14. Chapter 14
Chapter fourteen
SHADOW
Bones has a curved needle in my scalp and a curse under his breath. The fluorescent light over the back-room table is the brightest thing I have seen in four days.
“Hold still. You keep flinching and this closes up crooked.”
“It already hurts crooked.”
“It’ll hurt worse if I redo it.” He draws the thread through and knots it, gentle for a man the size of a door.
“Split lip’s mending on its own. Ankle’s raw where the chain sat, but nothing’s broken.
” He sits back and studies me, and there is a question in his eyes he is too kind to ask.
“You want to tell me how a four-day-old scalp wound looks two days along?”
“No.”
“Didn’t think so.” He cuts the thread. “Fifteen years I’ve patched this club. I have never once watched skin knit the way yours is knitting. Fast. The wrong kind of fast.”
“Maybe you got good at your job.”
“Maybe.” He does not believe it. Neither do I.
I feel the cut drawing shut under his hands, warm, itching, some new thing in my blood hauling the edges together.
Renner named it in the dark. A witch mends faster once she wakes.
My body knew what I was before my head was ready to admot it.
Now, there’s no pretending I am anything else.
The door has not moved in an hour. Neither has Crow. He’s planted beside it as if anyone who wants me has to go through him first.
“You going to breathe down my neck the whole night,” Bones says, not turning. “Or let me work.”
“I’m letting you work.”
“You’re looming.”
“Same thing tonight.”
Bones snorts and packs his kit. He sets a warm hand on my shoulder, brief. “Rest. Water, sleep, no arguments.” He points the roll of tape at Crow without looking at him. “She heals faster than any of us, and she still needs the dark and the quiet to do it. Don’t be the reason she doesn’t.”
“Out, Bones,” Crow says.
“Going.” At the door he pauses beside Crow and drops his voice to a thing meant for one man. I hear it anyway. I hear everything now. “Whatever’s got into the pair of you, brother, the whole club can feel it in the walls. Tread careful.”
Then he is gone, and the noise of the clubhouse comes muffled through the wall.
Loco’s voice comes down the hall a moment later, low, wanting his report, and Crow’s jaw works.
“Two minutes,” he tells me. “He needs the shape of tonight out of me before it goes cold. Two minutes. Then I’m back.”
“Go,” I say. “I’m not going anywhere. Not this time.”
He goes, and the door swings. Nova is through it before it settles, as though she’s been waiting on the other side for Crow to leave.
She sits on the edge of the cot and takes my hand.
The second her skin meets mine, a low hum runs up my arm.
The same current I’ve felt from her my whole life, except now I know what it is.
“You know,” she says. Not a question.
“I know what I am now. What you are. All of you.” My throat works. “You knew. The whole time. You let me believe I was the one strange thing in a house full of ordinary men.”
“We didn’t know how to tell you.” Her usual easy expression is gone.
“We weren’t sure you were one of us until Renner reached for you.
Being wanted like that, by a man like that, it wakes the thing in you.
It woke you.” Her hand tightens on mine.
“I’m sorry, Shadow. For every half-answer.
For the beer I put in your hand instead of the truth. ”
“Later.” I cannot carry her sorry and my own in the same hour. “You tell me all of it later. Every part.”
“Every part,” she promises. She kisses my hair and rises, and at the door she stops. “He’s coming back. I can feel him in the hall.” A pause, weighed. “Whatever’s between you two now, it’s loud. Be careful with it.”
She slips out past him as he comes in, and it is the two of us again and the low lamp and the wire strung tight between my chest and his.
For four days I told myself nobody was coming.
I told myself the stray ran off and the club shrugged and went back to its beer.
I was wrong about every part of it, and the proof is standing in the doorway with his hand still resting on his gun, watching me the way you watch a thing the room might take if you blink.
“Come here,” I say.
He does not move. Of course he doesn’t.
“Crow. Come here.”
“If I come over there,” he says, low and wrecked, “I’m not going to do the right thing.”
“I’m done with the right thing. The right thing kept you across a room my whole life.” I get up off the cot. My legs hold. I cross the floor to him, because he cannot make himself cross it to me. “Twenty years you wouldn’t look at me. Look now.”
He looks. And for once there is nothing held back. Everything I’ve wanted from him is right there on his face. It should frighten me. It does. I do not care.
His hands come up to my face, both of them, and they are shaking. Crow’s hands do not shake. When he kisses me there is nothing gentle in it. He kisses me like he’s been starving and I fist my hands in his cut and drag him into me. He comes willingly, no distance left between us.
