Chapter 41
Grace
The inside of the car smells like coffee and drugstore shampoo. That’s the first thing that reaches me, and it lands harder than the two men settling back into the front seats. All those calls in the dark, and the other end of the line smells like anybody on her way to work.
She doesn’t look up. She has a phone in one hand, thumb moving, and she finishes what she’s typing before she gives me anything at all.
On the calls, there was always a pause before her answers.
I thought it was a method, a way of keeping me small, making me wait.
Sitting beside her, I can see what it really was.
I was one task in a night that had several. She was just multitasking.
“Belt,” she says.
The voice is exactly the voice. Hearing it come out of a person is worse than hearing it come out of the dark. She’s fifty-something, dark-framed reading glasses pushed up into gray-brown hair, a raincoat, a travel mug in the holder between us with lipstick on the lid.
I put the belt on. Up front, both doors shut, and the locks drop.
She holds out her hand, palm up, eyes still on her screen. I lay the phone in it, and it disappears into her coat. The car pulls off the gravel. The phone was never mine anyway.
Nobody pats me down. Nobody ties my hands. There’s no need, and everyone in this car knows it. I’m not a prisoner being taken somewhere. I’m a delivery being driven.
I’m not shaking. I keep checking for it, and it isn’t there. What’s left in me is cold and quiet. Under the cold, low behind my ribs, the pull keeps on. Back the way we came. Up the road, up the mountain, to a man standing at a fence line in the dark.
I’m still furious with him. And I miss him with an ache that doesn’t come only from the wolf. Both of those ride down the mountain with me, and neither one cancels the other out.
The sky comes up gray on my side of the vehicle. We pass the dead weigh station, and where the river bends wide, the car swings east and runs along the water. Warehouse roofs. A gravel bank. Light moving on the current.
Nobody talks. The two in front don’t even look at each other. I let the light come all the way up off the water before I say the thing I got in this car to say.
“My sister comes off the program. Whole. That was the price. I want to hear you say it’s done.”
Her thumb stops on the screen. A second, not much more. Then it moves again.
“The terms were received.”
“That’s not what I asked.”
“It’s the answer I have.”
Mild. No push in it, and no lie in it either. That’s the part that worries me. A lie would mean the question still mattered. She sounds like a woman answering something that’s already settled.
I don’t ask again. Asking twice never made a difference in all the time I ran for her, and I’m not going to beg. I put my hands flat on my thighs and stare out the window. Wherever this car stops, Serenity is somewhere past it, and every mile is a mile closer to her.
Hours drag by. I shut my eyes, hoping to sleep through some of it.
I don’t.
The place, when we reach it, is nothing much. A chain-link gate with green slats woven through it. A low tan building with loading doors down one side. A man in a safety vest steps out of a booth, looks at the driver, and waves us through without a word.
The handler is out before the engine stops ticking. I open my own door and put my own boots on the ground before anyone can do it for me. If I’m walking into this place, I’m doing it on my own steam.
Inside is a gray hallway with fire doors and a desk. The man behind it doesn’t ask my name. He reads it off his screen.
“Sangrey.” He doesn’t make it a question. “Right arm.” His eyes raise to mine. “Don’t waste your time shifting. We have wards in place for that.”
I give him my arm, because the two men who came in behind me have gone still, waiting to see if I won’t. He closes a plastic band around my wrist. A number, printed. No name on it anywhere.
“Where’s my sister?”
I say it to the handler, because she’s the one I dealt with, first call to last. She’s already half turned away, coat over her arm, a woman with the rest of her day waiting.
“Serenity was transferred,” she says.
For a second I just stand there, waiting for the words to mean something else.
“Transferred where?”
“That isn’t information I have.”
“You said—” It comes out too high. I stop and start over. “The deal was her. Off the program. Whole. That was—”
“We had another deal.”
“Another—” The word won’t finish. “What does that mean, another deal?”
“We had an offer too good to refuse.” A small tilt of her head, almost polite. “It happens.”
