10. Chapter 10
Chapter ten
SHADOW
Three mornings I have watched the gray come down through the hole in the roof, and by the third I know my cage the way I once knew the clubhouse, corner by corner, blind spot by blind spot, until the fear has somewhere to sit and stop clawing at me.
They moved me off the open floor the first night, into a side room with a door, a bucket and a mattress soaked through with forty years of damp.
An improvement, if you squint. Walls mean I only have to watch one way.
The zip ties came off my wrists on the second day and a chain went on my ankle in their place, bolted to a ring set in the concrete, long enough to reach the bucket and the door and nothing worth reaching.
I have used the time. It is all they left me and I am using every second of it.
I know the guards now. Six of them, working in twos, and I have names for the ones who never offered theirs.
Bad Knee, the slow one who fed me water the first day.
Sleeper, his partner, who nods off on the late watch.
Then the two day men, Church Shoes and the Quiet One, tighter, meaner, no gap between them I can wedge a finger into.
The night pair I have barely seen. I file their rotations, their tempers, the way Bad Knee and Sleeper needle each other over old debts, because a house divided is a house with a door in it, and I am looking for the door.
I have not found it. What I found instead, sitting in the dark with my back to the wet wall, is worse.
The lights keep going out in my head.
Every time my eyes close, it starts again. Pressure building behind my breastbone. Nowhere for it to go. Then forty years of dead work lamps exploding at once, glass raining down around us.
Renner never even flinched.
He just stood there smiling as if he’d been waiting his whole life to see it happen.
There you are.
Three days and I have turned the thing over a thousand times, but I cannot make it a coincidence, a power surge, a fault in old wiring. I felt it leave me. Felt it rise from somewhere deep in my chest and reach.
That was me.
But how the hell did I do it?
And the not-knowing sits in me colder than the concrete, because I have spent my whole life being the one who knows, the girl behind the eyes who catalogs a room while everyone else is drinking, and now there is a room inside my own skin I have never once been let into.
Church Shoes brings the food when the light goes flat and high, which I have decided is noon.
A heel of bread, a can of something with the label peeled off, a fresh bottle of water.
He sets it down out of arm’s reach and shoves it the last foot with his boot, watching me the way you watch a dog you have been warned bites.
“Eat,” he says. “Boss wants you strong.”
“Boss can come tell me himself.”
“He will.” Church Shoes straightens. “He always does.”
The bread is stale enough to hurt going down and I eat all of it anyway, because Bad Knee was right about one thing, hunger makes you stupid, and stupid is a luxury I cannot afford in here.
I drink half the water and cap the rest. Saving half of everything has become a habit.
A body that plans is a body still in the fight, and I’m still in the fight, chained to the floor of a dead cannery with a locked room behind my ribs and no key.
I’m wiping the last of the can with the last of the crust when I hear it.
The good shoes. Slow, even, expensive on the wet floor, and the whole building seems to hold its breath around the sound of them.
Out past my door the day guards go straight and silent.
The sick electric hum of the one working light cuts out.
He likes the dark, my keeper. He likes what a room becomes when you take the light out of it.
The door opens and Sy Renner carries a chair in with him, the way he did the first day. He sets it a careful distance from my chain and sits.
“You have your color back,” he says. “Good. The first day you were gray as the walls, and it did not suit you.” He crosses one leg over the other and folds his hands in his lap, an old man at ease.
“Maren went gray like that when she was angry. All the blood in her went somewhere else, somewhere useful. I used to know how much trouble I was in by the color of her face.” A soft, private smile.
“You are in a great deal of trouble right now, if it runs in the blood.”
“Stop saying her name like you own it.”
“I knew her eleven years, Shadow. I am one of two people left alive who knew her at all, and the other one does not remember her, because the other one was five.” He tips his head. “You. In case the arithmetic escaped you.”
My face stays blank. A lifetime of practice has taught me how to hide everything. So, I give him what he’s given me for three days. Nothing.
Holding it there takes everything I have.
