8. Chapter 8
Crowe
We go down that mountain faster than we came up it. Nobody fires at our backs. The moment that convoy started rolling, every gun on the road turned around and went with it. They’re paid to deliver her, not to chase three men into the dark.
The sky over the ridge behind us is already going from black to something else.
Kent jogs down the slope with his arm held against his chest and doesn’t say one word about it, which is how I know it’s bad.
Meyer takes the shorter line through the rocks.
We drop the last stretch to the tree line without stopping.
The truck’s where we left it, facing downhill, key in it. I take the fire road with the lights off. The mine entrance is half a mile past the fork, gray timber, dry, dark past the first bend.
We’re inside it with the sky gone gray at the bottom and the sun not up yet. Close enough that I don’t look at it twice.
We go in far enough to be safe, and I put a fire together where the light can’t reach the entrance. Not for warmth. For something to look at.
I glance down at where my shirt has dried to my ribs. Bullet lodged beneath my lung. I dug it out back on the ridge, and the wound’s closed now. There’s a hole through the coat and nothing under it.
“Yours shut?” I ask Meyer, who’s stripping off his jacket.
“Yep.”
“You said it went through,” the kid says.
“It did.” He sits down against the rock and puts his boots out toward the fire. “Went through, came out, closed up. I’ve had colds that took longer.”
“You don’t get colds.”
“I remember them.”
Kent lowers himself down one-handed, gets his back against the wall, and immediately starts moving the arm, testing it, turning the wrist.
“Stop that,” Meyer says.
“I’m checking it.”
“You checked it at the truck.”
“And it was broken at the truck, and it’s still broken now, which is a problem.”
“It’s still broken because you keep checking it. Let it heal.”
Kent holds it still for about four seconds.
“How long do bones take?” he asks me. He’s definitely newly turned.
“Depends how straight it’s sitting.”
“Straight-ish.”
“Straight-ish takes about a day. There’ll be a bump on the bone for a bit. But it’ll heal.”
“See,” Meyer says.
“Nobody asked you.”
“You asked him, and he agreed with me.”
“Set it, then. Go on. You’ve wanted to since the fork back in the road.”
“I offered at the fork.”
“You offered like a man who wanted to cause me pain.”
Meyer gets up, takes the arm, and pulls it straight in one movement. Kent makes a sound through his teeth and doesn’t say anything for a moment afterward.
“Better?” says Meyer.
“No.”
“It’ll be better tomorrow,” I say.
“It’ll be better tomorrow,” Kent agrees, and then, “He does that all the time. I think he enjoys it.”
Meyer snorts but doesn’t disagree.
We sit watching the fire for a while.
We didn’t get her out.
Despite everything. The planning. The risks. I left her back in that goddamn truck.
“You good?” asks Kent.
I look up at him. “Fine.”
“You don’t look fine. Did they leave some lead in you?” When I don’t answer, he continues, “Or is it the mission?”
“What do you think, Kent?” I look up at him. I’m not used to failure. It’s a risk, obviously, but after six decades of this, I generally get things right.
I don’t fucking like not getting things right. That’s why this pisses me off so badly. I messed up.
I play every moment back through my head. Her eyes as I opened that door. My frustration as I wrestled with the fucking chains I should have planned for. Runed. Of course they’d be runed. That outfit builds everything it owns to hold creatures like her. And me too, if I’m honest with myself.
Idiot. You should have known.
I watch the sun creep inside the entrance. Eventually, it stops.
I stay well behind it.
Meyer walks to within a stride of the line where the light ends and stands there looking out at a strip of gravel and a bit of hillside.
“Anything?” Kent asks, rising.
“A bird.”
“What kind?”
“A brown one.”
“Riveting.” Kent stretches his arms overhead. “This is the worst part of this job. Not the shooting or the bleeding. This.”
“Sit down and be still before you knock that arm on something,” Meyer says, and comes back and sits down himself.
Kent sleeps for a while. Meyer doesn’t, and doesn’t pretend to. He leans against the wall, stares straight ahead, and cracks his knuckles in a way that makes me want to kill him. Which would be a problem, since he’s already undead.
I think about those glowing gold eyes again.
Where is she right now?
That convoy has been driving since before first light. It’ll drive all day. Every hour of it puts more road between her and me, and I’m sitting on a stone floor in the dark with nothing wrong with me at all. Aside from being allergic to daylight.
Fuck’s sakes!
The sun has controlled my life for sixty years. I plan around it because that’s just how things are for me.
It has never left me feeling this helpless.
I had my hands on that cuff, and the runes burned through it into both of us. She got down beside me and pulled on that plate with her bare hands, and her palms blistered, and she kept pulling. Mine healed while I watched. Hers didn’t.
