14. Chapter 14
Crowe
She’s solid in my arms and burning through the blanket. Heavier than a woman her size should be, and I could still run all night with her.
I take her across the open ground at the back of the house with Kent on my left and Meyer behind us. The lawn is frozen hard. Behind us, every window in that house is lit, and men are coming out of two doors at once. Somebody is shouting orders that nobody is following yet.
I found her room by walking toward the guards. Four men on one hallway, no guard on any other door in the house, and the rest of it dark. It didn’t take much.
“They’re coming out the kitchen side,” Kent says.
“Let them. Keep moving.”
She’s talking against my neck. Not much of it makes sense.
“You’re cold,” she says. “So cold. That’s not right, is it? People aren’t supposed to be cold.”
“Hold on to the blanket.”
“I am holding the blanket.”
We get off the drive and down the bank into the trees. I go another two hundred yards in before I stop. Right now, deep cover matters more than speed.
Kent crouches. Meyer stands and watches the road.
“Where’s the truck?” Kent says.
“Where we left it. Half a mile down, off the road, in the ditch under the pines.”
“Good. So we drive.”
“Where?”
He opens his mouth and stops.
“Go ahead and say it,” I tell him. He’s not going to tell us anything we don’t know, but it’s probably good to get it out.
“There’s one road,” Kent says. “One gate. It’s shut, and the wall’s still up.” He rubs his face. “We’re inside it. We got in, and now we’re inside it with her, and the only way out is through that locked gate.”
“That’s it. That’s the problem.”
“So what do we do?”
“We wait.”
“We wait?” He looks at me. “There must be a hundred men back there. They came out of the ground.”
“They came with the old dragon.” I keep my voice down.
“A man like that doesn’t drive up a mountain on his own, and he’s been sitting in that house waiting on her.
They were inside the wall before we ever got here.
That’s why we watched that gate for a day and a night and never saw them. And there are less than a hundred.”
“So how many?”
“Thirty. Give or take. They’re spread over a big property in the dark, and they’ve just lost their leader, which makes them harder to read, not easier.”
Meyer speaks without turning around.
“He’s right,” he says. “Whoever runs that house won’t sit on this. He can’t. We’ve got his dragon, and we killed the old male in there who seemed pretty important. Every hour we’re loose is another hour we could be out on the road. He’ll send men out to look for us.”
Kent looks at him. “And to send them out…”
“He has to open the gate.” Meyer nods at the dark down the hill. “So we don’t need a way through the wall. We need to be sitting close enough to the gate when he opens it himself.”
Kent is quiet for a second.
“That’s genuinely a good plan,” he says, “and I hate how much of it depends on a man being efficient.”
“He’s efficient,” I say. “It’s the one thing about him I’m sure of.”
We go to ground in a ditch above the road, four hundred yards up the hill from the gate, under a low stone wall that’s been there longer than the house has. Kent and Meyer take the two ends. I sit with my back against the stones and Kalli across my lap, still wrapped up.
We wait a long time.
The blanket has come off one of her hands.
Her wrist is burned all the way round where the cuffs sat, old marks with newer ones on top of them.
Then I look at the hand again, at the two fingers curled into my jacket, at the way it’s resting against me.
She’s warm through my sleeve. I’ve been cold for sixty years, and I can feel exactly where she is. I tuck her hand back into the blanket.
She doesn’t sleep, and she doesn’t stop talking.
“Your coat smells like somebody else’s blood,” she says.
“It does.”
“You should have a different coat.”
“I’ll get one.”
“Are you real?” she says, a while later. “Because I’ve had you in my head for days and my head lies to me now.”
“I’m real.”
“That’s what my head would say.”
“Then pinch me.”
She thinks about that seriously for a few seconds. Then she pinches the back of my hand, hard, with what strength she has.
“You didn’t flinch.”
“No.”
“Nothing flinches anymore,” she says. “Maybe I should pinch myself.”
“Don’t.”
Ten minutes later, from under the blanket: “I flew around the whole valley. Did you know that? Top to bottom. You can’t get out anywhere. I hit the top three times, and it hurt every time. I did it anyway, and there was nobody up there to tell about it.”
“You’re telling me.”
“I’m telling you now.” She’s quiet for a bit. Then, in a completely different voice, flat and clear: “They put stuff in my mouth. Two men held my head.”
I don’t say anything.
“I got my nails into one of them.” She sounds pleased. “I took a piece of his cheek. I fought them. I’m telling you, and you have to remember it for me, because I’m not going to remember any of tonight.”
“I’ll remember it.”
“Say it back.”
“You got your nails into one of them and took a piece of his cheek.”
“Good.” She turns her face into my coat. “That’s the good part. Don’t lose it.”
“I won’t.”
“Everyone loses things.” Her voice is going. “They took a whole year from me and—” She stops, mouth opening and then closing again, the thought lost.
“Tell me the rest of it tomorrow,” I tell her.
“Will you be here tomorrow?”
“Yes.”
“Say it like you mean it.”
“I’ll be here tomorrow.”