“You blew the lights,” Renner says, gentle, changing tack, going around a thing instead of through it. “Three nights ago. Would you like to talk about it, or shall we keep pretending it was the wiring?”
“Old building. Old wires. Surge.”
“Mm.” He is enjoying this, letting me have the lie so he can take it back slow.
“A surge. Except the power to this building runs off a generator my men fuel by hand, and it did not so much as cough. And a surge does not choose. It does not blow forty lamps and leave the bulb in the corridor burning. It does not, above all else, wait.” He leans forward, elbows to knees.
“It waited, Shadow. It held until I called you your mother’s daughter and something moved in you with no name on it, and then it came out of you all at once, because nobody ever taught you how to let it out slow.
Nobody taught you anything. That’s the point. ”
“You’re talking in circles. Say the thing or get out.”
“The thing.” He savors it on his tongue.
“The thing is you are a witch. As your mother was. As her mother was, back and back, a line of women running behind you. It is not a figure of speech, it is not madness, and you already know it is true, because three nights ago you reached down inside yourself in a room with no switch and you turned off the sun.”
The word sits in the stale air between us.
Witch.
It should be laughable. In the mouth of any other man it would be, and I would file him under lunatic and go back to counting exits.
But I felt it leave me.
And I think of Nova, folding onto the couch and putting a beer in my hand before I knew I was thirsty.
Ember’s fingers finding the salt a breath before Ariea reaches for it.
The women moving around each other without looking, without asking, always knowing where the others will be.
A thing I have watched my whole life and called love because I never had a truer word for it.
An hour after the fence, I stood in the chapel and asked Nova about it. Her easy face went careful. Her laugh landed a half-beat late.
I let her lie to me.
By then, I was tired to the bone of all the things nobody would say.
Renner watches me get there. He has been watching me the whole time, and he sees the second it lands.
“There,” he says softly. “You have felt it in them. The women in your club. The way they move. You thought it was closeness.” His mouth curves.
“It is closeness, of a kind. It is what my people call a coven, though the women rarely know to give it a name. They find each other. They always have, scattered, ignorant, buried in a funeral home full of dead men and gun oil. It makes no difference. Eventually they gather and that it is why they cannot be allowed to. A witch alone and unaware is a candle in a drawer. A witch who finds her sisters and learns her own name becomes something else entirely.” His eyes cool. “Something they come to notice.”
“Noticed by who?”
The question is out before I can weigh it, and I see it pleases him, and I see something else too, quick, there and gone, a flick of his eyes toward the door and the dark past it. A man reaching for a word he did not mean to reach for.
“By people far older and far more patient than I am,” he says, and for the first time in three days the warmth goes clean out of him, and what is left underneath is a man afraid of something.
“People who would never sit and talk with you the way I do. Who do not collect. They tidy.” He wets his lips.
“Pray you never give them cause to notice you, sweetheart. Pray harder you never learn how close they have stood your whole life, and for how long.”
“You’re scared of them?”
“I am careful of them.” He resets his face, folds the fear back down under the fake tenderness. “A lesson for later. You are nowhere near ready for it.”
He studies me a long moment. Then he does a thing I do not expect. He frowns.
“Though you are further along than you have any right to be,” he says slowly, half to himself.
“The piece I keep turning over. A witch does not wake on her own, you understand. Something has to pull the thread. And you, sweetheart, have a thread out already. I can see it.” His gaze moves over me, clinical, hungry in a new and worse way.
“Someone has been reaching for you a long time, and you back for him, and neither of you are the wiser. Tell me. Who is he? The one you follow. The one whose name sits where your mother’s ought to. ”
Something under my ribs gives one hard tug, and I would swear on the good book he feels it happen, because his smile deepens.
“No,” I say.
“You needn’t tell me. I felt it move in you.
” He sits back, and the tenderness comes flooding into him again, and it is worse than the hunger, so much worse.
“It changes nothing. Whatever half-built thing you have with some grease-stained ghost who cannot bring himself to look at you, it is a candle beside a house fire next to what you could be. What I will teach you to be. Your mother never got the chance. I mean to give it to you where I could not give it to her.”