Chapter 40
Decker
No breathing. I stand at her door with my hand up and my ear turned, and there’s nothing on the other side of the wood. No breath. No heartbeat—and I can hear a heartbeat through a door; I’ve done it all my life. It’s the first thing I listen for and the last thing I doubt.
I knock anyway. “Grace.”
Nothing.
“Grace. It’s me.”
I try the handle, and it turns. The door swings in, and that’s the second wrong thing, because she bolts it. Every night. I made her promise, and she keeps her promises.
The room is dark and neat and empty.
I stand in the doorway running possible explanations, because that’s what I do.
Maybe she’s in the washroom down the hall.
Or Vanya called her early. Viktor moved the seven o’clock up, and nobody told me.
Each one lasts a second before the smell of the room kills it.
Her scent’s here, but it’s old. Hours old.
Cooled all the way down, the way a room cools when the person walked out of it and didn’t come back.
The duffel is still against the wall. The bed is made. On the blanket there’s a dent where somebody sat for a long time in the dark.
I came here with the words in order. Sorry first. Then how I’d make this right. I’m still holding them, standing in an empty room, and there’s nobody to give them to.
“Sir?” The night guard has come down the corridor behind me—young, big, awake now. “Is there a problem?”
“Where is she?”
“She’s—” He looks past me at the empty room and his face goes white. “She’s inside. She has to be. Nobody passed me. I’ve been on that junction since midnight, and nobody passed me, I swear—”
“I believe you,” I say, and I do, and that’s the horror of it.
Something passed him. A woman wearing the one gift that’s entirely hers walked out of this wing right by him.
She turned it back on. All these days I watched her choose to be seen, and this morning she pulled the magic back over herself and walked out.
And the one man on this mountain her gift has never worked on wasn’t here to stop her.
I was a hundred feet away. I was looking at her dark window, telling myself she was asleep behind it.
Something starts coming up through me from a long way down.
I know what it is. I’ve been holding the bear back from making his mark on her, and he’s been patient, and now his patience is done.
She’s gone, and the thing between us is half-made and left open.
Torbjorn tried to tell me. I asked him what would happen if the bond wasn’t sealed, and he said I wouldn’t want that to happen.
This is what he meant.
It comes up hot, and nothing in me can hold it.
The sound that comes out of me isn’t a man’s. It’s not a sound the bear has ever made either.
The doorframe gives under my hand. I hear it crack before I feel it, wood splitting off the bolt plate. The night guard is backing away down the corridor with his hand on his radio and his eyes wide, and some far-off working piece of me knows he’s right to be afraid.
The animal is at the surface, all the way at the surface, wearing me this time. And what he wants is to go through the wall the door is set in, through the gates around the place, down the mountain, and take apart everything out there until something gives her back.
Boots. Voices. The wing waking up around the sound I made.
And then, when it feels like something’s about to explode, it changes.
I’ve felt this once before, years back, hunting a thing with the power to end me. The moment shrinks away.
The roar drains off. Everything left goes narrow and simple.
She’s not here.
But she’s somewhere. Somewhere is a direction, a distance, a window of hours. That’s a trail. Trails are the one thing on this earth I’ve never once lost.
I burst out through the people gathering in the corridor without seeing their faces. The yard is gray and cold. I stand at the center of it, inhale deeply, and go to work.
Her track is there. Faint, cold, but hers. Out the side door by the storage block, along the building shadow, downwind across the yard. I follow it at a jog, and twenty steps along it crosses another scent line. I stop like I’ve been shot.
Mine.
Her trail crosses my own night circuit. Forty feet behind where I stood at the fence staring at her window.
She walked past my back. Downwind, patient, wrapped in her gift, close enough that if the air had turned once, I’d have had her.
She watched me stand guard over an empty room, and she kept walking.
I hold back a snarl that surges up my throat.
Now’s not the time to lose control.
I keep jogging. Her path runs to the wire mesh, through at the gate, onto the south road.
On the packed gravel of the roadside it goes thin, and a quarter mile down, where the frost turns to mud at the first bend, it ends the way trails end when wheels take over.
Boot prints to a road. A road to anywhere.
Jericho catches up to me there. He’s armed, half-dressed, Nadia three steps behind him with her jacket over sleep clothes. They both stop short of me.
“Decker.” Careful. “Talk to me.”
“She’s gone.” My voice comes out scraped.
“Used her magic to get past the wing watch sometime after midnight. Walked out the south road. A vehicle took her at the bend.” I look up from the mud, and whatever’s on my face sends Nadia’s hand to Jericho’s arm.
“She’s gone to them. She’s trading herself for her sister. ”
“How do you know—?”
“Because I set it up.” It comes out flat. There’s no reason left to hold anything back. “I knew what her blood was worth and I didn’t tell her. Someone else did, last night. She came to me, and I confirmed it, and then I let her go back to her room because I believed she’d wait for morning.”
I turn to him. His hand reaches out, hovers near my shoulder, then drops away.
“She’s mine, Jericho. She’s always been mine, and I lied to her, and she’s in a Syndicate vehicle right now because I fucked up.”
Neither of them says anything about the “mine.” Nobody needs it explained—not after the sound the whole wing heard, not with the animal still this close to my skin. Everyone knows now what she is to me. It cost nothing to say, and it fixes nothing.
“Wake Viktor,” Nadia says to Jericho, but Viktor’s already coming through the gate.
He takes it in fast—the mud, the boot prints, me—and I watch it settle behind his face.
“You were wrong,” I say to him. “She didn’t get over it.” It’s small of me. I don’t care.
He doesn’t flinch. “How long?”
“Trail’s three, four hours cold at the wing. The pickup’s more recent. Two, maybe three.”
“Then she’s on the corridor and moving.” He’s already turned, already barking orders.
“This changes everything, and everyone needs to understand how. We thought we’d track the network and get there before it could go cold.
They’re going to know what we’re doing now.
” He looks at me. “The quiet game is dead. We go loud. Now.”
“Tracking?” Jericho’s already moving to it.
“The only phone she has is theirs.” My teeth grind. “Nothing of ours to ping.”
“Then we don’t trace her. We trace them.” Viktor is fully cold now, working, and for once I’m glad of what he is. “Vanya will step in. She has contacts. And the Nocturne Court watches every lane on that corridor.”
“I’ll get word to Crowe,” says Jericho. “Tell him to find out if his people saw a vehicle running south before dawn, moving like it has somewhere to be. Faine’s people will have seen it, or they’ll find who did.”
People scatter, moving with purpose. I stand at the bend in the road with her boot prints going to nothing in front of me and the bear leaning south so hard I’m fighting to stand straight.
I turn and pull myself back through the gate with the rest and work at staying useful. Every cell inside me is screaming to go after her. To get on that road and run until I pick up her scent again. I don’t. Because the best thing to do right now is use what she just gave us without realizing it.
Something to follow.
The word comes forty minutes later, and it comes from the Court.
Jericho finds me in the armory, where I’m loading magazines because I need something to do or I’ll start breaking things again.
“Crowe,” he says. “A watcher below the weigh station logged a dark sedan before first light. Moving fast, no stops, headed south down the corridor into Faine’s ground.” He holds my eyes. “Vanya says her intel points the same way.”
South, down the corridor. A direction, a distance, hours to run it down.
A trail.
One they’ve been on for hours.
And I gave them every hour of that head start.