18. Chapter 18
Chapter eighteen
SHADOW
We hit the tree line at first light, three trucks nose to tail on a logging road nobody has driven in years, and the second the pines close over us I know Renner is already in my head.
Not his voice. His attention. Patient and fixed on us, the same feeling I had at the cannery when the good shoes crossed the floor.
“He knows we’re on the road,” I say from the back seat.
“Course he knows.” Crow does not look back. Both hands on the wheel, eyes cutting the trees. “Sable gave him the map. Grim, eyes up.”
“Eyes up.” Grim sets his rifle across his knees.
Byte’s voice crackles over the radio from the second truck. “Wolf’s charter just hit the low road. Loud as hell, drawing everything they can. If Renner’s going to look the wrong way, it’s now.”
“He’s not looking the wrong way.” I lean between the seats. “He’s looking right at us. Tell Wolf to keep the noise up anyway. We take what we can get.”
Crow’s eyes find mine in the mirror for half a second. “You stay in this truck. Whatever happens out there. You hear me.”
“I hear you,” I say, and we both know it for the lie it is.
The road bends and the trap snaps shut.
A tree comes down across the road ahead, dropped on a chain. The lead truck stands on its brakes and slews sideways in the gravel. Muzzle flashes stitch the tree line on both sides at once, and the world turns to noise, glass, the flat hard bang of rounds punching sheet metal.
“AMBUSH. OUT. OUT.” Grim already has his door open, firing over it into the trees.
Crow’s hand slams into my chest, shoving me down into the footwell. “Stay low.”
“Crow.”
“Down, Shadow. Please.” And then he is out his door, gun up, moving.
Through the windshield I watch him work, and even here there is nothing wasted in it.
He goes low along the ditch, using the trucks for cover.
A shooter breaks from the trees to flank Buck, and Crow takes him off his feet without breaking stride.
Rounds walk across the hood over my head, punching through the metal, the cab fills with the stink of cordite and hot steel.
“Byte, get off the road,” Grim roars into the radio. “You’re in the open.”
“I’m pinned. I can’t move.” Byte’s voice climbs high and thin. “Four on the high side. They’ve got the truck ranged and I can’t get the door open.”
“Then get in the footwell and stay there,” Grim shouts, and turns back to his own patch of trees.
Then a Ruin Ridge kid younger than me stands up to run for better cover. The slope takes him, three shots crack out. He goes down in the road and does not get up. Somewhere behind us Wolf is screaming a name into the dark.
I do not stay down. I come up enough to see through the shattered window, and it is bad, it is worse than bad.
Three trucks stopped dead on a road with trees on both sides.
Exactly where you never let yourself get trapped.
The same lesson Grim drilled into me two birthdays ago.
Renner did not set a fight. He set a killing box.
A Ruin Ridge brother spins and drops beside the lead truck, red blooming across his shoulder. Buck drags him behind a wheel by his collar. Storm is down on one knee at the ditch, firing in measured bursts, calling targets he cannot really see.
“They’re above us,” Storm shouts. “On the slope, dug in. We can’t climb up into it.”
“Then we cook in here,” Buck yells back.
They are right. We cook in here. Every second in the box is a coffin filling. Somewhere ahead in the smoke I can hear Crow doing the thing he does. There are too many guns on the slope and not enough of us, the fight is turning against us.
So, I stop being cargo.
I come up out of the footwell and out the door on the downhill side, into the ditch, into the noise, and the second my boots hit the dirt of Renner’s mountain, I feel them.
The dead. Not the men dying around me now. Older. Deeper. Women buried in shallow rows through these hills. A dozen of them, maybe more. Burned and buried on a mountain nobody comes back from because they wouldn’t give Renner what he wanted.
They feel me the instant I feel them, and they are not resting. They are fucking furious.
Their fury pours into me the way the cold poured up out of Maren’s grave, but there is no grief in this. Only twenty years of women who burned wanting one thing, which is to burn him back.
I have no words for what happens next, only the knowing it is not only mine.
I go down into the place behind my breastbone, the one Ember taught me to open a thread at a time.
I tear it wide. I do not reach for a candle or a puddle.
I reach for the fuel, Renner’s own staging, the trucks his men drove up, the cans of gas, the dry August slope, all of it waiting, and behind me and under me a dozen dead women put their hands over mine and shove.
