CHAPTER 19
Grant
◆
The plane wanted to fly before any of us did, and everything that happened after it wanted that was the war we hadn't planned on fighting.
I stood on the cracked tarmac with the cold clean air going down into my lungs like a blade and I counted the things that could kill us, the way they trained it into me and the way the wolf kept it sharp long after the training stopped mattering.
Open ground ran two hundred meters from the hangar mouth to the turboprop with no cover but the fuel bowser and a stack of pallets Hollis kept meaning to burn.
The tree line to the north stood close enough to spit at. I tallied three exits off the apron and discounted two of them, because the storm had flooded the south road and the east gate was a tetanus shot pretending to be a fence.
So the plane was the only honest door we had, in and out both.
"She's good to go," Omar called from the wing, wiping his hands on a rag. He had grease on his jaw and that loose easy stand he gets when he's pretending the day isn't trying to murder us. "Fuel's topped. Bird's happy. I'd kiss her if Hollis wouldn't bill me."
"You'd bill yourself," Hollis said from somewhere under the cowling, deadpan, a flask-shaped lump in his back pocket. "Save us the paperwork."
The joke slid off me. I belong to worse weather than the morning's low pewter clearing, where the storm had finally rolled off and left the world washed and quiet and lying about how safe it was.
Quiet is a thing the enemy gives you. I learned that in a city I won't name, in an August seven years gone, and I never gave it back.
Sloane came down the hangar ramp with the cloned drive zipped into an inside pocket and Ruth's steel pen through the twist of her hair like a woman who'd decided to walk into a fight wearing armor only she could see.
She looked like a principal walking to her own table, the way she always had, which was the whole problem with her, and the whole reason I'd stopped sleeping right.
"Twenty minutes," Julian said, coming out behind her, coat over the cut, papers already squared away in some pocket that probably cost more than my bike. "Cady's holding the corridor on the sat phone. We get airborne before noon, we make the border window. We miss it..."
"We don't miss it," I said.
And that was when Wren got it into his head to be a man.
He was at the fuel bowser. Nineteen, all elbows and want, the youngest thing the pack had and the most desperate to matter. I'd sent him to pull the chocks and double-check the bowser was capped and bled. A nothing task. A task you give a kid so he feels like the operation needs him.
"Got the line, Grant," he called, grinning, lifting the cap. "Bone dry. We're tight."
Good, I should have said. On me.
I didn't get the words out.
The wolf hit first. It always does. The smell came across the apron on a wind that shouldn't have been there — ozone, sharp and electric, and crushed bay leaf, and under both of them that sweet-rot stink the coven trails like a signature, like meat left in a warded dark.
My pupils blew wide. The morning went down a register, slow and underwater, everything loud, everything close.
I was already moving before my brain caught up to why.
"Down," I said, low enough that it carried more weight than a shout ever would. "Wren. Down. Now."
He froze instead. They always freeze, the young ones, that one half-second where the body asks the mind for permission and the mind is too slow.
Beckett came out of the tree line.
Big, ugly, warlock-built — muscle stacked on muscle, a hex bag swinging from one fist on a cord, bay leaf and bone, and his other hand was already up and turning, fingers shaping the air.
I'd seen Beckett work. I'd seen what a hex does to a body, the way it never punches so much as rots, hunting down the soft places and telling them to stop.
And behind him, past his shoulder, half a glamour shimmering off her like heat off a road, stood Renata herself rather than the mother who'd sent men like Beckett for years. Impatient, ambitious, she'd come out into the daylight when patience said wait, because patience had never been her gift.
She's overreaching, some cold flat part of me catalogued, even then. Vivienne would never. This is the daughter who couldn't wait.
The rest of me was already at a dead run.
Beckett's hand snapped forward and the air bent.
I felt it pass me as a wrongness, a pressure with the ozone going thick as syrup, and it was aimed past me at the bowser, at the fuel, at the plane that wanted to fly.
Renata didn't care whether she killed Sloane clean; she wanted it loud and immediate, the whole sanctuary burned down to chrome and ash so her mother would know she hadn't waited.
Wren saw it the same instant I did. The hex, the line, the fuel.
And the kid did the bravest, stupidest thing I have ever watched a pack member do.