Kent looks over from the end of the wall. I look at him until he looks away again.
Deep in the night, hours before dawn, the gatehouse light changes and the barrier goes up.
Two vehicles come out and turn down the mountain, full of men, moving fast.
“Now,” I say.
We’re in the truck and rolling before the second one has cleared the posts. Meyer drives, because Meyer drives better than I do. Kent gets her from me and holds her flat across the back seat. I take the passenger side with the window down.
The gate man is out of his hut, watching the two vehicles go, with his back mostly to the road. Meyer comes down the hill without lights and without touching the brakes. The barrier is still up. It’s still up because nobody has told him to put it down, and he’s looking the wrong way.
We’re through the posts before he turns around.
He gets a hand up. He shouts something. Then he’s behind us.
And then we hit the line.
Coming in, the guard let me in, and the wards let me pass. Going out, nobody has given us permission. The barrier is up, and that is the only thing between us and a dead engine on a mountain road.
The magic hits me through the open window, through the door, through the floor of the truck, all at once.
When I walked through it, it dropped me and held me down.
This is shorter, because the truck carries me through it, and it is still the worst pain I have ever felt.
My arms lock. My jaw locks. My vision goes white at the edges, and the only thing I can think is that Meyer’s foot had better stay down.
It stays down.
We come out the other side. The pain stops the moment the line is behind us, and my shoulders slump.
In the back, Kalli arches up off the seat against Kent’s arm and makes a sound with no words in it at all.
“I’ve got her,” Kent says. “I’ve got her. Crowe, she felt that.”
“How is she?”
“She’s flat again. She’s all right.” He gets his hand under her head.
Nine miles down, I hear engines working the grade behind us before any light shows. Two of them. Then headlights come up and settle in our mirrors.
They stay behind us for a while. They’re quick on the straights, and they brake too early into the bends, and they keep their lights on the whole time, which tells me they’re not professionals.
I take us off onto a forestry track I marked three days ago, and we run dark for four miles with the pines closing in on both sides. The headlights go past the turn and keep going down the highway. Ten minutes later they come back up it, slower. Then they’re gone.
Guards. Not hunters. There’s a difference.
“They’ll be back on that highway by first light with better men,” Meyer says.
“They will. We’ll be underground by then.”
“And when they find nothing?”
“Then their boss starts making calls.” I watch the mirror. “We’ve screwed up his operation. He won’t report that to anyone official. So he’ll pay people. That’s the part we’ll be dealing with.”
We stop at the bottom of the track, where the second vehicle is waiting under the pines—the one we left outside the line before we went in.
Meyer gets out and opens the back door and starts to scoop her up against him.
I’m on him before I know I’ve moved.
I have him against the side of the truck with my forearm across his chest and my hand at his throat. My fangs are down. There is a sound coming out of me that I did not decide to make.
Meyer doesn’t fight me. He doesn’t even lift his hands. He stands there with my hand on his throat and looks at me.
The sound stops. My hand opens on its own. My fangs pull back, and I step away from him. My arms are shaking all the way down to where my fists are clenched at my sides.
Nobody says anything.
Kent is standing at the front of the truck with a fuel can in his hand and his mouth open.
Meyer straightens his collar. He takes his time about it.
“I was just going to move her across,” he says. “She’s fine.”
“I know.”
“Do you?”
“It was the adrenaline,” I say. “It’s been a long night.”
“Sure.” He picks up the bag he dropped and slings it over his shoulder.
“I’ve watched you work this entire mission, Crowe.
I watched you take a round through the side on that mountain and then check your watch.
Your hands are shaking right now.” He walks past me toward the other vehicle. “You just lost it. Think about that.”
And he leaves it there, which is the only reason I’m still able to work with him.
I stand in the dark with my hands at my sides.
I put a man against a truck for touching her. Meyer. Who cleared a hallway for me an hour ago. I’d have put him through the side panel if he’d been slower to stop moving.
I know exactly what I did. I can’t explain why I did it.
Stop thinking about it.
I can’t. I get in the vehicle.
We’re under cover forty minutes before the sun.
It’s a rented house at the end of a dirt road, paid for a month in advance under a name that isn’t mine, with the shutters already screwed closed on the inside from the last time I used it. Two rooms and a kitchen. One bed.
I put her in it.
“Gideon…” She’s got a fistful of my sleeve, and she doesn’t let go when I straighten up. I work her fingers open one at a time. Her hand is still hot, and it closes on the cuff again as soon as it’s free. I let it, and stand there like that for a while.
“How long are we staying?” Kent asks from the doorway.
“Until she can walk.”
“And then?”
“Then we’re a long way from that valley before anyone works out where we went.”
He nods and goes to check the back door.
I get my sleeve out of her hand.
“Gideon Crowe,” she says.
Her eyes are shut. Her voice is thick and slow and mostly gone.
“You said you’d come back,” she says. “And you did.”
Then she’s asleep, and I’m standing beside the bed in a shuttered room with my hand still half out toward her.
What the fuck are you doing, Crowe?