Crow’s Shadow (Grave Prowlers MC: Oregon & Idaho #1)

1. Chapter 1

Chapter one

CROW

Three in the morning has a smell, and Grimstone wears it like a second skin, diesel, cold clay, and the sweet chemical rot the vents never fully carry off.

I stand in front of the open door and watch the flame take him.

He was a courier. Skimmed off a shipment, figured the miles between here and Nohaven bought him room to breathe. Loco disagreed. Now, the courier is in the fire. Fat spits in the flame. Something in his chest gives with a wet pop, and the fire takes the sound.

Waiting is the part nobody wants. Prospects think the work is knives, heat and the wet sounds a man makes at the end.

It isn’t. It’s patience. A body takes two hours if you want nothing left worth naming.

Longer if he carried weight, and the courier carried none, so I have ninety minutes alone with the roar and the orange light painting the block walls the color of a wound.

The Prowlers built this place before I patched in.

Mortuary out front, beige carpet, soft lighting and a binder of laminated hymns for the families who come in daylight and never once wonder what runs beneath their grief.

Cemetery out back, six acres of it, headstones in tidy rows and a tree line past the last of them where the ground goes soft and private.

Between the two sits the crematory, cinderblock and steel, the black heart of the whole operation.

People bring us their dead. We bring the club its living.

Through the far door is the shop. Buck keeps the books, but the coffins are mine to load, and loading is where the real trade sleeps.

We build them ourselves, every box, oak, pine and the cheap laminate for the county jobs.

Good work, honest joinery, the kind Cannon’s people back in Virginia taught the first of us forty years ago.

We kept the craft, because a coffin built by hand draws no eyes at the border, and a coffin with a false floor draws no eyes at all.

Rifles ride under the dead. Powder rides in the pillows.

Some grieving family ships their grandmother to Idaho and never learns she traveled with forty pounds of someone else’s future tucked beneath her spine.

The gauge holds at sixteen hundred. I thumb the log, note the time in the careful shorthand Bones likes even for the jobs no coroner will ever read.

The courier is past pain now, past name, past the animal panic he wore when Grim walked him through the door.

Soon he’ll be ash and the stubborn white knots of bone the heat can’t finish, and I’ll run those through the cremulator until he’s sand, and the sand goes in the river, or the flowerbeds, or the consecrated ground out back if Mercy is feeling holy about it.

Fitting, some nights. A man who died for the club, feeding it.

I feel nothing. Not a boast. Feeling left me a long time ago, or I left it, and either way the absence is a tool, the sharpest one I own.

A cleaner who feels makes mistakes. A cleaner who feels leaves a thumbprint, a hesitation, a body half-done because his gut turned on him.

Mine doesn’t turn. Hasn’t in in years. Dead men don’t bother me, and the living rarely manage it.

I am the last cold room a man passes through, and I keep the temperature low on purpose.

The door behind me opens without a knock, and I know who it is before the air changes, because only one person in Grimstone moves without sound and still lets me hear her.

Shadow.

She doesn’t speak. She never speaks first. She crosses the concrete with the Ledger held to her chest like a hymnal, the big black book with its cracked spine and its pages full of a code only she can read, and she settles onto the stool by the cold table where I lay the tools. She opens the book. She waits.

I don’t look at her.

Looking at her is a thing I do not do. Call it discipline.

Call it the one rule I wrote for myself and never broke, in a club with no rules but respect.

She logs the dead. Every body I burn, every box I load, every name Loco wants gone, she writes it down in her small sure hand, and the club sleeps easy because Shadow remembers what the rest of us need to forget.

She is the memory of our sins. And I do not look at the memory of my sins, because I live inside one of them, on a page she has never read, from a night twenty years gone.

“Courier,” she says. Not a question. Her voice sits low and roughened, a little torn at the edges, like she keeps it in a drawer and only takes it out for me.

“Courier,” I agree.

“Name?”

“Didn’t ask.”

Her pen stops. “You always ask.”

“Not tonight.”

“Loco know that?”

I finally look at her hand instead of her face. “You writing the book or my fucking confession?”

“Depends which one gets you to answer.”

Pen scratch. The fire roars. Two words and a scratch and the heat between us.

She sits close enough for me to catch her under the chemical stink, rain, and something green and wild, out of place in a room built for endings.

My body knows she’s there before the rest of me permits the thought.

That’s the part I hate. Twenty years of teaching myself not to want what grew up under my nose and one breath of her still puts my teeth together hard enough to ache.

