32. Chapter 32
Serenity
Grace is folded into the armchair under a blanket with her boots still on. She wouldn’t leave. They gave me a room with a bed in it, and I sit on the floor with my back against it and watch her sleep, because I spent a year believing I’d never get to watch her do anything again.
I don’t sleep.
The pull doesn’t sleep either. It sits under my ribs all night, dragging at the same spot, pointing the same way. My wolf has been pacing since we got into this room, and it’s making my skin itch. Sitting here is going to make us both crazy.
He’s alive. He was alive at ten past one, and he’s alive now.
Sometime after dawn, Grace opens her eyes and finds me looking at her.
“You didn’t sleep.”
“No.”
“Sery.” She pushes the blanket off. “You have to eat, then. Pick one.”
“That’s not how it works.”
“It’s how it works today.”
She marches me to a dining hall full of strangers and puts a tray in front of me, and I eat because she watches every bite. It’s the first time in a year that anybody has fussed over me.
A young man in a gray jacket finds us before noon.
“Miss Sangrey. Viktor’s asking for you. Both of you.”
The same room as last night, with the same people I met then.
The map is still on the screen, but there’s a new mark on it now, a red circle a long way north of the compound.
Viktor stands at the head of the table. Jericho has his laptop and three empty coffee cups.
Craven is by the wall. Nadia. Decker, who pulls out a chair for Grace before she reaches the table.
“Sit down,” Viktor says to me. “We found where the call went.”
Jericho turns the laptop around. “The night Bastien watched the manager phone his superiors, the call went out from the desk line. I traced it through the network. It rang at a gravel quarry a hundred and fifty miles north of the compound. The quarry’s been closed for twelve years, but the power was never cut, and there’ve been truck deliveries going in for at least the last two. ”
“You think it’s their headquarters?” Viktor frowns.
“Unlikely. No office calls out of it, just short check-ins on a schedule. It’s a place they move people through.”
North.
I look at the red circle, and my wolf homes in on it.
“That’s where he is,” I say.
“That’s where the call went,” Viktor says. “It may be where they took the people from the compound. It may be a way station. It may be a dead office with a phone in it. We don’t know yet.”
“I know it.” I stand up. “I felt a pull. It started the minute his transmitter went dead, and it hasn’t stopped. It drags in one direction no matter which way I’m facing. I couldn’t have drawn your map. But I could have drawn that line.” I put my finger on the red circle. “It points there.”
Viktor takes his time answering. He doesn’t argue with me. That’s worse than arguing.
Nadia’s head turns. “When you were in there, they moved you around?”
I nod. “Sometimes they’d move us to another facility for a time, then bring us back.”
“How did they move you?”
“By truck.” I focus on the screen and not on the table.
“Tell me about that,” Nadia says. “When they moved you out of the compound, how did they do it?”
So I tell them. The cuffs and the key that opens them.
The van with the bench along one side and the ring bolts in the floor.
How many men rode with me and where they sat and what they carried.
Nadia writes it all down, and for the first time since I walked into this mountain, I’m not a victim in this room. I’m a source.
“How many people were in that ward when you left?” Viktor asks.
“Twenty. Give or take.”
“And could you identify any of them?”
“Some by sight. We didn’t speak to each other. But I knew the woman in the cell next to me was a dragon. Kalli. Cell seven.”
Craven comes off the wall.
“Say that again.”
“Her name is Kalli. She was in the cell next to mine. They kept her double-cuffed and only drew from her twice a week, and the handlers were afraid of her.”
“Full dragon?” he presses. “Not a hybrid?”
“Full dragon.”
“Describe her.” He’s crossed half the room while I’ve been speaking.
“Red hair, unusual eyes. Dark gold, with a ring around the outside. Older than me, but I couldn’t tell you by how much.”
“Dragons don’t get taken.” There’s no emotion in it. He’s stating a fact. “There are fewer of us than you think, and we count ourselves. Every clan, every name. If someone is missing, I would know about it.”
“She said her clan was small. Hidden. They keep to themselves.”
Craven stands there with one hand on the back of a chair and the air shimmering around him. Everyone in the room is looking at him.
“A dragon, held for over a year in a cage built by people like Vasile Dumitru.” He turns to Viktor. “If she’s in that quarry, this stopped being optional. I’ll need every flight I can raise.”
“You’ll have them by the end of the week,” Viktor says.
Everything in me goes cold. “What?”
“We verify the site. We watch it, we count the guards, we learn the shift pattern, and we build a model of the workings before anyone sets foot past that fence. A quarry is tunnels, pits, and machinery, and I’m not sending people into ground I haven’t mapped.”
“He doesn’t have time.”
“You don’t know that. You don’t even know if—”
“I do.” My voice rises. “He’s alive right now. If you wait, you’ll be mapping the place where he died.”
Viktor looks at me the way he looked at me last night. Kind, and closed.
