12. Ember
EMBER
I last about ninety seconds in the truck.
Cass goes in through the open door with his hand inside his coat and his body turned sideways to make less of a target, and Gideon slides out of the passenger seat to cover the alley, and I sit in the back exactly as long as it takes me to hear a voice from inside that I know.
Maeve's voice. Thin. Shaking. But hers.
And then I'm out of the truck, because running this long has taught me a lot of things and one of them is that you don't leave the only person who ever helped you alone in a dark room with a stranger, even when the stranger is on your side, even when your leg screams and a man told you to stay put.
Gideon says my name, low and sharp, and I ignore him, and I go through the open steel door into the dark of Maeve's back room.
She's standing against the far counter with both hands flat on it, holding herself up the way Gideon held himself up at the stove.
Old Maeve, who has to be seventy, who has sold me my life in a brown bottle a dozen times and never once asked me my name.
She's smaller than I remember. They always are, the people you've built up in the dark.
There's a bruise going yellow-green along one cheekbone, days old, and her hands won't stop shaking, and when she sees me her face does something that breaks my heart clean in half.
Relief. She's relieved. She thought I might be dead, and I'm not, and even now with her face bruised and her hands shaking she's glad of it.
"Oh, you stupid girl," she says. "You came back. You shouldn't have come back."
"Maeve—"
"They were here." Her voice cracks on it.
"Three days ago. Three men, and one of them did the talking, and he was polite, honey.
That's the part that gets me. He was so polite the whole time he was telling me what they'd do to me.
" Her hand comes up to the bruise on her cheek like she's forgotten it's there.
"Cedar. He smelled like cedar and something sweet under it.
Asked after a young woman who buys unconventional prescriptions and pays in cash and pelts.
Asked like he already knew the answer and just wanted to watch me lie about it. "
The floor tilts. Cedar and something sweet.
My father's enforcers. My father's scent, the one that lives in the oldest, worst part of my brain, the one that means the locked bedroom and the counted exits.
They were here. In this room. Three days ago, leaning on a seventy-year-old woman because she once sold pills to a girl who walked off.
Cass has gone very still by the door, watching the alley through the gap, listening to all of it.
"What did you tell them," I say.
"That I didn't know any such person." Maeve lifts her chin, and for a second the shaking stops, and I see the spine that let an old beta woman run unconventional prescriptions in a timber town for forty years.
"Same thing I'd tell them again. I've never known your name, and I find a person can't give up what they were careful never to learn.
" Then the spine folds and the fear comes back.
"But they'll be back. Men like that always come back.
So I'm gone, honey. Tonight. I've a sister in Idaho I haven't spoken to in twenty years and I'm going to go remember why. "
She turns and reaches under the counter, and her hands are shaking so badly it takes her two tries, and she comes up with two brown bottles. Full ones. She presses them into my hands and folds my fingers around them the way you'd close a child's hand around something precious.
"That's the last of it," she says. "Not just mine.
The last of this formula anywhere in the state.
I called everyone I know when I decided to run, called in every favor I had left, and that's what came back.
Two bottles. After this there's no more of the good kind, not from me, not from anyone I could find.
So you make it last, and you make it count, and you understand that when it's gone.
" She stops, squeezes my hands, makes herself say it.
"When it's gone, you're going to have to find another way to be safe.
Because there won't be a bottle for it anymore. "
Two bottles. I look down at them in my hands, the whole of my hidden future, and it's so small. A season. Two if I ration, and I know now what rationing costs. After that the wall comes down for good and stays down, and there's nothing in the world that puts it back up.
"Maeve." My voice isn't working right. "I'm sorry. I brought this to your door. The bruise, all of it. That's mine. I did that to you just by buying my fucking pills."
"Stop that." Sharp, the way she used to be sharp when I'd flinch at my own reflection in her window.
"You did nothing but try to live. A girl trying to live is not a thing to apologize for.
Whatever's chasing you put that bruise on me, not you.
" Her shaking hands cup my face, just for a second, the only tenderness I've let anyone show me in six years that didn't come with a fever and a stranger's bed.
"Now go. Whoever these men are." Her eyes flick to Cass at the door, measure him, and something in her settles.
"If they're keeping you, let them keep you.
You've been alone too long. It's all over your face. Go, honey. Go and be kept."
"Maeve."
"Go."
Cass moves then, easy and certain, and there's a gentleness in how he does it that I don't expect from a man his size.
"We'll see her out first," he tells me, low.