Twenty-five years old and grown up in the cracks of this club, underfoot and overlooked, a girl nobody claimed and nobody sent away.

The women fold her in. The men forget she’s there.

Two decades I have spent making sure I am one of the men who forgets, and I have failed at it every single night she walks through this door, and I will never let her see the failing.

Because I know what I am to her. I am not a fool.

I feel her eyes track me across the room, I have felt them since she was old enough to know the shape of want.

Shadow thinks I don’t notice. She thinks her wanting is a quiet thing.

It is the loudest sound in any room we share, louder than the fire, and I burn it down the way I burn everything else, because the day I turn around and meet her eyes is the day I have to tell her why I can’t.

The gauge drops. I kill the burner, crack the door wider, let the roar fall to a tick and a hiss. Ninety minutes gone. I don’t remember them. Time bends in here, folds and thins, the only clock I trust is the one in my chest, which never once speeds up.

I rake the remains forward. White grit, teeth, the curve of a hip and half a skull, honeycombed by heat.

Bone clicks against steel as I drag it toward me.

Shadow watches without flinching. She has watched a hundred of these.

The first time, she was nineteen and Loco sent her to learn the book from old Loki, and she stood right where she stands now and did not look away, and I hated how much I respected it.

The pieces go to the cremulator. The grind fills the room, a sound like the world clearing its throat, and when it dies the courier fits inside a plastic bag the size of a flour sack.

Five pounds of man. Everything he was, down to five pounds, and I have never held a bag of it and felt anything past the weight.

“River?” she asks.

“Ground.” Loco’s orders.

“He have people?”

“Everybody has people.”

“Not you.”

The rake stops. Shadow keeps writing.

“Careful,” I tell her.

“I am.”

The courier had people, and people ask, a headstone with a false name answers better than an empty chair. We’ll drop the bag under a real casket next week when the Petersen woman goes down. Two for one hole. The club is nothing if not thrifty with the dead.

She writes it. Ground. The pen stops. And then she does the thing I brace for every night, which is nothing, which is simply sitting in the orange light with her wild green smell and her torn voice and her eyes I refuse to meet, being the one warm thing in the coldest room in Oregon.

I seal the bag. I clean the rake. I do not look at her, and the not-looking is its own kind of labor, harder than the burning, harder than anything Loco ever sends down the hall with a bag over its head.

The motion light trips outside the shop.

Not the deer light. That one is soft amber on a slow timer, tuned so the herd drifting through the graves at night doesn’t have us up at all hours. This is the hard white one Byte wired to the fence line, set high enough that four legs won’t wake it. Whatever tripped this one stands on two legs.

I move before I decide to. The bag goes on the table, the pistol comes out of my waistband, and I am at the window with my back to the block wall while Shadow slides off her stool, book closed, silent, reading me now instead of the pages. She doesn’t ask. She is smart enough not to ask.

Through the grime on the glass, I see, the lot, the roll door of the coffin shop, the fence, the black wall of the tree line.

Nothing. Then something. A shape at the edge of the white light, out past the last row of stones where the ground goes soft, a man standing where no man should stand at three in the morning.

Not moving. Not hiding. Watching the building the way Shadow watches me.

He is too far for a face. Too still for a drunk. He wears the dark like he had it tailored, and even across the lot I feel him clock the light he tripped and decline to care.

Nobody comes to a crematory at three in the morning. Nobody stands in a club cemetery and watches a cleaner work. The dead here do not get visitors. The dead here get us.

“Crow.” Shadow’s voice at my shoulder, low, and she has followed my eyes to the glass. “Who is he?”

“Nobody,” I say, and the word tastes like a lie, because nobody is the one thing he isn’t. Somebody stands in our graves tonight. Somebody found the single place in Grimstone we swore no one would think to look, and looked, and stayed to let us know he found it.

I thumb the hammer back.

“Lock the book in the floor. Stay inside.”

Her hand closes on my sleeve. First time she has touched me in a year. I feel it everywhere, and I hate the everywhere, but I do not shake her off.

“Be careful,” she says.

I go out into the dark to meet him. By the time I cross the lot, he’s gone. No footsteps in the wet earth. No gate moving. Nothing.

Except something sitting on the headstone where he stood.

It’s a cheap black phone, it's screen cracked across one corner.

I pick it up, the screen lights up.

DOES SHE KNOW YET?