20. Chapter 20
Chapter twenty
SHADOW
We bury the Ruin Ridge kid on a Tuesday, and for the first time in the club’s history, the cleaner says the words out loud.
His name was Deke. Nineteen, a sister down in Boise, a laugh Wolf says filled a room.
We do not have a body to give the ground, because the mountain took most of him.
But we build a box anyway, the best oak in the shop.
We fill it with his cut, his colors, and a photograph his sister sent up.
Crow builds it himself, every joint, and he does not let a prospect touch it.
At the crematory he stands where he has stood a thousand times, at the mouth of the fire, and Mercy starts to step up to say the words the way he always does.
Crow stops him with a hand.
“I’ve got him,” Crow says.
Crow says the words. His voice catches halfway through, but he clears his throat and keeps going.
When he’s done, Mercy comes up beside him.
“Took you long enough.”
Crow looks at him.
Mercy wipes a hand over his face. “Don’t start. I’m allowed to be fucking emotional at a funeral.”
Crow’s mouth twitches. “Didn’t say anything.”
“You were thinking it.”
“I usually am.”
I log it in the book. Ruin Ridge. Deke. Ground, with words. My hand is steady.
The club hasn’t figured out what the fuck to do with us since the mountain.
Every man there saw Renner rot without anybody touching him. They saw me set half a mountain on fire. There’s no pretending anymore.
Some of them can’t look at me. Some stare too long.
Stryker hasn’t said a word to me since we got back, but he won’t leave a room I’m in either.
“Are you following me now?” I ask when he appears in the kitchen for the third time that morning.
“No.”
“You don’t even drink coffee.”
He looks at the mug in his hand.
“Fuck off, Shadow.”
Progress.
Sable is still in the wind. Loco put every charter on her. Sooner or later, somebody will find her.
Loco calls it in church, the week after, with the doors open for the first time I can remember, because there’s nothing left worth keeping behind them.
“Forty years,” Loco says, and the table is every patch plus, for the first time in the history of the Grave Prowlers, every woman.
Ariea. Nova. Ember. Me. We stand along the wall where the prospects usually stand, and not one man tells us to leave.
“Forty years we thought we were lucky. We weren’t lucky.
We were kept.” He looks down the table, then at us along the wall.
“Every close call we walked out of. Every rival who moved on us and missed. Every raid the county ran and came up empty on. It was never us. It was the women we didn’t bother to look at. ”
Silence. Then Buck, quiet, not looking up from his hands. “My Grace. Forty-one years married. She never said a word.”
“She couldn’t,” Ariea says gently. “It was the whole point. A witch who’s known is a witch who’s hunted. We kept you alive by letting you think you kept us.”
Loco lets it sit, then he does the thing I have watched him do my whole life, the thing making him president. He decides.
“Then here’s how it is now. No more edges. No more women at the periphery keeping us breathing while we drink and take the credit. They sit at this table. They ride in this club’s decisions.” His eyes come to me. “And the book. Shadow.”
My name in church. I have never once heard it in this room.
“You kept our sins your whole life and never let them walk. You went into the dark and came back fire. You’re not the stray we fed anymore, and I’m ashamed it took a war for me to say it out loud.
” He stands. The founding skull shifts on his shoulder.
“You want a place in this club, it’s yours. Name it.”
Everyone looks at me.
I think about the girl who sat on the bottom stair stealing scraps of talk through a locked door.
I think about all the years I spent being furniture, the one nobody sent away and nobody claimed.
I think about my mother in the ground, who spent her last breath making sure I’d be loved, and who asked me, through a dead man’s gift and a cleaner’s mouth, to let myself be happy.
“I keep the book,” I say. “But not in a hole in the floor anymore. It comes up. It’s not a leash you hand a girl and forget.
It’s ours, all of ours, and I’ll teach it, so it never again lives or dies with one scared person in a locked room.
” I look at the women along the wall, my coven, my blood.
“And they’re done hiding. I’m not asking.
Hiding handed us to men like Renner one at a time. We find each other now. Out loud.”
Nobody argues. Ariea’s hand finds mine along the wall. Ember’s takes hers, Nova’s takes mine and the power moves through all four of us. I watch the men feel it move through the room, and for once nobody is afraid of it.
“One more thing,” I say, because I am done leaving things unsaid.