“When?”
“Before your first message.” She glances at her screen to be sure. “She was gone before you ever reached out.”
The floor doesn’t move. It only feels like it does. My hand goes out and finds the edge of the desk.
Gone before I typed a word. Before I sat in my dark room and traded myself for her. There was never anything on the other side of it, and I walked in anyway.
He told me. Standing in his room with his hands opening and closing, he told me exactly how this ends, and I called him cold and came down the mountain to prove him wrong.
He was right. Of course he was.
“All yours,” the handler says—to the desk, to the men, not to me—and turns for the door with her coat and her day ahead of her.
“Let’s go.” A hand closes above my elbow.
They walk me off the tile and through the first fire door. My knees want to fold. I don’t let them, because there’s a hand on each arm now, and the last thing I’ll give this place is the sight of me going down.
He begged me not to do this, and I made him the enemy for it. And it didn’t even matter. I didn’t hand them a reason to let her go. There was no her to let go. They’d already been paid.
I bite down on my lips, because a sound is climbing and I won’t let them hear it.
The worst of it isn’t this hallway. It’s that I can’t tell him.
He’ll never hear me say it—that he was right, that I was wrong to fight him, wrong to think I knew the way through better than he did.
I did it alone, exactly the way I swore was my right, and there’s nothing at the end of it.
Nothing. I carried myself all the way here for nothing.
The pull picks that moment to double. It comes up through my chest so hard I turn toward the doors before I know I’ve moved, my whole body aimed back up that mountain at a man who doesn’t know where I am and has no way left to find out.
Because I made sure of that too. No note. No trail. The only phone I ever touched is in her coat pocket. Scent doesn’t sit in a closed car, and we crossed running water at dawn. I did it clean. So clean that the one time in my life I want to be found, there’s nothing of me out there to find.
The pull doesn’t care what I built. It keeps on, low and dumb, aimed back the way we came. A shove between my shoulder blades makes it clear there’s no point in heading anywhere but the way we’re going.
The men steer me around a corner, and the glamour sits up in me the way it always does when I’m cornered, ready to make me small, forgettable.
There’s nowhere to put it. The first place that ever held me, I walked out because a tired man on a night shift looked at my face and didn’t see it.
These men don’t look at my face. A hand rides above each elbow, and a hand doesn’t blink.
Back at that desk, a number went around my wrist, and a number can’t be fooled.
I could be the most forgettable woman alive, and both those hands would still be on my arms.
I made myself nobody to get in here. There is no nobody that walks back out.
My wolf has gone low and quiet inside me, ears back. She knows a cage when she’s standing in one.
Badge, door. Badge, door. The building never gets darker, and that’s the thing my skin can’t settle over—it stays lit and clean, hallway after hallway of people doing jobs.
A man eats a sandwich over his keyboard behind a wired window.
On the wall beside his door there’s a whiteboard ruled into a grid, numbers down the side, days across the top.
One of the men slows just enough to read the board against the band on my wrist. “First draw’s in the morning,” he says to the other. Bored. A man near the end of his shift.
I check the band myself, without wanting to. My number is already written in tomorrow’s first box. Somebody put me up there before I ever got in the car.
Oh God. I’m such a fool.
The last door opens on a clinic room, bright and warm.
A reclining chair with a strip of paper down one arm.
A steel cart. A folded towel, a coil of rubber tubing, a rack of tubes with colored caps, all of it laid out ready.
This is the front end of the thing that’s been draining my sister, and it’s clean, and somebody dusts it.
A man in scrubs looks up when the door opens. His eyes go straight past my face to my arm.
“This the Sangrey?” he says, to the men, not to me.
“Morning list.” One of them lets go of my arm. “Need to log a sample into the file.”
“Looks stronger than the other one ever did.”
The hands turn me and sit me down. Paper crackles under me.
“Wait!” I blurt.
The man pulls the cart closer with his foot and picks up the length of rubber.
“Sleeve up,” he says.