The bond reacts the second we touch. Heat moves under my skin and something in Crow answers it. Whatever Renner woke in me knows him.
Wants him.
And this time I let it.
“Shadow.” My name broken against my throat. “Tell me to stop.”
“Don’t you dare.”
The room comes back to me slow. The lamp has steadied. I am against his chest with his heart under my ear, hammered too hard all night for a calm man, gone quiet at last. His arm lies across me, a bar holding me down, as though I might vanish out a blind spot the way I did four days ago.
The pull is quiet. First time in my life, there is no ache at the end of the it. Only him. Warm, here and mine.
I should let it be enough. The girl in me who wanted this before she had a word for it would lie here till morning and ask nothing.
But the bookkeeper in me never sleeps. And now, with my cheek on his chest and the whole shape of what we are settling into my bones, she opens her book and starts to count.
“Crow.” I keep my face on his chest so I do not have to watch his. “The fire. In the car you said you’d tell me when I was ready. I’m ready.”
He goes still under me. Not the calm still. The braced still, the one a man wears before a blow.
“You were five,” he says.
“I know how old I was. I want your side. You were fifteen. Tell me what a fifteen-year-old boy was doing at a burning house forty minutes out of Grimstone in the middle of the night.”
The quiet stretches a beat too long. The quiet stretches a beat too long. Five. Fifteen. The numbers don’t fit.
“You didn’t find it by accident,” I say. “A boy does not stumble onto a house fire that far out in the dark. Somebody sent you.”
“Shadow.”
“Were you sent. Yes or no.”
He sits up with me, slow. The lamp catches the side of his face and gives me nothing, the cleaner’s face, the shut door I spent my whole life reading and never once cracked.
“I was sent,” he says.
The words land soft and take the floor out from under me anyway.
“Loco sent me. Word came down there was a body out past the county line needed handling. That is the job. It was the job even then, before the patch.” His voice does not rise. It never rises. “I drove out to clean a scene.”
“A body.” My voice comes apart on the word. “Whose body, Crow?”
He does not answer. He does not have to. The room tilts, and the story I have believed my whole life comes apart.
“My mother.” I am on my feet now, the sheet gripped to my chest. “You were sent to make my mother disappear. You were in the doorway to clean her up, not to save me.”
“I didn’t know whose she was.” He is up too, on the far side of the cot, hands open at his sides, not reaching, because even now he knows better than to reach for me.
“I was a kid. I knew there was a dead woman and a house set to burn and a child in it who was not supposed to be there. I broke the code to carry you out. Leaving a scene half-cleaned is the one thing we never do. I did it for you. I’ve carried that night with me ever since. ”
“You carried it.” The tears come and I let them, furious at every one, because even now the pull in my chest is still there and I cannot hate him the way I want to.
“You. What about me? I loved you for pulling me out of that fire. For twenty years, I believed you were the boy who ran into the flames for a stranger’s kid.
And the truth is the club sent you to bury what was left of her.
You knew she was dead. You knew where she went into the ground.
You let me grow up in the house of the men who ordered it, keeping their book, writing down their dead night after night, and not once did you tell me one of those dead was mine. ”
“I couldn’t tell you.”
“You wouldn’t.”
He has no answer for the difference. There is none. The silence sits between us with teeth in it.
“Where is she?” My voice has gone thin and cold. “You clean bodies. You made her vanish. So, say it plain. Where did you put my mother?”
He does not speak. And his eyes, for half a second, cut past me. To the window. To the dark on the far side of the glass, the six acres of headstones in their tidy rows, the tree line past the last of them where nobody plants a marker.
I turn and follow his eyes.
And I understand.
Every night in that crematory with the book on my knees.
Every gray morning walking the rows to get the smoke out of my head.
She was there the whole time. Past the last stone, buried on club ground.
My mother has been in Crow’s cemetery since the night he carried me out of that fire, and he has stood beside me over and over and never told me.
I do not scream. I do not throw anything. I reach down and take my jacket off the chair, then pull it on over the sheet. My hands are steady now.
“Shadow.” That voice. The wrong one. The afraid one, the same one he used at the fence line the night this whole thing started. “Shadow, don’t. Not out there. Not tonight.”
I open the door.
“Show me,” I say, without turning around. “Take me to her. Right now.”
I walk toward the tree line. Behind me, I hear him follow. Neither of us knows what will happen when Crow stands over my mother’s grave and puts his hand on the dirt.