13. Chapter 13
Chapter thirteen
CROW
“Roof’s cold,” Byte says in my ear. “Both of them. I watched the last one drop an hour ago. You stripped it clean.”
We are flat in the salt grass a hundred yards from the cannery. Storm and Buck are with us, four more spread along the fence behind. Two nights we’ve spent thinning Renner’s men, taking them off the roof and the doors one at a time. Now, there aren’t enough left to hold the building.
“How many left inside?” I ask.
“Four, maybe five on the floor. Him. Whoever’s sitting on her.” A tap of keys. “Doors are soft. Use the man door on the south wall, and go now, before somebody down there gets nervous and counts heads.”
“Copy.”
“You hear him,” Grim says, low at my right shoulder. “Five, maybe. After two nights of this, five is nothing.”
“Five between me and her is not nothing.”
“No.” He racks a round, quiet. “Guess it isn’t.”
Storm and Buck fan wide across the broken tarmac behind us. My piece rides low. The pull hits again, stronger this time.
“You alright?” Grim watches my face. “You went somewhere.”
“She’s awake.” I don’t question how I know anymore. “She’s in there. Awake and close.”
“You can feel her.” Not a question. Grim quit asking me to explain the things I can’t. “Then feel her toward the door, and let’s move.”
We move. A pressure rolls out of it, low, felt in the teeth and the back of the skull.
“The hell is going on?” Buck says behind me.
“It’s hers,” I say. “Keep moving.”
“Hers? What’s hers supposed to mean?”
“Doors,” I say, and Grim hits it.
The man door folds off its rusted frame on the second blow. We pour through into the black. Inside is a ruined cathedral, glass grit underfoot, a long row of dead lamps hung high overhead. Two men on the floor turn at the crash with rifles coming up.
“Contact,” Grim says, flat, and drops the near one through the chest.
I take the far one before he clears a crate. “Two down.”
“Left,” Byte crackles. “Movement on your left, past the big machine.”
Three men break from behind a fallen gantry.
“On you,” Storm calls, peeling wide. “Buck, cut right.”
“Cutting right.”
The first swings a shotgun toward Grim’s back.
“Grim, down.”
He drops. I shoot the shotgun man through the hip, and he folds screaming.
“Thanks,” Grim grunts, coming back up.
The second fires a round into the ceiling in panic.
“He’s yours,” I tell Buck.
Buck fires once. “He’s down.”
“Floor’s yours,” Byte says in my ear. “Nothing left moving but Renner and whoever’s in the room at the end. Get her and get gone.”
“Where’s Renner?”
“Can’t see through steel, Crow. But there’s a car warming on the flats side. If he runs, he runs west.”
“Then we get to her first.”
The third comes at me close with a knife, quick, low, trained. Nobody talks to a knife. I take the wrist, break it over my forearm and put him down on the ring of the blade hitting concrete.
“Crow.” Grim at my shoulder, chest heaving. “Which way? Talk to me.”
“Flank rooms. End door. She’s behind the end door.”
“How do you know?”
“I know. Move.”
A last man steps from a doorway, a pistol half-raised. Grim drops him without a word.
“End of the hall,” I say. “Chain and a bolt on the outside. Cover me.”
“On you.”
I shoot the lock off. Rip the chain free. My boot hits the door and it caves inward off one hinge.
And there she is. On her knees on a filthy mattress, a chain from her ankle to a ring in the floor, her hand pressed flat over her own heart.
“Shadow.”
Her head lifts. Her eyes come across the black room and find mine and lock, and for the first time in twenty years I do not look away.
“You came.” Her voice is wrecked and low and something locked behind my ribs gives. “I told myself you would. Then I told myself I was a fool for it.”
“You’re not a fool.”
“Crow.” Her breath catches. And the wire between us does not tighten. It shuts.
Nothing soft in it. A fucking detonation. It hits dead center in me and tears through every nerve I own.
“Crow.” She is up as far as the chain allows, reaching. “Crow, what’s happening to you?”
“I don’t know.” The dead lamps overhead flare once and burst. Glass comes down in a bright hard curtain. “Get down. Cover your head.”
“I’m fine. The glass went around us. It went around us. Did you see it go around us.”
“The voices.” My own voice comes out doubled, wrecked. “You hear them?”
“Hear what? There’s nothing here.” She stops. “No. Your face. What do you hear.”
“The dead. Everyone who ever died in here. Everyone we dropped coming in. They’re all talking, all at once. Colt’s in here, Shadow. The kid. He’s talking to me.”
“Look at me.” Her hand closes over my jaw. Second time in her life she has touched my face. The dead go quiet. Not gone, just pushed down beneath her voice. “Not them. Me. Only me. You hear my voice?”
