way, at least until some excitable tourist accidentally sent him careening to his death. But that hadn’t happened yet, and he hoped it never would.
As he made his way up the Crag, a shadow of dark wings flitted overhead, and Jamie smiled. He liked birds, particularly the crows and ravens of Edinburgh, who were so used to tourists that they were practically—although not actually—tame.
Tame enough that they’d eye you up for your french fries—chips, he reminded himself, although he’d yet to successfully train himself to think in Scots English—when you ate outside on a bench at George Square or the Meadows, although no matter how many times he’d tried to feed the birds directly, he’d never gotten one to come take a fry from his fingers.
When he was little, there had been a crow, or maybe a raven, he wasn’t sure, that had hung out once by the school playground. He’d started feeding it crackers, and it had flown off and brought back a shiny pebble, dropping it near the crackers.
And then it became a game. Jamie shared a few crackers, and the bird brought him a couple shiny pebbles and a single brass bead shaped like a star. Jamie had always thought that the bird had been thanking him for sharing his crackers.
He’d kept the stones and the tiny star-shaped bead—every time he thought about throwing them away, he just couldn’t make himself do it, silly as it seemed. So there was a small box in his tiny apartment that held a few shiny stones and a small gold star, along with a couple other odds and ends that reminded him of happy memories. A small knotted ring made of yarn his mother had made for him when he was little. A movie stub from the first date he’d been on with a guy—a date that had ended with Jamie’s nose bloody because some homophobes had seen Christopher kiss him on the cheek in public. The seat card from his first flight to Edinburgh.
His asshole step-father had called him sentimental for keeping things like that. Well, not exactly. Bill Eckel had called him a pansy-ass, crybaby sissy, but that’s what he’d meant.
Jamie pushed his muscles harder, increasing his pace up the hill to drive away the unpleasant thoughts, chasing the shadow of whatever bird had flown overhead. He’d always wanted to be a bird. Be able to fly, to soar free from the ugliness that had been such a fundamental part of his childhood.
But now he was half a world away from Bill Eckel’s fists and drunken, spittle-laced insults, and if Jamie wanted to collect beads and baubles from birds or movie tickets and kisses from boys, he could do so without a second thought.
When he got to the top of the crag, Jamie paused, the air rushing in and out of his lungs, Edinburgh spread out below like a tattered, but still beautiful, old quilt, the kind that smelled like dried lavender and years of laundry soap.
Except that Edinburgh definitely didn’t smell like lavender and laundry soap, especially not if you happened to be walking through the streets at bar time. Edinburgh smelled like pretty much any other city—car exhaust, the occasional whiff of sour garbage, and the mingled aromas of whatever was cooking or brewing in the hundreds of restaurants, cafés, and distilleries that dotted the streets. But she was still damn beautiful, even if she did occasionally smell a little funny.
As Jamie stood looking out over the sweep of the city, a shadow passed overhead again, and Jamie tilted his head back, shading his eyes from the sun as he tried to spot the bird that had momentarily blocked the light. Big, black, and graceful, it circled Arthur’s Seat, the wide span of its dark feathers telling him that this wasn’t an ordinary crow.
People confused crows and ravens—easy enough, if you only ever saw them in books, since they were both from the corvid family and were all black—but one was bird-sized and the other one was the size of a medium cat or small dog. With wings. And a really sharp beak.
Ravens weren’t unheard of in Scotland, Jamie knew, but they weren’t extremely common, either. And this one was big.
He wondered if it was the same bird that had taken up residence in the courtyard of St. Giles. He’d seen one there a few weeks ago, probably two, two-and-a-half feet long, with a wingspan wider than the bent old lady there who fed the pigeons was tall. Admittedly, she was probably only five feet on a good day, but still. That was huge for a bird.
