Cold Queen (The Grimm Riders MC #3)

Prologue

Wren

The house on Bellamy Street had a furnace.

I want that on the record. It wasn't that there was no furnace.

It's that Deena Kroll had a furnace and a thermostat and a hand she used to turn the thermostat down, and those three things together made a January that I still measure other Januaries against.

I was eleven. Kai was seven. The house had four kids in it and two of us were us.

"It's fifty-two," Kai said.

"You can't read a thermostat."

"It's five and then a two." He was standing on the arm of the couch in three shirts, squinting at the little dial in the hallway like it owed him money. "Five two."

"Get down before she hears the springs."

"Fifty-two, Wren."

"I heard you."

"That's like—" He was doing math. He did math the way other kids did cartwheels, badly and constantly and always where you could see him. "That's like being outside but with a roof."

"That's exactly what it is," I said. "Get down."

He got down. He got down the wrong way, the way he did everything, one foot on the cushion and one foot in the air and then all of him on the carpet, and the springs went off like a gunshot in a church.

We both froze.

Nothing from the kitchen. Deena had the TV going in there, some program with a studio audience that laughed on a schedule, which was the only laughing that house had ever heard.

"See," Kai whispered. "Fine."

"You're not fine. You're lucky. Those aren't the same."

"They feel the same."

"Only from the inside."

I was eleven and I already talked like that. I don't know where I got it. Somebody in some house somewhere probably said it to me and I kept it, the way you keep a coat that isn't yours because it's the coat that's in the closet.

The rule about Bellamy Street was that you didn't ask for things.

Not food, not heat, not a ride, not a signature on a school form.

If you asked, Deena would explain to you very patiently and at length how much the state gave her per child per day, and then she would say the number out loud, and then she would look at you like she was waiting for you to hand it back.

I learned early that the fastest way through the conversation was to say sorry before she got to the number.

Kai never learned it. Kai would stand there for the whole speech with his face open like a window, nodding, taking it in, and then at the end he'd say something like so that's not very much, huh, and mean it kindly, and she'd send him to the room without dinner for being smart.

He wasn't being smart. That was the awful part. He was being sympathetic. It just came out of his mouth in a shape she couldn't hold.

That night I made us dinner, which is a generous word for what I did.

There was a sleeve of saltines and there was a jar of peanut butter with about a knuckle left in the bottom, and there was margarine, and I've never been able to explain to anyone why the margarine was allowed and the peanut butter wasn't. Some houses have rules.

Some houses have weather. Bellamy Street had weather.

I did the peanut butter with a butter knife, scraping the sides, and I gave him seven crackers and I ate four.

"You have less," he said.

"I have four. You can count."

"You have less than me."

"Yeah, because I'm not seven and I don't cry when I'm hungry."

"I don't cry."

"You cried on Tuesday."

"That was my ear."

That was, in fact, his ear. He'd had an ear thing since November and Deena had a theory about ear things, which was that they resolved.

"Fine," I said. "You cried on Tuesday about your ear. I withdraw it."

"What's withdraw."

"It means I take it back."

"Then say take it back."

"Eat your crackers, Kai."

He ate his crackers. He ate them one at a time with the peanut butter side up so it wouldn't touch his hand, which was a system he'd invented, and then he licked all seven of his fingers in order and then he did the last three again, and I sat there in three shirts and a coat and watched my brother eat dinner off his own hands and thought, with the exact clarity I have never once managed as an adult: I am going to have to be very good at this.

Not good like nice. Good like a mechanic is good.

There were two other kids in that house and I never learned much about either of them, which tells you something about the arrangement.

One was a fifteen-year-old named Tasha who was in her room with the door shut from the day I arrived to the day I left, and who I only ever saw in profile, going down the hall with a towel.

The other was a boy about my age called Dev who had been there longest and had therefore worked out the economics, and Dev's whole strategy was to be liked.

He carried things for Deena. He said yes ma'am.

He got a second helping maybe twice a week and he ate it in front of us with no expression at all.

I didn't hate him. I've thought about it for seventeen years and I've never managed to. He'd found the one lever in the house and he pulled it, and if I'd found it first I'd have pulled it too, and the only reason I get to feel superior is that I had a brother and he didn't.