“Yeah.”
“Then hold onto it. Come on. Come back.”
I look at her. I stay. And then I flicker.
“Crow.” Grim, from the doorway, and his voice has gone somewhere I have never heard it. “Crow, where did you go? He was right there. Shadow, he was right there. Where did he go?”
“He’s here.” Her grip bites down and hauls me back into my skin. “He’s right here. Stay in your body, Crow. Whatever you’re doing, stop doing it and stay.”
I am solid again. Grim’s stares at me, all the color gone from his face.
“What in God’s name. What did I see.”
“Later,” I tell him. “Not now.”
“Crow. You were gone. My eyes went right through you.”
“I said later, Grim.”
“Fine.” He does not push it, because he is Grim, and he saves the hard questions for a room with a door. “Whatever it was, use it or bury it. We’re not clear yet.”
I get the chain in both fists. “Hold still.”
“It’s bolted down, you can’t just—”
I set my heel and yank. The bolt tears out of the slab in a spray of concrete and rust.
“Okay.” She breathes it. “Okay. Twenty years, and you never once told me you could do this.”
“I couldn’t. Until you.”
She comes into me all at once. No distance left in her anywhere.
“You came for me first,” she says into the leather of my cut.
“Always. First. Every time. First. There was never a version where I didn’t.”
“Say it again.”
“First.”
Headlights flare at the far end of the building. An engine turns over. Shadow goes rigid against me.
“Renner. It’s him. He’s running.”
We hit the open floor. A black car is already moving toward the loading door, two gunmen covering it.
I bring my piece up.
“Don’t.” Grim’s hand comes down flat on the barrel. “Too far. Too many guns on him. You fire, you eat a round, and she watches you drop after four days of holding on for you.”
“He’s getting away, Grim.”
“He’s getting away with his life. We’re getting away with hers. You want to trade?”
I do not want to let him go. I hate how right Grim is.
“Let him run,” Grim says. “We’ll build his box another night.”
The car speeds through the loading door and disappears into the dark.
“Crow.” Shadow’s voice goes flat. “He didn’t come here for me tonight. He was already packed.”
“What are you talking about?”
“He was leaving. First light, they said. He had what he wanted.”
“He didn’t get your power. You’re standing here.”
“Not my power.” She turns and looks at me. “The book.”
“The book’s in the floor at the club. He never touched it.”
“He didn’t need to touch it. Lash fed Renner what he could get his hands on for months. Old records. Cipher pages. Anything Loki left open long enough for him to photograph.”
“Pages of what?”
“Photographs. Page after page of the Ledger. Renner’s had a man down that hall the whole time I’ve been here, copying them into a book of his own. I heard the pen at night. I thought I was losing my mind.”
“You’re sure.”
“I count things, Crow. It’s the one thing I have never been wrong about.
” She swallows. “He couldn't read it the way I can.
He didn't have to. Names, dates, routes, enough pieces of the cipher, put the right people on it and he'd have enough to hurt us. Lash fed him a photograph at a time. Now, it’s riding in his car.”
Everything inside me goes quiet.
“So we didn’t end it,” I say.
“No.” She slips her hand into mine, first time in her life she has done it, and I feel it everywhere. “We started it.”
The cannery settles around us. Somewhere in my head the dead are still talking. Quieter with her beside me but not gone.
“Crow.” Storm, coming in off the flank, gun down. “We clear? Good to roll?”
“We’re good. She rides up front.”
“Copy.”
“And Storm.” I do not let go of her hand. “Nobody rides in the back tonight.”
“Copy, Crow.”
I key the radio one more time before we roll. “Byte. Raise the club. Tell Bones we’re inbound with her, and tell him she’s hurt. Not bad. Enough.”
“How bad is enough,” Byte says.
“Blood on the boathouse floor was hers. Four days chained to a slab. Have him ready.”
“He’ll be ready. Loco too.”
“Loco waits for a full report. Bones goes first.”
“Copy.”
I put her beside me, and keep hold of her the whole way down the country road.
She talks quietly beside me. “He told me how it works. The power. He needs it given, not taken. If he takes it, it rots. It rotted her.”
“Your mother.”
“He said her name like he owned it.” Her jaw sets. “He’s had twenty years to practice owning it. I want it back.”
“You’ll get it back.”
“There’s more, Crow. About the fire. Something I found out about that night.” She stops.
“Not tonight. I can’t do that one in a moving car.”
“Then not tonight.”
“You’re quiet.”
“I’m listening.”
“You never listen.”
“I do now.” I keep my eyes on the road. “I’ll be listening from now on.”
She leans her head on my shoulder and goes quiet. I keep her hand in mine, and drive.
I’ve kept my distance long enough.
Not anymore.