CHAPTER 12
Grant
◆
I went outside to remember how to breathe.
The storm had pulled its teeth back overnight, dragged the worst of itself east, and what it left behind was the kind of dawn I never trusted, a pewter and dripping thing that looked like it had been left out in the wet too long.
The tarmac out past the overhang lay slicked and steaming where the night's rain met the cold coming up off the concrete, and the light didn't come from anywhere in particular, just leaked out of the low sky like the lid hadn't sealed right.
I stood under the lip of Hangar 7 with my back to the steel and let the cold work on me.
I had the round in my fingers before I knew I'd reached for it, a spent.
308 casing gone dull from years of my thumb.
It should have gone through me and hadn't, because a man eight feet to my left was slower than I was.
I turned it in the gray light and it caught the only gleam in the whole washed-out morning, a thin gold line, then went dark again when I closed my hand.
She let me in.
That was the thing I couldn't get my range card around.
I'd spent the night inside the word yes, and she'd flipped me onto my back to do it, taken the wheel out of my hands because she'd read in about four seconds that handing it over was the only way I'd survive my own grip, and I'd let her.
I'd said the unsayable. I will always have you.
I'd meant it the way I mean coordinates.
And then I'd lain there after with her sleeping against my chest and I'd guarded the door because that was the only love I knew how to do, and somewhere before light I'd cried without sound, which I have not done since a city I won't name, and she'd seen it and pretended she hadn't, which was a kindness I had no range for either.
This is how the list grows. That was the other voice. The one that does inventory. You let one in, you sign up to bury one.
I rolled the brass under my thumb and counted exits without deciding to.
The hangar door was sealed, the personnel door sat at my four o'clock, and beyond those the back-bay roll-up and the apron gate and the runway each offered a way out that I'd already learned not to believe in, because a door is only ever as good as whatever waits on the far side of it.
I counted them anyway. Counting was the only prayer I had.
The personnel door groaned on its track and I knew the step before I smelled him.
Warm asphalt and citrus under the wet. Omar came out with two mugs of Hollis's percolator tar, handed me one without asking if I wanted it, and leaned on the steel beside me to look at the same nothing I was looking at.
"You slept on the floor by the bunk," he said, and didn't bother making it a question, because he'd have smelled it. He smells everything; it's the whole job.
"I slept on me," I said. "Door needed watching."
"The door's fine, Grant. Hollis bolted it. The storm's the only thing that came calling and it left."
"Doors are fine right up until they're the worst thing in the room. " I drank. It was terrible. "You want something or you out here to take my temperature."
He huffed a laugh, that easy sound he uses like a tool. But he didn't joke. He looked out at the steaming tarmac and the pewter light, and after a while he said, quiet, "She smells like both of us now."
And there it was, the thing I'd been bracing to feel all night and hadn't.
I checked myself the way I'd check a weapon, top to bottom, hunting for the part that would go wrong.
Omar had had his hands on her two nights running.
I'd had her under me. By every law I was raised with, by every fight I've ever been in, that should have put a low burn in my chest, the kind that ends with somebody on the ground, and the burn stayed gone no matter how long I waited for it.
What I had instead was a thing settling, the way a sight settles when you finally stop fighting your own pulse and let the crosshair rest where it wants to rest. The wolf in me, the part that runs hot and tallies a debt in blood, had gone quiet and certain in a way I didn't have words for.
The closest I could come was that she felt like a load coming on-line square, every line of it pulling true, the weight shared out across all of us and steadier for it.
"Yeah," I said. "I know."
Omar turned his head. He'd expected to have to manage me. He's the one who reads the room in one breath and then spends himself smoothing it down, and I watched him realize he didn't have to, and watched it cost him something, the way relief does when you've braced your whole life for the blow.
"I keep waiting to hate you for it," he said. "It's not coming."
"No."
"I had her laughing. You hear me? Laughing, in the galley, this woman who looks at the world like it's a contract somebody's trying to slip past her.
