4. Chapter 4
Chapter four
SHADOW
Nobody tells me a damn thing, so I have gotten good at stealing it.
Church breaks near four. I know because I am parked on the bottom stair with the Ledger shut on my knees and my ears open, and men leaking out of a locked room drop more than they think when they figure the only girl awake is furniture.
Buck goes by rubbing his face, muttering about oranges, which makes no sense.
Byte goes by grey as old meat and does not clock me at all, and Byte clocks everything, so whatever he saw in there took a bite out of him.
Then Crow.
He comes out last, the way he always does, sweeping the room behind him out of habit, and his eyes hit me on the stair and skid off fast, and there it is.
The tell. For years I have watched this man give a room nothing, a wall, a shut door, and he gives me the same shut door every day of my life.
But tonight the door has a crack in it, and behind the crack is something with my name on it.
“What did Byte find?” I ask.
“Nothing you need to know.”
“Try again.”
He stops. Crow stopping is a whole conversation on its own. The man does not waste motion, so when he plants himself in front of me and looks down, I feel it in my teeth.
“Go to bed, Shadow.”
“You keep saying that like I take orders from you.” I stand, because I hate looking up at him, hate the way it puts the want right out on my face.
“I keep the book. Every body, every buyer, every hole we dig. You want me blind, you take the book off me, and we both know Loco would sooner cut off your hand than let you.”
Something moves in his jaw. “It’s not about the book.”
“Then what.”
“Leave it.”
“Crow.” And I do the stupid thing, the thing I have not let myself do in a year. I put my hand flat on his chest.
He goes to stone. Under my palm his heart is going hammering far too hard for a man this calm. For one cracked-open second we both stand there, and feel it, slam against my hand.
“Don’t,” he says, low. Wrecked. Not an order this time. Closer to begging, and Crow does not beg.
“Then tell me,” I whisper.
For half a breath I think he will. His hand comes up. It hovers at my jaw, close enough that I feel the heat come off it, close enough that years of wanting rears up in me like a live thing.
Then he steps back, and the door slams shut, and his face is the wall again.
“Nothing walks off this lot with you tonight,” he says. “You want to be useful, stay behind the fence. That’s the job.”
He is gone down the hall before I can put my hand down. I stand there like an idiot with my palm still warm, and under the warmth, under the sting of it, the wild thing in me sits up and bares its teeth.
Fine. He wants to play wall. I have been getting around walls my whole life.
Nova finds me in the chapel at dawn, which is what we call the back room off the shop where I keep the book, on account of Mercy blessed it once as a joke and the name stuck. She has two coffees and the look she gets when she is about to mother me.
“You slept in here again.”
“Didn’t sleep.” I take the coffee. “Nov. You ever get a thing off the women? Off Ariea, off Ember? A thing you can’t quite name.”
She goes still with the cup at her mouth. “What kind of thing.”
“Like last night you handed me a beer I didn’t ask for before I knew I wanted it. Like Ember reaches for the salt before Ariea’s done needing it.” I watch her. “Like sometimes I think I hear you before you talk.”
Nova’s easy face does something I don’t like. For a second it is not easy at all. Then she laughs, and it comes a half-beat late, same as Sable’s did across the bar, and my stomach drops.
“That’s just knowing each other, babe,” she says. “Live in a pile of men long enough, the women learn to move like one animal. It’s survival.”
“Sure, but that’s not what I asked,” I say, and let her have it, because she wants it, and because whatever she is not saying has the same shape as whatever Crow is not saying, and I am so goddamn tired of the shape of things nobody will say.
“No.” Her eyes meet mine over the coffee. “It isn’t.”
I open the book instead.
And there it is. Right there, waiting, like it wanted me to find it once I stopped chasing men who lie for a living.
The Ledger does not make mistakes, because I do not make mistakes, because a mistake in this book is a body in a ditch with a name still on it.
Every job gets three marks in Loki’s old cipher.
What came in, what went out, where it went down.
Loki taught me the marks the winter I turned nineteen, sat me in this room and made me copy the alphabet of it until my hand cramped and the shapes stopped being shapes and started being words.
Then he handed me the book and never touched it again.
Forty years of the club’s dead, and for the last six the hand keeping them has been mine.
I balance it the way Buck balances his money, and it has never once been off.
It is off.
A run three weeks back. Darkwater, two coffins out to a buyer coded R.
Renner. I have the weight in, forty-one pounds of hardware under a dead retiree named Alvarez.
I have the drop. What I do not have, what has been changed, is the went-out, the mark that says where those coffins actually landed.
In place of my hand there is another one, careful, clean, writing the marks as if it was born to them, pointing the book one way when my gut screams the run went another.
My skin goes cold.
Here is the thing nobody outside this room understands about the book. The cipher can be taught. Loki taught it to me, and somebody taught it to Loki before that, a line of hands running all the way to Virginia. Learn the marks and you can read a line. Learn them well enough and you can write one.
But nobody reads my Ledger except me. Six year of my own shorthand runs through Loki’s cipher, thousands of entries deep. A stranger might understand a sentence. Only I can read the whole damn book.
But somebody forged a line. Somebody who knows the marks Loki taught. Somebody who got into a room with one lock, and the one key rides on a cord against my skin and has not left my body since Loki looped it over my head six years ago.
One lock. One cipher. And the list of people alive who could beat both at once is so short it stops my breath, because there is really only one name on it. The man who taught me the marks. The man who set the safe in the floor. The man who has been kind to me since I was a stray nobody claimed.
Loki.
I sit very still while every ugly piece slides into place.
A man at the fence who knew my name, who handed me a mother out of the dark as if he had been carrying her around in his pocket for years.
And now this. Three weeks back, before any of it, somebody walked into the one room I own and scratched me out of my own record.
Same cold. Same wrong. And sitting between the two is a face I’ve trusted my whole life.
Loki.
I should go to Crow. That’s the rule. Something’s wrong with the book, you go to Crow, and Crow makes it not wrong, usually with his hands.
But Crow is a wall with a crack in it and my name behind the crack, and he told me to stay behind the fence like a dog.
And if I say Loki’s name out loud to Crow with nothing but a bad line to stand on, I had better be right, because Crow does not ask a man twice.
The book lies about where those coffins went.
The only place the truth is now is the ground at the end of that run.
Darkwater. Forty minutes up the county road. I can be there and back before Crow knows I’m gone.
I lift the cord over my head and lock the book in the floor, because some rules I keep. I take my jacket off the hook. I take the little .380 Grim gave me two birthdays ago and pretended he didn’t.
I go out the back where the cameras have a blind spot I mapped when I was twelve, and I get on the road while the sky is still the color of a fresh bruise, and I do not tell one living soul where I am going.
It is the last thing I do as a girl nobody sees.