“I never had a name. Everyone here knows it, the girl from nowhere. I had one the whole time.” My voice does not shake.
“My mother was Maren. I’m her daughter. And I’m keeping her name in this club out loud, because she’s the reason every one of you is standing here, and nobody’s going to forget her again. ”
Crow finds me in the chapel after church. He’s leaning against the doorway, watching me close the book.
“You claimed the whole fucking club back there,” he says. “In front of God and everybody.”
“Somebody taught me how.”
He crosses the room. He doesn’t stop at the careful distance anymore. He never will again.
“I’ve got something for you,” he says, and nervous is not a thing I have ever seen on Crow, but there it is, a tightness in his jaw. He sets it on the table. A patch. Not a property patch, nothing to brand a woman as somebody’s property. The stitching isn’t perfect, Crow made it himself.
It doesn’t say Property of Crow. It says Shadow in thread. The name I chose for myself before I knew I had my mother’s.
“You are not property,” he says, low. “I meant it on the mountain and I mean it now. But you’re a Prowler, Shadow. You have been. I’m not asking to own you.” His jaw tightens. “I’m asking you to claim me back.”
I take the patch. I run my thumb over my name and stare at it until my vision blurs.
“You already know you’re mine,” I tell him. “The whole club knows. The dead know. My mother tied the knot herself and neither of us got a say.” I step into him, close, closer, until the bond hums between us. “Say it back to me anyway. Out loud. The way you made me say it to a room.”
“You’re mine,” he says, forehead to mine, both hands in my hair. “Obsessively. For the rest of my life and whatever the fuck comes after it. And I’m yours. There’s no version of me left that isn’t.”
Then he kisses me and I grab the front of his cut and kiss him right back. Mine. Ours. The fire in me and the dark in him wrap around each other and hold.
“You keeping the patch?”
I look down at it. “Maybe?”
“Shadow.”
I grin. “Yeah, I’m keeping the fucking patch.”
There’s one thing left, and I do it at dusk, alone, though Crow walks me to the tree line and waits where the ground goes soft.
I’ve spent my whole life not knowing where my mother was. Now I know to the inch. Crow marked it for me the day after the mountain, a small flat stone he cut and carved himself, no false name on it this time, no county lie.
MAREN. Her name. And under it, in his careful hand: SHE GOT THE GIRL OUT.
I sit down in the soft grass and run my fingers over her name.
“Hi, Mom.” It’s the first time I’ve ever said it.
“I don’t know if you can hear me. Crow says the dead don’t always stick around.
I hope you didn’t. I hope you’re finally resting.
” I pull my knees up and put my hand on the grass.
“But I got your message. All of it. Every word.” The grass moves.
“I’m going to let myself be happy,” I tell her.
“I’ve got a whole coven of sisters who quit hiding.
I’ve got a place at a table where I used to be invisible.
I’ve got a man you picked out for me when I was five years old, and you have good taste, for the record, even if he’s a lot.
” A laugh cracks out of me. “I’m not the girl from nowhere anymore.
I’m from you. You’re where I’m from.” My hand flattens on the cool grass over her.
“Thank you for spending your last breath on me. You got me out, Mom. I’m going to live. ”
I stand up. Crow is waiting at the tree line.
“You okay?” he asks when I reach him.
“Yeah.” I look back at my mother’s grave.
“Really?”
“Yeah.” I take his hand. “Really.”
We walk back toward the club, his hand in mine, and I’m almost happy when I feel it.
Something is watching us. I stop.
Crow turns immediately. “What?”
I stare past the tree line. “I don’t know.”
“Renner?”
“No. He’s gone.”
Crow moves closer. “Then what?”
I reach for it and wish I hadn’t. Whatever is out there is far away. Farther than anything I’ve touched before. But it felt us on that mountain and it knows where we are.
“Shadow?”
I look at Crow. “We woke something up.”
The clubhouse doors open as Loco comes out.
Crow nods toward him. “You want to tell Loco?”
I think about it then slowly shake my head. “Maybe tomorrow.”
His eyebrows go up. “Seriously?”
“In the last week we buried a nineteen-year-old, I got patched into a motorcycle club, talked to my dead mother and now something supernatural is watching us. It’s a lot and I’m taking the fucking night off.”
Crow stares at me, then he laughs, and I pull him toward the clubhouse.
Whatever is out there can wait until tomorrow.