16. Chapter 16
Chapter sixteen
SHADOW
Dawn comes up gray over Grimstone, and for the first time in my life I do not wait in a corner for someone to tell me what I am.
I go and ask the women.
Ariea’s kitchen smells of woodsmoke and coffee, the way it has every morning I can remember, and the women are already there, as though they knew I was coming before I did, which I understand now was exactly what happened.
“Sit.” Ariea pours me a cup I did not ask for. “You’ve got questions. We’ve got twenty years of answers we weren’t allowed to give.”
“Weren’t allowed by who.”
“By what we are.” She sits across from me, her hands around her cup, the same hands that braided my hair when I was small.
“A witch who doesn’t know she’s a witch stays safe.
Stays quiet. The second she knows what she is, the power starts showing.
Power draws attention and we’ve spent our whole lives avoiding it.
” She holds my gaze. “You’re shining, Shadow.
Your power has been awake since Renner took you.
We can all feel it. It’s why we couldn’t keep pretending anymore. ”
Nova folds into the chair beside me. “Bonding wakes the power. A witch and the right man. When it happens, he comes into a gift of his own, and hers gets stronger. Neither one feeds off the other. They’re just stronger together.”
“Crow,” I say. “The vanishing. The dead.”
“Crow,” Ariea agrees. “You bonded him in that cannery, whether you meant to or not, and it woke the pair of you. It’s why you’re further along than a new witch has any right to be. Most of us needed years to feel a fraction of what’s already moving in you.”
Ember has not spoken. She is the youngest of us, quiet, watchful, and she slides a candle across the table to me, unlit.
“Light it,” she says. “Not with a match.”
I look at the wick. In the cannery the power came out of me in a flood, all or nothing, forty lamps at once.
Ember does not want a flood. She wants a thread.
I reach for the heat behind my breastbone, the same way I did on the cannery floor.
This time I take only a sliver of it and push it into the wick.
The candle catches. One small flame, steady, mine.
“There,” Ember says softly, and the word puts a hook in my chest, because it is almost the thing Renner breathed at me in the dark. I shove it down. Same word, different mouth. I will not let him own a sound I can hear in a friend.
“Fire,” Ariea says, watching the flame. “Yours. Some of us pull water, some read a room, some mend. You burn.” A small hard smile.
“Fitting, for a girl raised in a crematory. You’re fire, Shadow.
And you’ve bonded a man made of shadow and dead men.
Fire wrapped in dark. God help whatever the two of you decide to point it at. ”
“I know exactly what to point it at.”
Crow is in the doorway when I look up. I felt him coming before I heard him. Apparently, the pull runs both ways. The women go quiet. Ariea’s eyes move between us, and whatever she sees makes her stand.
“Give us the room,” I tell them, and they go, Ariea squeezing my shoulder on the way past, Ember carrying her candle, the small flame still burning.
Then it is only the two of us and everything unsaid.
“You should be sleeping,” Crow says.
“So should you. Neither of us is going to.” I wrap my hands around the cooling cup. “Say what you came to say.”
He does not sit. Crow standing is a whole sentence on its own. He looks at me a long moment, and I brace for him to shut me out again.
Instead, he says, “It’s Sable.”
“What’s Sable?”
“The rat. The second one.” He says it flat, the cleaner’s voice, but his eyes do not leave mine, and the not-looking-away is new, is the thing stopping me cold.
“Lash didn’t work alone. Somebody inside walked him to Renner, ran him, took the money at his side.
I put my hand on Lash in the box last night and I heard it off him before the door shut. A face. Hers.”
The kitchen tilts a little. Sable. Friendliest of the club girls. Easy laugh, easy hands. The girl I clocked working the room wrong the night the watcher came to the fence, drifting toward the offices where the girls do not go, her phone glowing against her jaw.
“You’re sure?”
“As sure as the dead let me be.” He sits now, across from me, close. “I’m telling you first. Before Loco. Before the table. Nobody in this club knows but me, and now you.”
And there it is. He doesn’t say the rest, because Crow doesn’t explain himself, but I understand anyway.
