Chapter 34
Serenity
The fence is chain-link with three strands of wire over the top. A man walks the inside of it with a rifle across his chest.
Thirteen of us are flat in the snow forty feet back. He has looked at this treeline twice.
He’s underneath them.
It’s not just my wolf who feels it now. It’s going right through me, hard and steady.
Crowe puts his mouth by my ear. “Now.”
I reach for it.
The magic comes up out of me and goes out over all of them. The weight lands across my chest and keeps coming, thirteen people’s worth, pressing down until I have to get both palms into the snow to stay flat. All of them. Nobody stays in the trees.
Hold. Just hold.
The man with the rifle walks six feet from where Odile is lying. He doesn’t turn his head.
Then we’re up. The cutters take the chain-link in four bites, and I’m through the gap on my hands and knees, dragging all of it behind me.
Thirteen. Hold thirteen.
The quarry floor is white and open with no cover anywhere. We cross two hundred yards of it in front of a lit building with men standing outside, and not one of them looks up.
Hold. Please hold!
Crowe turns his wrist over as we reach the wall. Six twenty-two.
Twenty-seven minutes.
The building above ground is a concrete box with the windows painted over. The way down is a vehicle ramp on the north side. Three trucks are backed up to it with their engines running and their tail-lifts down.
They’re loading.
Faine goes past me at the top of the ramp without any sound at all.
The smell comes up out of the ground and hits my wolf hard enough that I stagger into Crowe’s arm.
Bleach. Bodies. Old blood sitting in a drain somewhere below. People who haven’t been clean in weeks, all of it warm and wet, and underneath it the exact industrial cleaner they used on the floors of the ward I lived in for a year.
It’s the same. They’re all the same.
He’s down there.
I take the ramp.
They have them in the loading bay in two lines. Gray coveralls. Bare feet on the concrete. Cuffed at the wrists in front, runes going dull blue up both arms of every one of them, handlers walking the lines with tablets.
I stood exactly like that for a year.
A woman with a clipboard comes straight at me, steps past me without knowing she’s done it, and walks away.
“There are more people in this bay than my ward held,” I say low when she’s gone.
“Then they’ve emptied more than one building into this hole,” Odile says under her breath.
My hands have started to shake. There are guards all through this bay and thirteen of us standing in the middle of it. Every scrap of what’s keeping us here is coming out of me.
The pull is not down here. It’s above me now, and east, and I have been standing in the wrong place for ninety seconds.
Then the second truck’s tail-lift starts to rise, and I see her.
Red hair. She’s at the back of the truck bed with her wrists double-banded, and a chain running from the cuffs to a ring bolted through the floor. Two handlers are on her. A third stands well back. Even here, even now, they give her the room.
Her head is down.
“Kalli—”
Crowe’s hand comes over my mouth.
It isn’t gentle, and it isn’t steady either. His palm is against my teeth, and I can feel it shaking. He isn’t looking at me at all. He is looking at that truck bed. His other hand has gone to the front of his coat, over the place where the knife is, and it stays there.
He takes one step toward the ramp.
Faine’s hand comes up against his chest.
She doesn’t say anything. She doesn’t push. She just stands in front of him with her hand there, and Crowe stops with his weight already forward, eyes locked on Kalli. The two of them hold like that while the tail-lift comes up and the doors go across.
The truck pulls out. It grinds up the ramp, and the sound of it goes away over the quarry floor.
Crowe watches the whole thing. He watches the space where it was for two seconds after it’s gone.
Then he takes his hand off my mouth.
“Go and get him,” he says. He hasn’t looked at me. “We’ll take this bay. Odile’s people hold the ramp.”
“Crowe—”
“Go.”
I go.
Through the inside doors into a corridor with strip lights, and the pull drags up and left the moment I’m through them.
The glamour is stretched over thirteen people behind me, and it’s tearing.
I feel it go thin. Then it frays at one edge, and I can’t hold it.
A man shouts behind me in the bay.
The whole thing tears through the middle.
The lights come up properly. An alarm starts somewhere overhead. There’s shooting behind me, deafening in the concrete. A guard is standing eight feet away, looking at my face.
Shit!
My wolf takes over, and I don’t try to stop her. The shift takes me down onto the floor. The coat and boots come off me in pieces. The corridor turns sideways and gets bigger, and every sense goes sharp.
