CHAPTER 2
Grant
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I clocked three exits walking the structure and threw out two of them inside a breath, because two were the kind that read open and aren't.
The third was the ramp I'd parked across, and I'd parked across it on purpose, which made it less an exit than a kill funnel I controlled. Standard. You don't leave a door open you can't watch.
I sat the bike at the bottom of the structure and read the building the way I read every building, top down, threat first. Concrete deck, low ceiling, sodium lights dying in a stagger up the levels like someone walking down a hall flipping switches off behind them.
That was the tell. Lights that fail in sequence aren't failing at all.
They go dark because something is moving through the panels, or because somebody wants the black to arrive in a particular order, and either way somebody had decided the dark.
Field of fire's bad here. Pillars every twenty feet. Sightlines garbage. Whoever's coming likes it that way.
I thumbed the round in my pocket. Spent brass, cold, the rim worn smooth where my thumb had lived on it for seven years.
It worked the way a scar works, a thing that remembers for you whether you ask it to or not, and what it remembered was a vehicle and a woman's hand and the ninety seconds I'd been short, and I carried it so I'd never round a corner soft again.
Then I smelled it.
Under the engine reek and the wet-concrete and the city, a wrongness.
Ozone, like before a strike hits the wire.
And under that, sweet and turned, the way meat smells two days past. Coven.
They'd glamoured something or someone in here, and the glamour was good, good enough to fool eyes, but it couldn't fix the smell.
They never could fix the smell. That was the thing the witches forgot about us. We don't see the lie. We breathe it.
She came around the pillar at a fast clip, heels in one hand, a slim hard case clamped under the other arm, and she was already talking.
"If you're with them, you should know the lobby cameras have me leaving at eight, so whatever you're planning, the timeline doesn't help you, and if you're not with them, then you're a man on a motorcycle blocking the only ramp out of a parking structure at night, which is its own category of problem. "
Whatever she was, it sat a long way from helpless.
I'd been told a lawyer. I'd built a picture off the thin brief the way you always do, and the picture I'd built was somebody frozen behind a desk.
This one was moving, fast, low to the ground, hugging the pillars without seeming to know she was doing it, putting concrete between herself and the open lanes.
Whether that was instinct or terror made no difference to me.
Her body was smarter than her mouth, and her mouth was running a deposition at a stranger in the dark.
Gray-green eyes. Auburn hair coming loose from whatever she'd pinned it with.
A pen. There was a pen pushed through the twist of it, brushed steel, catching the one light still alive two levels up, and some part of my head that wasn't doing math filed it.
Object. Hers. She'll reach for it before she reaches for a weapon she doesn't have.
"You're already dead, Counselor," I'd told her. "Decide if you want to stay that way."
She didn't decide. She argued.
"That's not a decision, that's a threat dressed up as a courtesy, and I've spent six weeks reading documents written exactly like that, so you'll forgive me if it doesn't land the way you wanted."
"It wasn't dressed up as anything."
"Then it's a poor threat. Who sent you."
"Dane Voss. You don't know him. Sable Halloran knows the man who knows him.
" I tipped my head a quarter inch toward the dying lights.
"You want to do the rest of this conversation, we do it moving.
Three things are about to come through that stairwell and the door behind you, and none of them are going to introduce themselves. "
She looked at the stairwell. She looked at the door. I watched her run it, fast, the way I'd watch a man decide whether to take the shot, and I respected that she ran it at all instead of screaming.
Then the ozone spiked, and I stopped watching her think.
Contact.
The thing about going lethal is people expect it to be loud.
It's the opposite. Everything in me went still and quiet and very, very clear, the noise dropping out, the pupils opening up to pull in the dark, the wolf coming up under my skin like water finding a crack.
The stairwell door blew open and a man came through it wearing somebody else's face.
Beckett. I knew the build under the glamour, the way the shoulders sat. The coven kept him on a short leash and pointed him at the things they didn't want to dirty their own hands on, and right now they'd pointed him at her.
