CHAPTER 17 #3
Arrow had confirmed it. All of it. The blood drive.
The three victims chosen because they signed their names on a form.
True-name power. The same mechanism Luca had described when she asked him about the binding agent residue behind the feed co-op, the iridescent smear on the grate that Eric had examined and lost four hours to, bled for three days from, because Eric was a sorcerer and sorcerers read the world through the lens of what they knew, and what they knew was sorcery.
The binding agent wasn’t sorcery. It was alchemical.
A distillation. Blood treated with a compound that catalyzed on contact with sorcerous residue and left a signature that read sorcerous to anyone looking for sorcery.
Arrow had built the frame. He had sponsored the paperwork.
He had collected biological samples with signed consent, catalogued under names, and then he had used those names to open throats on county roads and leave no blood at the scene because the blood wasn’t at the scene.
It was in vials, in compounds, in whatever working he had been building for two years in a town that hadn’t known he existed until the second body turned up.
He said the working was nearly finished.
He wouldn’t name the window. Which meant the window was short enough that naming it would tell her something useful.
Short window. Alive and unharmed. Temporary necessity.
The logic was its own reward: whatever Arrow was building required her presence for a period measured in hours, not days, and after that period she was expendable or irrelevant or both.
He had been courteous enough not to say which.
Luca’s standing rule. She had not once in six weeks failed to answer a message before midnight.
Not once. If she was working late at the clinic, she texted.
If she was at the carriage house, she called.
If she was anywhere the ridge road didn’t reach, she found a signal and sent something.
Two words, three, enough to say she was alive and accounted for, not lying in a ditch with her throat open and no blood on the ground.
Luca noticed patterns. He had been noticing patterns for two centuries, and the pattern of June Callahan answering messages had six weeks of consistency behind it.
Consistency was its own kind of signal when it stopped.
He would notice before morning. The clinic closed at five.
She typically left by six, six-thirty if the boarders needed extra attention.
It was now. She checked her watch, found her wrist bare, remembered the watch was on the nightstand at home because she’d taken it off to wash her hands after the last patient and hadn’t put it back on.
The clock wasn’t on the wall. The oil lamps didn’t keep time.
But the absence of her message would register.
Luca would call the clinic. The clinic wouldn’t answer.
He would call her phone. Her phone wouldn’t answer.
He would drive to the clinic. He would find the parking lot empty, the doors locked, the lights off, and the absence of all three would tell him something had happened. He would start looking.
Hours, not days. The only thing she could do with hours was be findable.
She stood. The chair creaked. Her boots on the stone were loud in the quiet room, and she didn’t try to soften them.
Let them fall. Let the sound carry. If Arrow had ears in the walls, let him hear her moving.
Let him know she wasn’t sitting in the chair waiting for the window to close.
Let him know that whatever he had built in this room had a tenant who understood the value of being difficult to lose.
She started at the far wall. Right hand on the stone, fingers spread, palm flat.
The stone was cool. Dry. The mortar between the blocks was smooth under her fingertips: hard, set and older than she wanted to think about.
She worked methodically. Top to bottom. Left to right.
Each block. Each seam. Looking for a draft.
A variation in temperature. A hairline crack where the mortar had shrunk or settled or done anything that suggested the wall was connected to something other than more wall.
The oil lamps guttered. Her shadow moved across the stone behind her, long and distorted, but she ignored it.
Her focus was in her fingertips. In the cool dry pressure of stone against skin.
In the texture of mortar that had been mixed and set by hands that were probably dead by now, and the dead didn’t care about draft or didn’t care about anything.
Either way they weren’t going to help her, so she helped herself.
Left wall. Nothing. Back wall. Nothing. The shelf with the oil lamps. Nothing except heat from the flames, which she had expected, and expectation was its own kind of dead end because it meant she wasn’t learning anything she didn’t already know.
The right wall. She started at the top. Worked down.
The stone was cooler here. Not dramatically.
The kind of cool that registered as a relative difference rather than an absolute one, like a patch of skin that felt colder than the rest when you had a fever and couldn’t tell until you touched something that wasn’t you.
She pressed her palm flat against a section three blocks from the floor.
The stone was fractionally colder. Not enough to be sure. Enough to check.
She turned her ear toward the wall. Pressed her cheek against the stone. Closed her eyes. Listened.
The stone carried sound oddly. Dense materials did.
They transmitted vibration rather than air, and vibration traveled through solid matter in ways that the ear wasn’t built to interpret, so what June heard wasn’t sound so much as the absence of it.
A particular hollow quality, a resonance that suggested the stone on the other side wasn’t backed by more stone but by something else, something that held air differently, or didn’t hold air at all, or held it in a configuration that changed how vibration moved through the wall.
She held still. Her breath shallow. Her ear cold against the stone.
The oil lamps guttered behind her, and her shadow held its shape on the opposite wall.
Whatever was on the other side of the stone kept its counsel while she pressed her face against it and listened for something she couldn’t name because naming it would mean hoping.
Hope was currency she couldn’t afford to spend until she knew what it bought.
The stone was colder. The resonance was hollow.
The wall behind the wall was not a wall, or was a different kind of wall, or was something that walls weren’t supposed to be, and June kept her ear pressed against it, her breathing shallow and her mind clear because clear was what she had instead of a phone or a watch or a door that opened when you pushed it. Sometimes clear was enough.
Sometimes it had to be.
She found the seam an hour later, or near enough.
There was no clock in the room, and she’d stopped trying to guess.
Not a crack. A ridge. Her fingers traced it in the dark, a raised line of iron half-buried under decades of mortar dust, running vertically along the cold section of wall in a shape that had nothing to do with masonry and everything to do with a hinge.
A grate. Set into the stone and mortared over from this side sometime before she was born, forgotten or abandoned or left as a mistake by whoever had built the room to hold things that didn’t need doors.
She worked her fingers into the gap where the mortar had crumbled thinnest and found the latch pin behind it.
Corroded, seized, but there, a piece of iron that had once turned and could turn again if enough of the rust around it gave way first.
She worked it with her thumbnail until her thumbnail split, then with the edge of her belt buckle, then with her bare fingers because the buckle kept slipping and her fingers didn’t.
The pin moved a fraction. Then a fraction more.
Her knuckles opened against the stone and she kept going, because Luca would come looking, and when he found the right building, she wanted the door to already be a door, not a wall he’d have to guess at from the wrong side.
The oil lamps guttered low and she didn’t stop to trim them.
Blood dried tacky on her fingers between rounds.
She worked the pin until it turned a quarter inch, then a half, timing her breathing to the effort as she timed everything that cost something, and somewhere in the hours that followed, she never knew exactly when, the latch gave.
The grate sat unlatched in its frame, waiting for a hand on the other side that wasn’t hers.