“You knew what happened to my mother and carried it alone.” My voice comes out slow.
“You let me build my whole self on a lie because you decided I couldn’t hold the truth.
And now you’ve got a secret twelve hours old, and instead of burying it, you walked into a kitchen full of witches to hand it straight to me. ”
“Yeah.”
“Why?”
“Because the last time I decided what you could hold, you spent twenty years loving a lie, and I spent them watching you do it.” His jaw works.
“I’m done deciding for you. You want to be seen?
Fine. This is what seeing you looks like.
You get everything I get, the second I get it, even when it’s ugly. Especially then.”
It doesn’t fix what he did. Nothing will. But he came to me first this time. Trusted me with the truth before anyone else, even Loco. I hate how much that matters.
“Okay,” I say. “Then we do this as partners, not as a cleaner and the girl he’s guarding. All of it. You don’t lock me in the floor with the book while the men ride up the mountain.”
“Shadow.”
“No. Hear what I am now.” I set the cup down.
“I’m not the thing you protect anymore. I’m the thing they should be scared of.
Renner spent twenty years and a war chest trying to get his hands on what’s in me, and you want to leave it in a safe room while you drive off to die on his mountain.
Use me. I’m your best weapon, and I finally know it. ”
For once he does not argue. For once the wall stays down.
“Say you’ve got a plan,” he says. “Because I’ve got rage and a map and not much else.”
I do have a plan. It came together while Ember’s candle burned.
“We don’t kill Sable. Not yet. A dead rat tells Renner we found her.
A live rat we control is a wire straight into his hands.
” I lean in. “You said she doesn’t know you made her.
So we feed her. We let her carry Renner a lie.
We tell her, through the club, through whatever channel she thinks is secret, exactly when and how the Prowlers are coming for the mountain.
Wrong day. Wrong road. Wrong everything.
She carries it straight to Renner. He sets his whole trap for a strike we never make.
We come the other way while he watches the wrong door. ”
Crow is quiet a moment, and then something moves in his face I have almost never seen there. Respect. Not the grudging kind. The real kind.
“Cleaner than anything I had,” he says.
“I keep a book for a living. I know how to make a wrong line look right.” I stand. “But a lie about the mountain only works if we know the real one. The true road in. His stronghold, his numbers, his ground. Marchetti gave you a valley and no more. I can get closer.”
“How.”
“The same way you found me.” I hold his eyes. “I reach for it.”
I take Ember’s word for it, and Ariea’s, and my own four nights on a cannery floor. I sit back down. I close my eyes and go looking, not for a puddle this time, not for a candlewick. For a place. For him.
Crow’s hand finds mine on the table, an anchor, the way I anchored him when the dead came flooding in. I push out along the bond, past the kitchen, past the graves, north and east into the hill country. I don’t know exactly what I’m looking for until I feel it.
Renner.
A house in the hills. A gate. A long private road. Men, more men than Marchetti counted. And at the heart of it, warm and patient and horribly awake, a presence turning toward me the instant I brush it, the way a spider feels the far edge of its web tremble.
I try to pull back. I am too slow.
There you are. Renner’s voice, not in the room, not in my ears, in the place behind my breastbone where only Crow has ever been.
Delighted. Tender. Home at last. I wondered how long it would take you to come knocking, once you woke enough to try.
Good girl. Reach a little further. Let me see how bright you’ve gotten.
Crow’s hand crushes down on mine. “Shadow. Your nose. You’re bleeding. Come back.”
But Renner is not finished. The warmth disappears from his voice, leaving the same cold underneath that I heard in the cannery when he spoke about people older than him. People who tidy.
Tell your cleaner and his brothers to come.
Please. I’ve left the road wide open for you.
A pause, and I feel him smile. I’ve been ready for days.
The one question I couldn’t answer was whether you’d walk up my mountain on your own two feet, or whether I’d have to send for you again. Softer. Final. You answered it.
The wire snaps. I come back into my own body with blood on my lip, Crow’s hands on my face, the candle Ember left guttering out on the table. And I know two things at once, cold and certain.
I found the mountain.
And the mountain found me.