Two more behind him. Glamoured. The smell told me they were people. The set of them told me they were the kind of people you don't talk to.
"Down," I said, and put my body between her and the lane.
Beckett threw something underhand, low, a little cloth sack, and I knew the rattle of it, dry leaves and bone, and I knew not to let it land where she was breathing.
I caught it out of the air and slung it back into the stairwell and it went off against the cinderblock with a wet ozone crack that left a stink like a struck match in a slaughterhouse. Then he was on me.
I let the first man commit. That's all fighting is, mostly.
You let the other man spend himself and you don't spend yourself back, you just take what he gives and turn it past you into the concrete.
He swung. I moved his arm an inch further than he'd planned and put his face into the pillar, and the glamour stuttered when his skull bounced, a flicker of the real underneath, just long enough to be ugly, and then he went down and stayed.
The second one had a knife. Knives I take seriously.
I don't take them seriously by backing up.
I closed, because the worst place to be against a knife is the place a man your size instinctively wants to be, which is far enough to feel safe and close enough to die.
I came inside his reach and the blade went past my ribs over the old burn, and I felt the heat of it and didn't feel it cut, and I took his wrist and made the hand let go because that's a decision the wrist makes when you ask it correctly.
Beckett got an arm around her.
Everything went very clear.
I don't remember crossing the lane. I remember the sound I made, low, a growl pitched under hearing, the kind a human doesn't catch with her ears but with her chest, and I saw it hit her, saw her flinch like the floor had spoken, and then I had Beckett's wrist and I broke the grip and put him off her and into the deck.
I let him live, which cost me something, because there's a part of me that always wants the other thing, the part the brass round is for.
A body is a clock you can't reset, though, and we needed to be gone before that clock started ticking, so I gave him a reason to stay down a while and left it at that.
The third man was still up, still circling, looking for an angle on her past me, and there wasn't one.
There was never going to be one. I'd settled that the moment I rolled the bike in, before there was anything to settle, and he read it off me the way prey reads a thing it can't beat, and he chose the stairwell over the lane.
Smart. He'd live longer than his friends.
"On the bike," I said. "Now."
"I have questions."
"You have a count of four before more arrive and you're already on three. The bike."
She went. Furious. Heels still in her hand.
The hard case clamped tight, and I clocked that too, because people drop what doesn't matter when they run and she hadn't dropped it, which meant it mattered, which meant later I'd want to know what was in it.
She swung a leg over behind me like she'd done it before and hadn't, awkward and stubborn, and then her arms came around my ribs and locked.
She was cold against me with the deep inside cold the body makes when it starts running the temperature of fear, nothing the night had done to her, and she was running it hard, while I came off warmer than anything human had a right to be, the way I always did.
I felt her register the difference where her chest pressed my spine, felt her go rigid with the wrongness of it.
"You're burning up," she said.
"Yeah."
"That's a fever. That's a hundred and four, easy. You should be on a—"
"I'm fine. " I kicked the bike alive. "Hold on."
I took the ramp hard and put the structure behind us and the city opened up, wet and lit and indifferent, ten thousand people in their apartments who'd go their whole lives without thinking about what walked among them.
I ran the route in my head as the lights went by.
Two rights, the river road, lose the cameras under the overpass, the rendezvous where Omar's holding.
Omar would have a route stitched together by now, the quiet thread out that he always seemed to find when the map swore there wasn't one, and right now I needed a man whose gift ran to escape instead of to ending things, because mine had a way of using up all the air in a room.
That was the shape of what I was carrying her toward, and she didn't know it yet: a set of us, each built for the half of the job the others couldn't do, and somewhere I'd have to find the words to tell her she was being brought to her people, not handed off down a line.
The strange part was the thing I caught off her even now, faint under the fear.
Her attention had already started reaching past me, out into the dark, toward whatever else was waiting, as though some part of her had worked out before she'd even met them that one man was never going to be the whole answer to a woman built like she was.