“Yesterday they knew we were coming before we came,” he says.
“Somebody handed them our plan, and twenty prisoners vanished because of it. If I rush this and they see us, that quarry empties like the compound did, and we lose all of them: your friend behind the wall, nineteen others, and Val-Serein too, if he’s there. I won’t be early twice. We plan first.”
“Viktor.” It’s Decker. His hand covers Grace’s on the table. “The animal knows things before you can explain them. Mine did. If her wolf says he’s alive and points at that circle, that’s not a feeling. That’s a report.”
“I hear you. It’s why the quarry gets verified first and not third.
” Viktor straightens. “But I can’t confirm what she feels from the outside, and I don’t send people into unmapped ground on it.
And you two…” He looks at Grace and me. “Neither of you goes within twenty miles of that quarry. Grace is too vulnerable right now, and both of you are what they want. You’re what they lost. They’ll target you as soon as you get there. ”
Nobody says anything after that.
The meeting breaks up around me. Nadia and Craven go out talking about flight paths. Jericho stays bent over his screen. Grace’s hand lands on my shoulder, and I let her steer me into the corridor.
She walks me all the way back to the room before she says it.
“You’re going to do something.”
“Grace—”
“Don’t. I’ve watched you get that face since I was six. You had it the day you climbed the water tower.” She steps in front of the door. “Sery. I just got you back. It’s been one day.”
“And he’s the reason you got me back.”
She flinches, but I keep going anyway, because it’s true.
“He bought me so nobody else could. He went into that building knowing his cover was gone, so that twenty families would get their people home. And right now, he is chained somewhere north of here, and everyone in this mountain who agrees he’s a hero has scheduled his rescue for when it’s too late. ”
“We don’t even know he’s alive.”
“I know, Grace.” I fight to keep the frustration out of my voice.
“Because of a feeling.”
“Because of a fact I can’t explain yet.” I take her hands and hold them. They’re shaking. So are mine. “You did what you had to do, because it kept me breathing. Don’t stand there and tell me you don’t understand what I’m about to do.”
Grace’s face crumples. She wipes it with the back of her wrist. “Viktor said—”
“Viktor’s not my alpha.”
“No. He’s just the man whose mountain you’re standing in.” She lets go of my hands. “I’m not going to stop you. I’m telling you I can’t lose you twice. I can’t survive it. So whatever you’re planning, plan on coming back.”
She walks off down the corridor with her arms wrapped around herself, and she doesn’t look back. I stand there until she’s out of sight.
Then I go into the room and start waiting for dark.
The mountain quiets slowly. Boots in the corridor, then fewer boots, then a long stretch of just pipes ticking somewhere in the rock. The bird cage sits on the table where I left it. I don’t wind it. If I hear that bird right now, I’ll come apart, and I don’t have time to come apart.
I take my boots in my hand and open the door.
The corridor is empty. At the end of it, where the stairs go down toward the garage level, there’s a lamp burning in the common room, and Decker is in the big chair under it with his eyes open.
Of course he is. Viktor didn’t post a guard on me. He didn’t have to. He just never sent the bear to bed.
I stand in the dark end of the corridor, and I reach for the thing my grandmother put in me before I could read.
Don’t be seen. Don’t be noticed. Don’t be remembered.
It comes up over my skin in an instant, stronger than I’ve ever felt it. I walk down the corridor, through the lamplight, past the bear. Four feet from his chair. He doesn’t turn his head.
I’m through the far door and down the first flight of stairs before I let myself breathe. My wolf is wide awake and silent, and neither of us is sorry.
The scent of diesel leads me to the garage level. Rows of trucks and cars, half of them with mud up to the windows, and one light burning down at the end where somebody has an engine hood up.
Crowe.
He’s in his shirtsleeves with a rag hanging out of his back pocket, and his coat is folded over the door of the same dark car that brought me here. He never unpacked. Some part of him has been waiting down here to drive somewhere.
I walk down the row of vehicles, and I let the glamour go about ten feet out.
He doesn’t jump. He looks up from the engine and stares in my direction.
“That’s a useful trick,” he says, reaching back to wipe his hands on the rag.
I let the magic sink. It swirls around me in a ripple that I can almost feel.
“I need to ask you something, and I need you to hear everything before you answer.”
“Go on.”
“Bastien is alive. He’s in that quarry on Viktor’s map, but Viktor wants to wait until they’ve checked it out before they go in.
He doesn’t have time for that.” My voice doesn’t shake, and I’m proud of that.
Because the rest of me is shaking. “I think he trusts you. And I think he’s your friend.
And I don’t think you’re the type of man who’d leave a friend to die. ”
Crowe folds the rag in half, and in half again, slowly, watching me the whole way through it.
“I need a car,” I continue, “and I need somebody who doesn’t answer to Viktor.” I lock eyes with him. “Will you help me?”