Then I’m on four feet, and he’s bringing the weapon round.
I take him at the knee.
The bone goes between my teeth. He comes down on top of me, and I’m already at his throat. It opens hot across my face. He makes a sound for a moment. Then he doesn’t.
Up!
The pull is above me.
Mate, she says, and this time I don’t argue with her.
I put my nose down and run.
Two more come round the corner. The first one fires and it goes past my shoulder into the wall. I’m up against his chest before he can put the next one anywhere. I take the forearm and break it across. He goes down screaming.
The second one turns to run.
I take him from behind at the base of the neck.
There’s another one after that. I don’t remember him at all.
There are stairs. My claws won’t hold on concrete, and I go up two flights half-sliding. Somebody on the landing above is firing down into the stairwell.
One of the rounds goes into me.
It goes in under my collarbone and comes out of my back. I feel the whole of it, front and back. It knocks me over, and I go down the steps on my side.
Up! Now!
I get up.
I shouldn’t get up. Some part of me knows the difference between a thing you get up from and a thing you don’t. This is the second kind, but I am on my feet and moving anyway.
The man on the landing sees me coming and stops firing. His hands go up.
I take him through the stairwell rail.
At the top there’s another one waiting with a length of steel pipe in both hands. He swings it into my ribs and something gives on my left side. I go into the wall with my whole weight. He lifts it again.
Get up!
I get up before it comes down. I have his forearm. Then I have his face.
When it’s finished, I’m standing over him with blood running off my jaw onto his coat. My sides are heaving. There’s a hole through the top of me, and it’s bleeding.
I can hear the wound. That’s the thing I notice. Air going in and out of somewhere it shouldn’t.
It should stop me. It doesn’t.
He’s close now, above and east, so strong it’s pulling my head around for me.
I go up the last flight.
The corridor at the top has doors down one side only. There’s a window at the far end, and the sky beyond it has gone from black to gray. Down the corridor, light is shining through the edges of the doors.
No. No, no—
Sixth door. Seventh.
The pull drags hard left, and there is a door with fresh cuts in the frame, runes going all the way round, pale wood where somebody has carved it recently.
I wore runes for a year. The ones on my cuffs burned whenever the wolf lifted, and I know what they feel like when they’re cut for what you are. These don’t do anything to me at all.
They weren’t carved for a wolf.
There’s a steel bolt across the outside. I can’t work a bolt with paws.
I shift.
It comes fast. The shift doesn’t hurt. My ribs moving while it happens does.
There’s a hole through me that whistles when I breathe.
That hurts too; more than anything I’ve ever felt before.
And I can’t think about any of it now. I get both hands on the bolt from my knees.
My whole front is red, and almost none of it is mine.
I drag it back and put my shoulder into the door. The pain is blinding. And I still can’t think about it.
The door swings open. The room beyond is bare. Concrete floor, bare walls. One wide window on the east side with the boards gone and the glass filthy.
The light is already inside it.
It lies across the floor in a wide gray band with a hard edge. The edge is moving.
He’s in the far corner with his back against the wall. The light hasn’t reached him yet. There’s smoke in the air anyway.
His left arm sits against his ribs at an angle it shouldn’t. There’s iron burn around both wrists. He has no shirt on, and every rib is showing. His eyes are open and on me. He doesn’t move at all.
God, what did they do to you?
The edge of the light is eight inches from his foot.
“Bastien.”
His mouth moves. No sound comes out.
I get across the floor on my hands and knees. My ribs go through me at every step. I get between him and the window and put my back to it. There’s no way I can move him by myself.
“Bastien… Up…you have to get up.”
The light comes over the edge and onto his foot.
His leg goes rigid. A sound comes out of him that I have never heard anything make, and he bites it off.
The skin across the top of his foot lifts.
It blackens from the middle out, and it opens, and it keeps opening.
The smoke off it is thick and white, and it catches in the back of my throat and won’t clear.
He’s shaking. All of him.
So am I.
I cover his foot with my hand, and the light comes through my fingers onto it.
No.
NO—
Do something!
And then the magic opens in me.
It comes from underneath the wolf, from somewhere I have never been. It goes up my spine and out along both arms, and it is enormous. I have no idea what to do with it. So I do the only thing my grandmother ever taught me.
