Chapter Seven
Day three was the same. The routine was already setting like concrete.
Amani woke with Grainger's arm across his chest, extracted himself with the careful precision of someone lifting a trip wire, and stood in the dark bedroom listening to the old man breathe until he was sure the rhythm hadn't changed.
It hadn't. Grainger slept the deep, untroubled sleep of a man who believed his world was exactly as it should be.
The collar had rubbed the skin of his throat raw.
Three days of constant contact and the irritation had deepened into something angrier, a ring of inflamed skin that stung when he swallowed and ached when he turned his head.
He'd stopped noticing the burn of the silver itself.
It was the damage around it that kept reminding him.
Breakfast. Eggs again, because eggs were the only thing Amani could produce with any reliability and because Grainger seemed content to eat the same meal twice in a row if it meant watching Amani in the kitchen.
The crane sat at the breakfast bar with his newspaper and talked about the weather, a clear day, high of a hundred and four, the horses would be sheltering in the arroyo to the west. Amani filed the information.
The arroyo. West. Somewhere the horses went when the heat was worst. Water, maybe. Or shade.
He filed everything. Three days of cataloging and he had a map of the house in his head that was detailed enough to navigate blindfolded.
The front door was always unlocked. The windows in the sitting room opened outward with simple latches.
There were no other people on the property, no guards, no hired men, no one between Amani and the door.
Grainger's arrogance and the desert itself were the only security system.
He had also found the truck.
The previous day, during the hour Grainger napped after his reading session, Amani had been allowed to "stretch his legs" in the courtyard behind the house.
Grainger had said it with the magnanimous air of a man granting a privilege.
Amani had walked the perimeter of the courtyard with his hands clasped behind his back like a prisoner in a yard, which was exactly what he was.
And there, behind a low adobe wall on the north side of the house, was a dusty Ford pickup. Old, sun-bleached, but intact.
He'd looked for keys that evening. Quietly, methodically, while Grainger watched the news and stroked his hair on the couch.
He'd scanned the kitchen counters, the entryway table, the hooks by the front door.
Nothing. The keys were somewhere he hadn't found yet, in Grainger's bedroom, maybe, or on his person.
And searching Grainger's pockets while the man slept was a risk that had a very narrow margin for error.
So. No truck. No keys. No phone. That left the road and his feet.
After breakfast, Grainger wanted to be read to.
Amani read. Two hours. The crane was in a restless mood, stopping him to comment on passages, to share memories of Edward reading the same pages, to explain the historical context of a scene set in an English manor that Amani could not have cared less about.
The collar made the reading worse than yesterday.
His voice cracked and rasped against the raw skin of his throat, and by the second hour he was sipping water between every other page just to keep going.
He listened to Grainger's commentary with the polite attentiveness of a hostage and turned the pages and let his voice carry the words while his mind ran the calculations for tonight.
Distance: unknown, but the van had driven for three or four hours from Vegas on a highway. That meant the nearest paved road could be anywhere from ten minutes to two hours on foot, depending on how far the driveway stretched before it connected to something.
Terrain: flat desert scrub. The ground would be hard-packed dirt, rocks, scattered cactus. In the dark he wouldn't be able to see everything he was stepping on.
Speed: on a good surface, he could run a mile in under seven minutes. On desert floor, barefoot, in the dark, slower. Much slower. Call it twelve minutes per mile at best.
Window: Grainger fell asleep fast and slept deep. Amani estimated he'd have at least thirty minutes of uninterrupted running before the old man noticed the empty bed. Maybe more. Maybe less, if the body heat was what Grainger tracked in his sleep rather than the weight.
Thirty minutes at twelve-minute miles was two and a half miles.
In the open desert, with no cover, under starlight.
Anyone looking from the house would be able to see a running figure for a mile, maybe two.
He had no idea how sharp Grainger’s human eyes were.
If he shifted to his crane form, all bets were off.
But if Grainger was asleep and Amani had a head start, it might be enough.