Kai adored him. Obviously. Kai adored anybody who looked at him for longer than a second.

"Dev says there's a way to make the radiator work."

"There's no radiator, Kai. It's forced air."

"He says there's a thing you can do."

"There's no thing you can do. There's a woman in the kitchen with a thermostat and that's the whole machine." I was doing his sock, which had come apart at the toe, with a needle from a motel sewing kit I'd taken in a previous life. "Don't ask Dev for things."

"Why?"

"Because he'll say yes."

"That's good."

"It's not," I said. "He'll say yes and then he'll do it and then he'll be owed, and being owed is how everybody in this house talks to everybody else, and I don't want you learning it."

Kai thought about that for a while, sitting on the end of the bed with one sock on.

"Can I ask you for things?"

"Yes."

"Is that different?"

"Yes."

"Why?"

And I remember I sat there with a needle in my hand and no answer, because I was eleven, and because I'm your sister is a reason that a seven-year-old with three placements behind him has every right to find unconvincing.

"Because I'm never going to keep the score," I said finally. "That's the difference. Everybody else in the world is keeping the score. I'm not going to."

"Ever?"

"Ever."

"Even if I ask for a lot?"

"Ask for a lot," I said. "Ask for everything. That's what I'm for."

That's another sentence I made up that night with no idea what it was going to cost me.

I've thought about it in truck stops in four states.

That's what I'm for. Eleven years old, sewing a sock, casually assigning myself a purpose that would still be running seventeen years later when a man in a treatment center told me it was a load he never asked for.

He was right, by the way. He was right about the load.

He was wrong about who put it there.

The ear thing got worse the second week of January.

By Thursday he was holding his head on one side like a bird and by Friday he wasn't eating, and I finally did the thing you're not supposed to do in that house, which is that I went into the kitchen during her program and asked.

"He needs a doctor."

"Ear things resolve."

"It's been nine weeks."

"They resolve," Deena said, without turning around, and then she said the number out loud, the per-child-per-day number, and explained what a co-pay was, and what a deductible was, and how a person on her income had to think about these things, and I stood there and let it happen because getting out of the kitchen faster wasn't going to get him antibiotics.

Then she said, "You could ask the school nurse."

And I want to be fair to Deena Kroll, who was a cheap and unkind woman running a fifty-two-degree house: that was, in fact, a real piece of information, and it worked, and on Monday a woman named Mrs. Petrosky at Bellamy Elementary looked in my brother's ear for nine seconds and said a word under her breath that I had not previously heard an adult say at school.

He had amoxicillin by Tuesday. He was eating by Thursday.

Nobody in that house ever mentioned it again, and I understood, at eleven, that I had just learned the most valuable thing I would learn that year, which is that there is almost always one person somewhere in the system who will do the thing if you can find them and get in front of them and be extremely specific.

I've been finding that person ever since. Sometimes it takes six hours of driving.

They came for him on the fourteenth.

That's not a dramatic sentence. Nobody kicked a door.

It was two people from the county in a Ford Taurus with a bad idle, and one of them had a lanyard and one of them had a clipboard, and they came at four in the afternoon on a Thursday and stood in Deena's living room with their coats on because even they weren't taking their coats off in that house.

The lanyard one crouched to talk to Kai. I hated her instantly for crouching. It's a thing adults do to children when they're about to do something to them.

"Kai, honey. We're going to take a little ride."

"Where."

"To a house with a very nice family in it. Just for a bit."

"Is Wren coming?"

The pause on that was maybe half a second and it taught me more than school did.

"Not tonight."

"Then no," Kai said.

He said it like a man declining a second helping. Polite. Complete. He sat down on the floor exactly where he was standing, which was his whole strategy in life at that age, and he folded his arms, and the clipboard one sighed through her nose in a way that said she had somewhere to be at five.

"It's a placement issue," the clipboard one said to Deena, over his head. "It's not about the child."

"It's never about the child," Deena said, and lit a cigarette in the house, and that's the one true thing I ever heard her say.

I got down on the floor with him.

"Kai."

"No."

"Look at me. Kai. Look at me."