He turned straight into it, put his body between the hex and the bowser, and shoved the bleed valve open with both hands, dumping the line, killing the charge in the fuel before the curse could find it, so that the hex landed on him, on meat, and spared the hundred gallons that would have taken the plane and the apron and everyone standing on it.
The sound he made.
I've heard men die. I've heard the noise a body makes when the thing keeping it together lets go.
This was worse, because he didn't die. The hex went into him and started taking him apart slow, and he folded over the bowser and slid down it and the noise came out of him in a thin animal thread, and the smell hit me full in the back of the throat — hot pennies and burning weather, the curse cooking his blood from the inside, so wrong against the clean cold runway air that the wolf in me wanted to throw its head back and howl the world down.
I was already there.
I have to say that part plain, because it's the thing the last seven years built a man around. I was already there.
I went over the bowser line and I had him.
I had both hands on him, his shoulder, his arm, the meat of him going gray and slick under my palms, the hex chewing, and for one white blind second I was in the other place — the stalled vehicle, the fire, the heat coming through the door I couldn't get open in time, her hand in mine through the gap, her kid screaming behind her, I had her hand, I had it, and then the door buckled and I had a glove and no hand and ninety seconds was the distance between a man and the rest of his life.
Ninety seconds.
Not this time, the voice in my skull said, flat as the round in my pocket. You got here early for once, so hold the line and hold the kid.
"Beckett's mine," Omar snarled, and went past me low and fast, a folding knife already open in his fist, herding the warlock off the kill, putting himself between Beckett's next shape and the rest of us.
Julian had his sidearm out, the one he hates to draw, and he drew it, two-handed, calm as a man reading a balance sheet, and put rounds into the dirt at Renata's feet to break her glamour and break her nerve.
The crack of it rolled off the steel hangar skin and came back doubled.
And Sloane.
I will tell this part exactly, because I owe it to her and because anyone who calls her cargo after this is going to answer to me.
Where another person would have bolted for the plane or locked up where they stood, she did the cold lawyer thing instead and read the room, the whole field of it, in the half-second it took the rest of us to commit, and she found the one piece nobody else had hands free for. The sat phone.
Beckett's hex bag had a tail of cord and a second pouch I hadn't clocked, planted at the bowser base like a snare — a comms trap, a thing to fry the one line we had to Cady and the corridor, to blind us, to leave us deaf the second the shooting started. Sloane saw it.
She came off the ramp at a dead sprint, dropped beside Wren and me with no regard at all for the curse stink or the gunfire, grabbed the trap pouch in one bare hand and Ruth's steel pen in the other, and jammed the pen through the binding cord and ripped the thing open and ground the bay leaf and bone into the wet tarmac under her heel before it could close the circuit.
"Comms are clean," she said, breathing hard, voice clipped to the bone. "Go. Whatever you have to do. The line's up. I've got him."
She got both hands on Wren's far side and hauled.
The kid outweighed her by eighty pounds and she dragged him clear of the bowser with me, into the lee of the pallets, out of the line, her teeth bared, her hair come loose, blood up her wrists that wasn't hers and an expression I'd only ever seen on operators — that flat, total, I am doing the next thing focus that doesn't have any fear in it because the fear got filed for later.
"Sloane," I said.
"Don't," she said. "Don't you dare thank me like a man saying goodbye. Fix him."
So I fixed him.
I got Wren flat. I got his cut open and his shirt cut away and I put my whole weight on the wound the hex had opened in his side — except it wasn't a wound the way a knife makes a wound.
The hex doesn't cut. It unbinds. It tells the body to stop being a body, and the flesh around it had gone the gray-slick color of a thing that's already grieving itself, and the reek came up off it so thick it furred my tongue, blood and burnt magic together, the whole signature of the coven written into a boy who'd done nothing but want to matter.
"Cady," I barked at the phone Sloane held up to my face. "Hex wound, lateral, left flank, he's losing the binding. What've you got."
Cady's voice came thin and fast off the sat phone. "Counter-charm in the med kit, the iron filings and the salt, the little tin. Grant, you have to break the curse's hold before he loses too much, iron breaks the working..."
"Hollis," I said.