Chapter 10
They brought me to my family at nine o’clock that night, which I understood, even as Francis unlocked the door, was not a kindness.
It was a tool. A man who has only been told a threat can talk himself into doubting it.
A man who has been allowed to stand in the room with the threat, to put his hands on it, to smell the fear coming off the two people he loves most in the world — that man does not doubt.
He does exactly what he is told. Edoardo Conti had been running packs for fifty years, and he understood the mechanics of leverage the way I understood the mechanics of a lock, and letting me see them was the most efficient turn of the key he had. It worked.
The room was a converted apartment on the fourth floor — somebody’s idea of comfortable, once, with a sofa, a kitchenette, and a window painted shut.
A second wolf standing in the corner with his hands folded who did not leave the entire time I was there.
Noah was on the sofa. Amy was beside him with her arm around him, and she came up off the cushions the instant the door opened.The sound she made when she saw me was not a word, and I crossed the room and had both of them against me before the guard finished telling me I had ten minutes.
I held my son’s head against my chest and I felt him shaking, the fine continuous tremor of a six-year-old who has been brave for too many hour.
Overr the top of his head, I looked at my wife, my wife looked at me, and in the half-second before either of us could arrange our faces for Noah’s sake, I saw the whole truth of where we were written plainly in hers.
She is a doctor. She has a doctor’s face for catastrophe, the calm that is built specifically to keep the frightened person from reading the chart.
She put it on for Noah a hundred times that week.
She did not have it on yet when the door opened, and so I saw, for one half-second, exactly how frightened she was, and exactly how completely she had decided not to let it touch our son.
I have loved her across eleven years and a great deal of difficulty, and I do not think I ever loved her as violently as I did in that unguarded half-second.
Then the calm came down over her face like a shutter, and she said, “Hi,” in an ordinary voice, for Noah.
The performance of normal began, and the two of us held it up between us for the rest of the ten minutes the way you hold up a tarp in the rain, each gripping our own corners, not looking at how thin it was.
“Dad,” Noah said into my shirt. “Dad, the man said we have to wear the vests or the bad thing happens.”
I felt the room go very far away.
I made myself look down. I made myself look at the thing my son was wearing under the unzipped hoodie they’d let him keep — the flat gray panels, the strapping sized down clumsily for a small body, the small hard shape of the receiver over his sternum where a six-year-old’s heart was beating much too fast. Amy was wearing one too.
I’d felt it when I held her and made my arms not understand what they were feeling.
They had put an explosive vest on my wife and a smaller one on my son.
They had told a six-year-old it was a vest, the way you’d tell him it was a seatbelt, the way you make a monstrous thing sayable to a child by giving it an ordinary word.
“That’s right, buddy,” I heard myself say, and my voice came out steady, which I will never understand and have stopped trying to.
“You wear the vest. It’s like — it’s like a really serious seatbelt.
Dad’s going to fix it so you can take it off really soon.
Okay? That’s my whole job right now. That’s the only job I have. ”
“Okay,” he said, in the trusting way that took the bottom out of me, because he believed me completely. I had given him my word, and I did not yet know how I was going to keep it, only that I was going to keep it or not survive the failing.
Amy got him settled with a glass of water and the second-hand promise of sleep, talking to him in the low even music she used at the end of his bad nights.
While she did it, she steered the two of us a step toward the kitchenette, putting her back to the guard, and under the cover of refilling the glass, she finally let me see her face do something other than perform.
That was when I smelled it.
It was on her breath, faint, and on the water, fainter — a flat, green, medicinal bitterness with a chemical edge sanded onto it, and I knew it the way you know a voice through a wall, before you can name it, in the part of you that remembers older than thought.
My wolf knew it first. My wolf, which had been pacing the inside of me all night, went absolutely still.
Wolfsbane. Refined.
“Amy,” I said. Very low. “How long have they been dosing you.”
Her doctor’s calm flickered. “Since the first hour,” she said, just as low, not looking at me, smiling slightly for Noah’s benefit across the room.
“It’s in everything. I can’t —“ The smallest break. “Zimife, I can’t shift. I’ve been trying since they put us in here.
There’s nothing there. It’s like reaching for a hand that’s been cut off.
I’m a wolf and I can’t find it.” She steadied.
“They don’t want me able to run, or fight, or get him out as anything other than a woman on foot in a building full of their people.
So they took it. They just — took it out of me. ”
I had spent thirty-four years not letting myself stand inside the Evangel Street house.
I had built a whole life out of the not-standing-there.
And in that kitchenette, with my son’s too-fast heartbeat ticking against a receiver across the room, and the green bitterness of refined aconite coming off my wife’s breath, the wall I’d built finally failed, and I stood inside it whether I wanted to or not.
