19. Chapter 19
Chapter nineteen
CROW
Renner’s hand is around my throat and my boots are off the ground, and through the roar in my ears I feel him reach into Shadow and start to take.
I have killed men every way there is. Not one piece of it helps me now.
My gun is folded scrap in the dirt. My hands are on his wrist and his wrist is stone.
The edges of the world go soft and gray, and the last thing I will see is her face while a monster empties her the way he emptied her mother.
I cannot stop it. I have never once in my life been able to stop it, and when it matters most, I fail her.
She is fighting him. Chin up, her mother’s chin, teeth bared, refusing to give him a fucking thing. But she gave the mountain her fire, and there’s nothing left in her tank. He’s going to drain her dry and leave her dead in my arms.
No.
I stop pulling at his wrist because strength isn’t going to save either of us. Instead, I reach for what the cannery woke inside me, the thing I’ve spent every night since trying to shove out because the dead are fucking loud and I am man enough to admit they scare the shit out of me.
I open the door. All the way. For the first time I do not brace against it. I let it come.
And the mountain answers.
They are already awake. Shadow woke them in the ditch, a dozen women burned to husks and buried in shallow rows behind this house.
They have not gone back to sleep. The second I open to them they pour into me, cold and furious and vast. But I am not looking for them.
I reach through them, past them, farther than I’ve ever reached before, toward a grave I have tended a thousand times.
I have never reached that far. I could never reach at all until she bonded me. But Shadow’s fire is in me. The bond is a wire with no slack. The dead are holding the door. I throw my whole ruined self down the line, and I call the one name I have never once let myself say.
Maren.
She comes.
Not cold. Not furious. Not the way the mountain women come. She comes warm, nothing like the women on the mountain. The roar drops away, Renner’s hand on my throat becomes distant, and I’m standing somewhere quiet with a woman I buried twenty years ago.
I know her at once. Shadow’s face, older, softer, the same chin, the same green in the eyes. She looks at me and somehow I know she’s been waiting a long damn time for this.
You’re the boy, she says. You’re the boy who carried her out.
“I’m sorry.” It falls out of me. “I was sent to make you disappear. I only saved her. I never told her. I let her think it was mercy. It was a lie. And I...”
Stop. You were fifteen years old. You were sent to a monster’s leavings and found my baby in the smoke. Don’t you dare tell me you saved no one. You saved the only thing I had. Get the girl out. That was my last thought. I never knew if she lived.
“She lived.” My own voice is wrecked. “She’s twenty-five, fierce and stubborn. She reads a room before it knows it’s being read. And she just lit your whole fucking mountain on fire to save me.”
Oh.
One sound that damn near breaks me.
Show me.
I turn toward Shadow and let Maren see through me. Her daughter, grown, bloody but still fighting.
Oh, baby.
Then Maren sees Renner’s hand around her daughter’s throat, and every trace of warmth disappears.
Now, she says. Let me introduce you to your friends downstairs.
I come back into my body with a gasp, into the roar, the smoke and Renner’s hand crushing my throat. Whatever I opened is still wide open but I am not controlling it anymore. They are.
Every woman Renner ever burned. A dozen on this mountain, and more I feel waking further out, in other ground, in other states, a whole scattered graveyard of stolen women, and at the front of them one who died twenty years ago holding one thought.
They do not go for Renner. They go for what is in him. The power he took from every one of them, the stolen fire that’s kept the bastard alive and made bullets useless against him. And the dead have come to collect.
Renner’s hand spasms on my throat and lets go. I drop. I hear Shadow gasp as his other hand tears off her chest. We both go down in the dirt as Sy Renner begins, at last, to rot.
Renner screams. His skin grays in front of us, his face caving in as twenty stolen years catch up with him at once. His expensive coat hangs loose on his shrinking frame. He claws at himself, at the dirt, at anything he can reach while the women rip back every piece of power he stole from them.
Nobody helps him.
Fuck him.
Boots on the road. Wolf’s charter comes around the bend at a dead run, guns raised.
“What the fuck?” Wolf shouts.
Nobody answers.
What are we supposed to say? Renner is collapsing into ash on his own front porch without anybody touching him, while Shadow and I kneel in the dirt and watch every fucked up thing he’s done finally catch up with him.
At the end there is almost nothing left of him. He gets one hand into the dirt. He lifts his head. He finds Shadow and even now, with his body falling apart, that sick tenderness is still in his eyes.
“You were... never... going to give it,” he breathes, the last of the man in it, baffled to the end anyone would choose a child over power. “Any of you. Why.”
Shadow crawls to him. She does not touch him. She lets him see her face, her mother’s face, up close, at the end.
“Because we’re not you,” she says. “There’s your whole answer. We were never you.”
And Maren, through me, with the last of the thread before she goes, gives him the only goodbye he ever earned.
“You spent twenty years hunting my daughter,” I say, and it is my mouth but her voice, and Renner’s ice eyes go wide, because he knows it, knows exactly whose voice. “And she grew up surrounded by people who loved her. You lost her the night you killed me, Sy. You only found out tonight.”
He falls apart. There is nothing left to fall.
The mountain goes quiet. One by one the women fade back into the ground, but something is different now. The rage is gone.
They got him.
They finally fucking got him.
Shadow is in my arms. Or I am in hers. We have stopped being able to tell. She is shaking and bleeding and alive, so alive, and I hold her in the ash of the worst and best night of my life.
“She was here,” Shadow whispers. “I felt her. Through you. I felt my mother.”
“She saw you.” My voice will not work right. “She got to see you. Grown. She said...”
I stop, because Maren is still here, barely, a warmth going thin at the edges. She has one thing left, and it is not for me.
Tell her, Maren says, so faint now I strain to hold it. Tell her I never stopped looking for her. Tell her the last thing I did for her was to make sure she’d be loved. Her presence weakens. Tell her I’m proud of her, and she can stop being afraid now.
Maren—
Tell my baby, I love her.
And she is gone.
I tell Shadow everything her mother said. She breaks, and I catch her and hold on.
Behind us, Wolf is yelling for Bones while Grim gets Byte onto his feet. The Ruin Ridge kid is dead and there’ll be a coffin for him. A good one, built by hand.
We came up this mountain knowing it was a trap, and we still lost one of ours. Renner is ash, Shadow is alive in my arms, and somehow we fucking won.
But I’m a cleaner. I count what’s left when the fire goes out, and kneeling here with Shadow’s heartbeat against mine, I remember the one thing tonight didn’t destroy.
Somewhere out there is another copy of our book.
Every sin. Every grave.
Renner is dead.
The book isn’t.
And a dead man’s secrets never stay buried. Somebody always comes to dig them up.