It leaves me the way a scream leaves a throat, all at once, more than I have, more than I own. Heat rips up my spine and out through my hands. The dead push it, and push it.
Fire tears up through the dug-in shooters. It catches the dry pines, jumps to a truck Renner’s men left in the trees, and the truck goes up in a fist of orange. Men who were killing us a breath ago come screaming out of the smoke, slapping at their own clothes, guns forgotten.
The killing box breaks.
Crow appears through the smoke twenty feet ahead and looks straight at me. “You?”
“Me.”
His mouth kicks at one corner. “Fuck me.”
Then he’s gone again.
“Up. Up. Push Through.” Crow’s voice cuts through the roar, loud and hard enough to move men. Grim and Buck and two of Wolf’s boys pour uphill through the gap my fire tore, through smoke and burning brush, over positions gone empty because the men who held them are running or down.
I watch Crow flicker as he goes, there and gone, a hole in the smoke, and the last two shooters die not knowing what took them. Grim reaches Byte’s truck and hauls him out by the collar, alive, gray-faced, still clutching the laptop to his chest.
We did it. Me and a dozen dead women nobody ever avenged.
My nose is pouring blood. My knees have gone to water. I grab the truck’s mirror to stay up. The dead women slide back down into the ground, satisfied, the fire still climbing the slope behind them. The road ahead is open at last, straight up to the dark shape of the house at the top.
We are through. We cracked it. And I cracked it.
Up the slope the last of the shooting dies.
Grim’s voice calls the all-clear, ragged.
Buck drags two of ours down to the trucks, one moving, one not.
Wolf comes up the road on foot with a dead kid over his shoulder and a look on his face I will carry a long time.
He does not say a word to me. He does not have to.
Crow reaches me and grabs my arm. “You did this.” Not a question. His eyes are wild on mine. “You’re bleeding. Can you walk.”
“I can burn,” I say, but the words come thin. The fire took nearly all of me. My legs have gone to water. The world has a gray edge crawling in at the sides.
“Get behind me.” He pushes me back, moving us up toward the house through the smoke, the crew fanning wide, the big black lodge rising out of the burning slope with its door standing open. Held open. For us.
And Renner walks out of it.
No gun. No men at his shoulder. Hands loose at his sides, unhurried, watching his mountain burn with something close to joy.
“There she is,” he says, and his voice is warm and wrong. Under my boots the dead women vanish. “I hoped. I did not know. Now I know.”
“You buried them behind your own house,” I say, and my voice does not shake, because the dead in the ground will not let it. “All those women. I felt every one of them help me light your mountain. They hate you, Renner. Dead, and they still hate you.”
Something flickers across his face, there and gone. “They always do, by the end,” he says. “It changes nothing.” He comes down the steps. “You are everything she was and more, and you did all that half-trained and bleeding in a ditch. Imagine what you’ll be when I’m done teaching you.”
“Stay back.” Crow steps between us, gun level on Renner’s chest. “One more step.”
“Or what. You’ll shoot me.” Renner does not stop. He does not even look at the gun. “Go on, then.”
Crow fires.
I see the round hit. Center chest, a killing shot. Renner takes it and does not fall, does not slow, and where the blood should come there is something dark and wrong beneath his shirt. Whatever he stole from those women, he put inside himself.
He does not break stride. Crow fires again, and again. Renner walks through it the way you walk through rain. His hand closes around Crow’s gun and crushes it, steel folding. His other hand closes around Crow’s throat and lifts him clear off the ground.
“No.” I throw what fire I have left at him but it barely catches.
Crow grunts. Renner only turns his head to me and smiles through the flame.
Around us the crew has guns up and not one of them fires, because Renner is holding Crow between us as a shield, and because every man here watched three rounds do nothing. Nobody fires again. Three rounds did nothing, and every man here knows exactly what that means.
“There it is. The last of it.” Renner’s hand tightens around Crow’s throat, and his boots kick uselessly above the ground.
“Now choose sweetheart. Open that door for me, or watch him die.” He steps closer, Crow hanging between us, and plants his free hand against my chest. “Give me what your mother wouldn’t.
” His fingers press in. “Freely.” Crow’s kicking slows. “Or I take it.”
And I feel his hand start to pull.