Might. That was the word that kept everything balanced on a knife's edge.
It might be enough. It might not. He might reach the road.
He might collapse in the desert with shredded feet and no water and no one knowing where he was.
He might die out there, and Grainger would find his body, and the old crane would probably mourn him the way he'd mourned Edward, with genuine grief and no understanding at all of his own role in the death.
Amani turned another page and kept reading.
The day passed the way the previous day had passed.
Lunch. Reading. The nap hour when Grainger dozed in his armchair and Amani sat very still and watched the desert through the window and counted his own breaths.
Dinner, rice again, with vegetables, nothing that required oil or heat or steady hands.
The couch. The news. The hand in his hair.
Grainger was in a gentle mood. Whatever cold thing had surfaced during the burned chicken had retreated fully, and the old crane spent the evening talking about the stars.
He knew the constellations. He pointed them out through the window, naming them with the quiet pleasure of a man sharing something he loved, and Amani watched the stars and hated them for being beautiful and hated Grainger for knowing their names and hated himself for listening.
"There," Grainger said, his finger tracing a line across the glass. "Orion. Edward used to say he could see the belt from our bedroom window. He had better eyes than me." A soft laugh. "Most herons do."
Amani said, "That's nice, Mr. Grainger."
The hand in his hair stopped.
The room didn't change. The stars didn't move. But something in the air compressed, the way air compresses before a storm, and Amani felt the shift in Grainger's body, a tension that started in his fingers and ran through his arm and into his chest where it pressed against Amani's shoulder.
"My mate," Grainger said quietly, "doesn't call me that."
The silence stretched. Amani's heart beat once, twice, three times, and then Grainger's hand resumed its stroking and his body softened and his voice came back warm and easy, as if nothing had happened.
"The desert skies are clearest in winter.
You'll love them. We'll bundle up and sit outside and I'll teach you all the stars. "
Winter. He was talking about winter. It was barely the start of spring and Grainger was making plans for them in winter, months away, as if Amani would still be there, still sitting on this couch, still being stroked like a pet while an old man narrated the sky.
Amani let the silence hold. He did not say Mr. Grainger again. He did not say anything at all.
Tonight. It had to be tonight.
He counted to four hundred.
Grainger fell asleep the same way he had the nights before, quickly, his breathing evening out within minutes of the lights going off, his arm heavy across Amani's chest. But Amani wasn't taking chances.
He lay in the dark and counted each breath, and when he reached four hundred he counted a hundred more, and then he began to move.
Slowly. Millimeters at a time. Lifting Grainger's arm with the delicacy of someone handling blown glass, sliding his body sideways across the sheets, freezing every time the old man shifted or sighed.
It took him ten minutes to get out of the bed.
Ten minutes of controlled, silent, agonizing patience, and by the time his feet touched the cool tile his heart was pounding so hard he was amazed it didn't wake Grainger on its own.
He stood in the dark bedroom and looked at the sleeping man. The white hair spread across the pillow. The weathered hands curled against the sheets, relaxed in sleep, their hidden strength tucked away. The mouth slightly open, breathing steady and deep.
For one still, clear moment, Amani thought about his lion.
About what four hundred pounds of muscle and teeth could do to a thin old man asleep in a bed.
The thought arrived without drama, a simple tactical fact, the predator's math.
But then he remembered the shower on the first day.
The silver slamming him to his knees, the shift snapping back like a whip, the headache that had left him blind and gasping on the tile.
The collar would drop him before his jaw finished reshaping.
He'd be on the floor, half-shifted and screaming, and Grainger would wake up and find him there. And then what would he do?
So, he chose the door instead.
He walked through the house in the dark, barefoot on tile, navigating by the map in his head. Hallway. Turn left. Past the sitting room with the bookshelves. Past the kitchen where he'd burned the chicken and first felt those hands on his stomach. Through the foyer to the front door.
Unlocked. Just like he'd known it would be.