Don’t be seen.
I put it over him. Over both of us. Over the whole corner of the room.
The light stops.
There’s a line across the concrete where the gray band is, and past that line there’s nothing. The window is still there. The sun is still climbing. It isn’t getting in. All I have to do is keep it until someone comes.
“Here!” I choke out. “We’re in here!”
There are shouts from outside. Gunshots. More voices.
But none of them is moving closer.
Hold it. Just hold it.
“We’re here!” I call again. I’m starting to shake, and it isn’t the ribs doing it. I’m fighting the sun, and I’ve never had to do that. Something hot runs over my lip and down my chin and drops onto his chest. Red splashes against his pale skin.
The room slides, and I have to get a hand onto the wall over his shoulder to stay upright. Blood streams from my nose into my mouth. The pressure in my head grows unbearable, and then it starts out of my ears.
The shaking gets worse until there’s no part of me still. My heart stops. One beat missing, then two, then it comes back too fast, and the edges of everything go white.
Hold it.
“Serenity.” His voice is almost not there. “Let go.”
“No.”
“You’ll die.”
“Then I’ll die.”
The light climbs. Every minute of it takes more out of me than the one before. My arms won’t stop shaking, and the blood off my chin is coming faster than it was.
Below us there’s more shooting, and then there isn’t, and then boots come up the stairwell at a run.
“In here.” My voice doesn’t come.
The door goes back off its hinges.
Crowe stops there with one hand on the frame. The light should be reaching him where he stands. It isn’t; my magic is holding the whole room past the line, and he’s inside it, looking straight at a corner that looks empty.
“There,” Odile says behind him. Her coat is open, and there’s a cut down the side of her face. “Move, Crowe.”
They come through. I feel the moment they cross the line. The whole thing bows and nearly folds. I get it back, and the sound I make doing it comes out of the wolf.
Crowe goes down on his knees beside me.
“Left arm’s broken.” He gets his forearm under Bastien’s shoulders. “Odile. Take his legs. Don’t hold his left side.”
Odile’s hands come onto my shoulders. Her gloves are gone. Her fingers are cold and steady.
“Let go,” she says. “We have him.”
“Not until he’s out of it.”
“Then thirty seconds more.”
They lift him. I go with them on my knees with one hand on his chest, holding it over him. The dark goes across the floor with us the whole way, down the corridor with the window burning white at the far end of it, and none of that light reaching us.
Somebody has the door. Somebody is shouting about the stairwell. Both my hands are on him now, and my face is running, and I can’t see anything.
Then the wall changes.
Stone on both sides. No window. The gray has gone out of the air. It’s dark.
“It’s okay,” Crowe says. “You can stop now.”
I let go.
Everything goes out of me at once, all the way to my fingers, and I go over sideways onto the corridor floor.
For a while there’s just darkness.
Then there’s a coat over me, and a hand under my head. My breathing is coming in and out too fast, and I can hear the wound doing it with me.
“Faine.” Odile’s voice, above me. “Her shoulder.”
Faine crouches at my other side. She puts two fingers under my collarbone and turns me an inch.
“Through and through,” she says. “Front and back.”
“That was twenty minutes ago at least.”
“Yes.”
Nobody says anything else about it. Faine sits back on her heels and looks at my face for a long moment, and whatever she’s thinking she keeps.
I get my eyes open properly.
The corridor is full of people. Two of Odile’s are at the far end with their weapons up. There’s a body on the stairs behind them.
Bastien is on the floor eighteen inches from me.
Somebody has put a coat under his head. His arm is still wrong.
His eyes are open, and they’re on me.
I get onto my elbow. Then my hand. Odile says something and puts an arm out, and I go past it.
I get to him. I get both hands on his face.
He’s freezing. His skin is pulled so tight that all I can feel under my palms is bone.
“I’m here,” I say.
He tries to speak. He can’t.
“Don’t.” My hands won’t stop shaking against his jaw. “Don’t talk. I’ve got you.”
His right hand comes up off the floor. It takes him a long time. It reaches my forearm and closes on it with almost no strength behind it.
“I’ve got you,” I say again.
Then I can’t say anything else. I rest my forehead on his chest, where there’s no heartbeat, and I stay there.