Her skin was hot. I’ve put my hands on every kind of person and creature, and I’ve never touched anyone who ran that hot without going up in flames.
And her eyes changed while I was looking at them. Gold, and bright. Bright enough to light that cab up.
I can’t explain any of it, and I’ve stopped trying for today. Nothing about this has made sense since it started.
This has stopped being a job.
It’s never been a job, Crowe.
I’m not dressing that up, and I’m not taking it back. I don’t know what it is instead. I leave it alone.
The phone in my coat goes twice around the middle of the day. Faine. I don’t look at it. What do I say? That I had my hands on her and let her go?
Kent wakes in the afternoon, moves the arm, gets told to stop moving the arm, and comes over to look at what I’ve got spread on the floor.
“Can I ask about the woman?”
“No.”
“I put my head through that door for ten seconds,” he says anyway. “She’s got gold eyes, Crowe. Not brown. Gold, and they were glowing. Actually glowing. I’ve been alive a while, and I’ve never—”
“Kent.”
“What?”
“Leave it.”
He looks at me for a second longer than he needs to.
“Right,” he says, and sits down across from me. “What have you got?”
“Paper.”
“Funny. What’s on the paper?”
“Two piles. This one came out of the site we just hit.” I put my hand on the notes I’ve written so far.
“A ledger with her entry details. A transport order with a route number. And what the guard on her cell told me, that someone came and examined her, and then everything changed. There’s a client, and the client’s timetable moved up.
That’s everything I know about the client, so don’t ask. ”
“And the rest?” He looks down at the stack of files beside my other hand.
“Copies out of the old compound. The one they held her in for the year. Faine’s people lifted them before Aurora sealed the quarry building.”
“And?”
“And this is the one that matters.” I pull the courier sheet out and turn it so he can see it. “For over a year, they took her blood twice a week. Two small vials each time, sealed for shipping.”
“How do you know that?”
“Because the number listed here is the same as the number assigned to that truck we just hit. That’s her.”
“Okay. I get it. So what about it?”
“Every time, the same courier collected them, signed this sheet, and drove away. Same man. Same two days a week. Over a year of it.”
Kent runs his finger down the column of signatures.
“Where did he take them?”
“The sheet doesn’t say. It says when he collected and where from. Where he delivered them was never written down anywhere.”
“But he knows.” Kent looks up. “He drove that blood to the client twice a week for a year. Whoever the client is, wherever they are, that man has driven there a hundred times. It’s in his head.”
“Yes.”
“And she’s being delivered to the client right now.”
“That’s my read of it.”
Meyer opens his eyes.
“So the runs are over,” he says. “There’s no more blood to collect. The courier’s out of a job, and he doesn’t matter to anyone anymore.”
“He matters to me. He’s the only person outside that operation who knows where that blood went.”
“Can you find him?”
I turn the sheet around and put my finger on the bottom of it. The same signature, over a hundred times, and under the last one a printed line the clerk filled in the day the account was opened. A name. A carrier number.
“He signed his own name for a year,” I say. “I’ve found men from less.”
“Where do we start?”
“The carrier number belongs to a freight office. Offices keep records of their drivers, and the records have addresses. The office is within range of here. We go there, I get his address, and then he and I have a conversation about where he’s been delivering.”
“And if he doesn’t want the conversation?” Kent asks.
“Nobody wants the conversation. He’ll have it anyway.”
“How far?” Meyer asks.
“A day. Hard driving.”
“Then we should have left an hour ago.”
“I’ll take that up with the sun.”
Kent laughs, which pulls the arm, which makes him swear, which makes Meyer say something about swinging it, and the two of them go back and forth for a while.
“Can I ask you something else?” Kent says when it’s finished.
I look up at him. “Depends what you’re going to ask.”
“Why her?”
“That’s not something I’m going to answer.”
“I’m not asking who she is. Faine told us what you told her: a woman called Kalli. I’m asking why you.” He shifts against the wall. “It’s not a job. Faine called us off it. You’ve had a phone going in your pocket all day, and you haven’t looked at it once.”
“No.”
“So it’s not work. It’s not money. It’s not orders.”
“No.”
He waits. I let him wait.
“Right,” he says eventually. “Here’s the worst part. I’d have come anyway. You didn’t even have to tell me.”
“Why?” It’s my turn to ask questions now.
He thinks about that for a second. “I have no idea. But it’s the most fun I’ve had in years, so there’s that.”
“Fair enough.”
At dusk I stand up and walk out past where the light sat all day, into air that won’t kill me.
The truck’s cold and it starts on the second try. Kent’s already up, holding the door with his good hand. Meyer comes out behind him, gets in, and says nothing.
Neither of them asks what we’ll be facing next.
I’m thinking about eyes with fire in them.