"Make sure she gets to her car. It's the least we owe her.
" To Maeve, with a small nod, the kind men like him don't give often: "Ma'am.
You did right by her. We'll take it from here. "
Maeve looks at him a long moment. Then she nods and reaches for the packed suitcase that's been sitting by the inner door this whole time, ready, a woman who decided to run before we ever pulled into the alley.
Cass takes it out of her hand before she's lifted it an inch, and she lets him, which from Maeve is its own kind of verdict.
We go out the back the way we came, into the wet gray light of the alley, Maeve's suitcase in Cass's hand and the two bottles clutched against my chest like a heartbeat. Gideon's at the truck, scanning. The alley's empty. The morning's quiet.
And then it isn't.
He comes around the mouth of the alley where it lets onto the side lot, a big man in a good coat, moving with the easy confidence of someone who belongs wherever he stands.
He's not looking for trouble. He's just walking, a man crossing a parking lot, and the wind is at my back carrying my scent straight to him, the heat-thinned scent the last pill can't hide anymore.
His head comes up.
I watch it happen. I watch him catch it on the air, watch his stride break, watch his eyes find me across forty feet of wet asphalt and go wide with recognition.
Cedar. He smells like cedar, faint, under the cold.
One of my father's. And his mouth is already opening, already shaping the start of the name that ends my six years, the name that goes straight back to Malek on the next phone call.
"Em—"
Cass shoots him.
It isn't loud. That's the thing nobody tells you about a gun with the right attachment in a wet alley.
It isn't the crack you brace for, just a flat heavy cough, there and gone, swallowed by the rain and the brick.
The man folds. Not the way they fall in the movies, all drama and spin.
He just stops being a standing thing and becomes a heap on the asphalt, fast, like the strings got cut, and the start of my name dies in his throat half-formed.
For a second the world holds very still.
Then Cass is moving, and the thing that frightens me most isn't the body.
It's how unhurried he is. He doesn't run.
He crosses the lot at a walk, that same easy walk the dead man had thirty seconds ago, and he crouches over him and goes through his coat with the brisk competence of a man unpacking groceries.
Wallet. Phone. He thumbs the phone dark and pockets both.
He gets a fist in the dead man's collar, hauls him half upright, and folds him over one shoulder, knees bent, taking two hundred pounds of deadweight with a low grunt he doesn't bother to hide, the first thing all morning that's cost him visible effort.
Then he carries him to the dumpster at the end of the lot and tips him over the lip the way you'd set down something heavy you'd been asked to move. Quiet. Final. No wasted motion.
Ninety seconds. Maybe less. I counted, because counting is what I do when the alternative is feeling.
Maeve's gone. Somewhere inside those ninety seconds she took her suitcase up off the wet asphalt where Cass dropped it when he drew, got herself to her car, and pulled out, no goodbye, which is the most sensible thing anyone's done all morning.
Gideon's hand finds my shoulder. I didn't see him come around the truck. "In," he says, low, steering me toward the cab. "Eyes forward. Don't look at the dumpster again."
I look at the dumpster again. Of course I do. Then I let him fold me into the back seat, and Maeve's two bottles are still clutched against my chest, and somewhere across town an old woman is driving toward a sister in Idaho, and a man is dead in the garbage for the crime of recognizing my face.
Cass gets in. He doesn't say anything. He starts the engine, backs us out of the alley smooth and slow, signals at the empty street like a law-abiding citizen, and drives us out of Forks at exactly the speed limit.
His hands are steady on the wheel. There's a fleck of something dark on his cuff he hasn't noticed or doesn't care about.
He killed a man in front of me and his pulse never changed. I should be terrified of him. Some cold animal part of me, the part that's kept me alive, is.
The rest of me is doing something I have no name for and less control over.
Because he did it for me. Between one breath and the next a man started to say my name and Cass ended him for it, no debate, no flinch, like my safety was a simple fact he'd already decided and the man crossing the lot was just an obstacle to it.
Nobody has stood between me and my father's reach in six years.
Nobody has stood between me and it ever, not once, not even the people who were supposed to.
The heat's been climbing in me all day. Now it's joined by something worse, adrenaline and gratitude and the awful animal pull toward the man who just proved he'll kill to keep me, and they braid together low in my body into a single unbearable wanting that has picked the worst possible moment to arrive.
We're ten miles out, on a logging road with nothing but trees on either side, when I can't sit with it anymore.
"Pull over," I say.
Cass's eyes flick to the mirror. "Ember."
"Pull over, Cass."