Because this was the weapon. This exact weapon.
My father had ordered this same poison by the crate and seeded it through the air and water of a house full of people so that when the fire came they could not become the thing that might have saved them.
So that a nineteen-year-old girl carrying my child reached for her wolf in a burning corridor and found a hand that had been cut off, and burned as a woman, on foot, because someone had decided she should not be allowed to be anything else.
I had told myself for three decades that I’d had no part in the chemistry of it, that the aconite was my father’s doing, a thing I learned about after.
And maybe that was even true. But here it was again, a generation later, in my wife’s water, and the symmetry of it was so total and so cruel, that for a moment, I could not breathe around it.
The Contis did not know what they were doing.
That was the obscene part. To them it was just suppressant, standard practice, the chemical equivalent of handcuffs — they had no idea they were dosing my wife with the precise poison my father had used to murder the woman I’d loved before her.
The war did not even know it was rhyming.
It just reached for the same tool, because cruelty is unimaginative, because the machine that ate Kerra was the same machine, still running, still reaching into the same drawer.
“Hey.” Amy’s hand found mine below the level of the counter, out of the guard’s sight, and gripped it hard, and I realized my hands had started to shake — me, not her, the steady one coming apart while the dosed one held on.
“Hey. Look at me. Not there. Here.” She knew.
Not the details — I’d never told her all the details, not the aconite, not the corridor — but she knew me, eleven years’ worth, and she knew the particular country my face goes to when the past comes up through the floor.
“Wherever you just went,” she said, “come back. I need the man who’s in this room.
Not the one who’s in 1989. Can you do that? ”
“Yeah,” I said. It came out rough. “Yeah. I’m here.”
“Good.” She didn’t let go of my hand. “Because I need to tell you something and I need you to hear it as a fact and not an argument.” Her thumb moved once across my knuckles.
“I can feel you. Right now. I know you don’t always believe it’s there — I know your wolf got burned down to almost nothing a long time before me, and I know it answers me so quietly you’ve spent eleven years half-sure you imagined it.
I’ve never minded. I knew what I was choosing.
But I can feel you right now, Zimife, the bond, faint as it is, and it is not imaginary, and it is telling me one true thing, which is that you are going to get our son out of this building.
” Her eyes did not waver. “I’m not asking you to promise.
I’m telling you what I already know. So go do whatever you have to do, and do not spend one second of it being gentle.
Do not carry me up a flight of stairs in your head while you’re doing it.
I’m not her. I’m not going to burn. You’re going to get us out, and then you and I are going to have a very long conversation about whatever you just saw on your own face, and we are going to have it because we lived. Are we clear?”
I have been spoken to by a great many dangerous people in my life.
My father. Edoardo Conti. Men whose names open doors that don’t have handles.
None of them ever frightened the past out of me and put my spine back in the same sentence the way my wife did, dosed, disarmed, and wearing a bomb, in a fourth-floor room with our son three steps away.
“We’re clear,” I said.
“Say it back to me. The part that matters.”
“I’m going to get you both out.” I held her eyes. “You’re not her, you’re not going to burn, and we’re going to have the long conversation because we lived.”
“Better.” Something eased at the very corner of her mouth — not a smile, the structural beam a smile gets built on.
“Now, go let them think they own you. You’re very good at letting people think they own you.
It’s the most useful thing about you, after the obvious.
” And there, even there, was the dry thread of her, the thing that had made me able to love again after I’d decided love was a door that only opened once, and I held onto it like a man holds onto a rail.
The guard said, “Time.”
I kissed my son’s hair, told him to be brave for his mother, and that being brave mostly meant sleeping; which made him laugh, a small wet exhausted laugh, the best sound I had heard in years.
I put my forehead against Amy’s for exactly as long as they let me.
I did not say goodbye, because goodbye was a word from the wrong story, and I was done living in that story.
I said, “Tomorrow,” which was a promise dressed as a time, and she heard it as both.
Then Francis walked me back to my own room and locked the door, and I sat down on the floor with my back against the wall, and I let myself shake for sixty full seconds, on a timer, the way my father had taught me to ration everything, including fear.
And when the sixty seconds were up, I stopped. I drew one long breath in and let it out, and I started, very methodically, to plan.
There would be no fire this time. There would be no corridor, no cut-off hand, no woman on foot because a man had decided what she was allowed to be.
Whatever else I had failed at across thirty-four years, I would not fail at this one thing twice.
They had shown me my family to make me obedient.
They had made a mistake. They had reminded me exactly what I was for.