30. Chapter 30 #2
And underneath it all, from a room at the end of the corridor, a smell that stops me in the middle of the hallway with my hand on the wall.
Rain. Warm skin. Green stalks snapped between somebody’s fingers. Our mother’s kitchen. A bed I shared when the storms came.
“Grace.” It comes out so low nobody hears me.
Crowe stops walking. “What is it?”
I go past him.
The room at the end has a dozen people in it and a map up on a screen, and she isn’t in any of the faces. I go over them twice. She’s not there.
My wolf swings away from the pull for the first time all night. She turns her head at the far corner of the room, at a coat rack and a stretch of bare wall, and holds there. Ears up.
There’s nothing in that corner.
I’ve spent a year learning to trust her over my own eyes.
“Grace.” I say it to the empty wall. “It’s me. Let go.”
A chair goes over at the far end of the table.
She comes up out of nowhere. One second there’s a wall with a coat rack against it. Then Grace is standing there with both hands over her mouth.
She’s so small. In that place, whenever I thought about her, she seemed bigger.
“Sery?” she says.
Nobody has called me that since they separated us.
I don’t remember crossing the room. She meets me halfway, and we go down together against the edge of the table, her fists in the back of my coat, my hand in her hair. She’s warm and solid and shaking and completely, absolutely alive.
“You’re here.” She says it into my shoulder, over and over. “You’re here. You’re actually here.”
“I’ve got you.”
Grace pulls back far enough to see my face. Hers is soaked.
“I spied for them for months. So they’d take care of you.” Her hands are on my collar. “They sent me a photograph of you. They sent messages. But I didn’t know… I never knew…” She chokes down a sob.
“Grace.” I take her face in both hands. “I’m here.”
She puts her forehead against mine and holds it there. Neither of us says anything for a while.
Somebody at the table clears their throat. Somebody else tells them not to.
Then a very large man in a flannel shirt comes over. He stops a good distance back and puts his hands in his pockets.
“Grace.” His voice is low. “Sit her down. She’s been in a car all night.”
Grace chokes out a laugh. “Decker. This is my sister.”
“I know who she is.” He pulls out a chair and turns it toward her. “Sit her down.”
I sit. Grace takes the chair beside me and keeps hold of my hand, and the room starts moving around us again.
My wolf lifted her head for Grace. She lifted it all the way.
That’s as far as it goes. The wards have had her pinned since the gate, and whatever she’s reading off my sister comes through thin and unfinished. There’s something about Grace I can’t put my finger on. I put it down to a year apart, and this mountain, and the state I’m in.
Now she puts it back down and points, and the feeling inside is worse in this room than it was in the car. The need to find him becomes all-consuming. And I hate that because Grace is sitting right next to me.
The man at the head of the table gets to his feet. He waits until I’m looking at him before he starts.
“Miss Sangrey. Viktor Parlance. This is my facility.” He puts both hands on the back of his chair. “You’re safe here for as long as you want to be. I have things to tell you, and you won’t like any of them.”
“Tell me.”
“All right.” He nods. “Last night we moved against the compound where you were held. Two teams on the ground, dragons in the trees. We went in at first light.”
My hand closes on Grace’s.
“There were twenty people in that building when I left,” I say. “And there’s a woman in cell seven. She’s—”
“There was nobody,” Viktor says.
“What do you mean, nobody?”
“The building was empty. Every cell, the medical rooms, all of it. They cleared it out days before we got there.” He doesn’t soften any of it. “Whoever runs that operation knew we were coming.”
“Then where is everyone?”
“We don’t know yet. We have a phone line we’re tracing, and we have vehicles that went somewhere. That isn’t what I need to tell you.”
The pull drags again.
“Say it.”
“A man went into that building ahead of the teams. He had an invitation, and he was supposed to be out by midnight.” Viktor stops. “He didn’t come out. We got inside at dawn and didn’t find anything. No sign of him, no sign of anyone else. We’ve had people in there all day.”
“Bastien,” I say.
“Yes. I’m afraid we didn’t get to him in time.”
“He isn’t dead.”
“We don’t know what he is.” Viktor holds my eyes. “I won’t tell you he’s alive, and I won’t tell you he isn’t. We have no body. We have no vehicle. The transmitter he was carrying stopped sending at ten past one.”
Ten past one.
The clock two floors down, striking. The feeling arriving a few minutes later, out of nowhere, from outside me.
I know exactly when they took him. I was awake for it.
“There’s more,” I say. “You’re all standing there like there’s more.”
The woman with the braid comes down the table and sits on the edge of it near me.
“Vanya Arrowvane. I’ve been hunting for you since the day your sister came off that mountain. I want you to know that people were coming for you.”
“Thank you. Say the rest.”
“He came to us through the Nocturne Court in the fall,” Vanya says.
“He was given a job. Get inside the blood trade, find out who runs it, and hand the Court a name so they could shut the whole thing down. He was working with us. That compound was only on our map because he drove to it every week and drew it.”
I sit there.
“He bought me,” I say.
“Yes.” She glances over to where Crowe is standing with his back to the wall. “Yes, we know that now.”
“He paid a fortune for me. He locked me in a house.”
“He did.” Vanya looks back at me. “And a week ago he sat in this room and gave us the location of that compound. He was the only person who could walk through those front doors. He knew how thin his cover was getting. He was advised not to go, and he went.”
Grace’s hand is still in mine.
He reserved me so nobody else could touch me. Then he bought me outright. I called it ownership, and I was right, but I had no idea what it was for.
You were shutting it down. The whole time. And you let me think you were a rich addict who liked how I tasted.
“Why didn’t he tell me?”
Nobody answers.
“Why?” I repeat.
“Because if you’d known, and they’d ever taken you back,” Vanya says, “they’d have had it out of you inside a day.”
Viktor is standing. “I’m sorry. I don’t know what he was to you. I’ve been told enough to guess.”
Everyone in this room is wearing the same face.
I know that face. I watched it on the ward every time a cell went quiet. It’s the face people wear when they’ve already decided, and they’re waiting to see how you take it.
They think he’s dead.
I put both hands on the table, and I wait for it to feel real.
It doesn’t happen.
The pressure remains under my ribs. It arrived at ten past one, and it hasn’t stopped once since.
It’s not grief. I know what grief feels like. It’s not this.
My wolf hasn’t settled. She’s still edgy, still leaning toward the pull.
She’s waiting for him.
You picked him. When did you pick him?
She doesn’t have to say anything. She’s been telling me since a corridor in that compound, and I’ve been refusing to hear it.
“He’s alive,” I say.
Grace’s hand moves in mine. “Sery—”
“He’s alive.” I say it to the room, and my voice comes out steadier than before. “I can feel him. He’s that way.”
I lift my hand off the table and point at the wall, and I hold it there.
Vanya looks at Viktor. Viktor looks at me.
“Miss Sangrey,” he says. “You’ve had a very long day.”
I lower my hand.
Grace’s thumb starts moving back and forth across my knuckles, the way our mother used to do it, and I take my hand back and put it in my lap.
Nobody in this room believes me. I don’t care. Inside my chest, the pull keeps building.
I’m going to need somebody on my side.