And then she goes to your bunk and I'm standing in the dark expecting to feel like I lost something.
" He scrubbed a hand back through his hair, that habit, shoving it off his forehead so it falls right back.
"And I felt like she got more. Like the more of you she takes, the more there is of her to go around, instead of less. That's not how it's supposed to work, Grant. Things divide. Everybody who ever taught me anything taught me a thing gets smaller the more hands you put on it."
I thought about that. I'm slow with words; I'd rather move than talk, and Omar knows it, so he let me have the quiet.
"Not this," I said finally. "This is the other kind of thing.
" I rolled the round between two fingers.
"You stack a load wrong, every line fights the others, the whole rig wants to tear itself apart.
You stack it right, the lines pull together and the weight stops being the enemy.
That's all this is. We're not three men pulling on her.
We're three lines on the same load, and the load's holding because we're square. "
He was quiet a second. Then, soft, with that crack of true under the joke he didn't make: "Did you just call her a load, you romantic son of a bitch."
"I called her the only thing worth carrying. " It came out flatter than I'd meant it to, and truer than I'd planned on letting it be.
He didn't laugh. He bumped his shoulder against mine once, the way brothers do, the way we've done across a hundred bad nights since Dane first put the three of us on the same run and we figured out we fit.
That's all it was. That's all it's ever been with Omar and me, and Julian and me, and Omar and Julian.
We've slept in worse cold than this pressed back to back to keep a wounded man between us alive, and there was never a thing in it but the work and the trust.
I want that set down plain, since she's the only one who's ever made me weigh my own words. Whatever's growing here, whatever settled overnight, it runs through her and never between us. We're brothers. The wolf knows the difference and so do I.
"You scared?" Omar asked, and he didn't mean the coven, because that's the one thing he's never had to ask me.
"Of the coven? No. " I looked at the brass. "Of this? Every minute since she put her mouth on mine and meant it. " I closed my hand. "I lose things, Omar. It's the one thing I'm reliable at. You know the story."
"The translator. " He said it gentle. He's one of three people alive I've told.
"I had her hand," I said. "I had it in mine.
Fire took the vehicle and I was ninety seconds out and I ran the whole way and I got my fingers around hers through the window and I pulled, and the glove came off in my hand.
She was still inside it. I came out with a glove and no hand.
" I made myself say the rest, because the dawn was gray to the horizon and the casing in my fist held the only warm color left in it, and for once that made me feel like I could.
"Her kid was in the back seat. I never even got a glove off the kid. "
Omar didn't say it wasn't your fault. He has never said it, not one time in all the years, which is why I told him. He just stood there in the cold with me and let it be as heavy as it is.
"So when she looks at me like I'm a man," I said, "and not a thing that gets people burned, I don't know what to do with my hands."
"Watch the door with them," Omar said. "Same as you did all night. She knows what you are. She watched you do it and she stayed."
The personnel door went again and Julian came out adjusting his coat collar against the wet, looking like a man arriving at a meeting nobody told him the dress code for, which is exactly how he likes to look.
He had no coffee. He'd had his already, precise, at the same hour he has it every dawn no matter what continent the dawn is on.
He stopped on my other side and looked at the steaming tarmac and the pewter sky, and then he looked at the two of us, and read the whole conversation off our faces in a single pass, the way he reads everything.
"You've been talking about her," he said.
"We've been talking about us," Omar said. "All four of us. There's an us now, Jules. Try to keep up. You're the one who's good at paperwork; you'd think you'd have noticed the new entity got formed."
Julian's mouth did the thing it does, the irony under glass. But his eyes weren't ironic. He turned the crown of his watch a few quiet notches, the way another man might worry a coin, and the small steel sound came out steadier than he was.
"She thinks I rejected her," he said. To me, because I'm the one who won't soften it. "Last night. She came to me cold and I sent her away colder and she thinks it's because I don't want her."
"Do you," I said, keeping it level and clean, no cruelty in it, just clearing the field so he had to step onto it.