Chapter 24
He gave me Sera Voss the way you hand someone a loaded thing.
“And the family,” I said. “While I’m uptown sitting with a Conti banker.”
This was the part I’d been dreading, because it required the thing I had not done in thirty-four years, which was trust Jeff Alli with someone I loved.
“That’s the other reason I’m out of the dark,” Jeff said.
“Your bolt-hole in Sunset Park is good. It’s clean, nobody alive connects it to you — I checked, it’s genuinely clean, you did good work.
” A beat. “But your wife and your son spent three days in a Conti building, and their scent is the loudest thing in this city right now. A wolf can be tracked to a clean building the same as a dirty one, if his nose is good enough and the family’s put enough wolves in the air.
You stashing them and walking away isn’t safe.
It was never going to be safe. The longer they sit in one place, the worse it gets.
” He held my eyes. “I can move them. I’ve got a place upstate, off every grid, no scent of you or them anywhere near it, and a way to get them there that breaks the trail three times.
I can have them out of the city before you finish with Voss.
Then you’re free to do what you have to do without a leash made of the two people you can’t lose. ”
“You want me to hand you my wife and my son.”
“I want you to let me do the one thing I’m good for,” Jeff said.
“And I know exactly what I’m asking. I know what my track record is with the people you love.
I’m not asking you to trust me, Z. I’m asking you to do the math.
You can’t protect them and reach Marr at the same time.
I can take one of those off you. And if you’re standing there thinking I’d sell them again—“ his voice cracked, finally, the only time it did “—then put me through the wall now, because a man who’d do that doesn’t deserve the six months and you’d be doing me a kindness. ”
I looked at him for a long time.
The wolf had stopped pacing. Somewhere in the last twenty minutes, it had stopped, and I hadn’t noticed when. I sat in the cold dead room where we’d been boys together and I made the hardest call of the whole long week, which was not the escape, the hunt, or any of the violence.
It was deciding to let Jeff Alli carry my family up a dark road, and trust that this time he’d get them where he said.
“If anything happens to them,” I said, “there is no six months. There’s tonight. Do you understand me?”
“I’ve understood you since we were nine years old,” Jeff said. “You hit harder than anybody in the neighborhood and you never once hit somebody who didn’t have it coming. I’ve got it coming, Z, one way or another. But not from this. From this, I get them home.”
I called Amy from the dead club while Jeff sat with his hands flat on the table, giving me the room.
I told her what I was about to do. I told her who Jeff was — all of it, the 1989 of it, the present-day of it, the dying of it — because she was a wolf, my mate, and I was done deciding what she could afford to know.
She listened the way she listened to everything, and when I finished, she was quiet for a moment.
Then she said: “Does he love you? The way you’d have to, to do all that, and let you hate him for it? ”
“Yes,” I said. “I think he does.”
“Then I’ll go with him,” Amy said. “Not because I trust him. Because I trust your read of him, and because you can’t do this carrying us, and because” — a breath — “a man dying of guilt who gets a chance to carry the thing he broke to safety is the most reliable man in the world for exactly one trip. Send him.” A pause. “And Zimife? Finish it. Come find us.”
“Always,” I said.
I hung up. Jeff was watching me.
“She said send you,” I told him. “She also said she doesn’t trust you.”
“Smart woman,” Jeff said, and stood, slow, the sickness moving through it.
At the door he stopped, the way I’d stopped at Reyes’s, and didn’t look back at me.
“I won’t say her name to you. Kerra’s. I know I don’t get to.
But you should know I see her. Every day.
For thirty-four years, she’s been the last thing before I sleep.
” His hand was on the frame. “Go get the thing that ends it, Z. I’ll keep the people you love alive while you do.
It’s the only prayer I’ve got left and I’m going to pray it with my hands. ”
He went out into the dark to go and get my wife and my son.
I gave him five minutes. Then I went uptown to see Sera Voss.