CHAPTER 19 #2
The old man was already there, knees in the blood, the med tin open, his hands not shaking, which is the only thing I will ever need to know about Hollis.
He spilled the iron and salt into my palm and I packed it into the wrongness in Wren's side with my fingers and I felt the hex fight it — felt the working buck and writhe like a live wire, the sweet-rot stink flaring, the kid arching off the tarmac — and then I felt it break.
A snap, low, in the sternum, the way the wolf feels a thing more than hears it. The grayness in his flesh stopped spreading. The blood, when it came, came red. Just blood. Just a boy bleeding the ordinary way, which after a hex is the most beautiful thing a man can ask for.
"There," I said. "There it is. Stay with me, kid, you hear me, because you don't get to leave on my watch. Nobody leaves on my watch anymore."
His eyes found mine. Glassy, blown, nineteen. "Did I..." His voice was a thread. "The plane. Did I..."
"You saved it," I said. "You saved the plane and you saved her and you saved all of us, and it was the dumbest, bravest thing I've ever seen, and if you ever do it again I will end you myself. Breathe. In. Slow. On me."
He breathed. In, slow, on me. And his pulse, when I pressed two fingers under his jaw, was there — fast and thin and wrong but there, climbing back toward something I could keep.
Behind us the field had gone quiet the bad way and then the good way.
Omar had run Beckett off the apron and into the tree line, bleeding from a long shallow line down one forearm and grinning the way he grins when he's terrified, humming under his breath, already loping back to us.
Julian stood over a patch of churned dirt where Renata's glamour had been, sidearm low, jaw tight.
"She broke," Julian said. "Renata. She didn't come for a fight, she came for a fire, and the fire didn't take.
She's gone. Beckett with her. They'll run to her mother and she'll be furious that the girl moved early.
" He holstered the weapon like sheathing a thing he wished he'd never owned.
"Which means our window just shrank from hours down to minutes.
The next thing they send won't be impatient. "
I didn't look up from Wren. "Med status."
"Stabilizing," Cady said off the phone, and I heard her crying, the way you cry when the number stops climbing toward the bad place.
"His vitals are coming up. You broke the curse, Grant.
You broke it. He's gonna... he stays, he heals, but he doesn't fly, not like this, no chase, he stays here with Dane and Hollis and me... "
"Then he stays," I said. "He stays where it's safe and he gets old and fat and useless and he tells this story wrong for forty years.
" I had blood to the elbow. I had a boy breathing under my hands.
I had, for the first time in seven years, gotten there.
"You hear that, kid? You're benched. You did your one brave thing.
The rest of your life you get to be a coward like the rest of us. "
Wren laughed. It hurt him and he did it anyway, a wet broken little laugh, and a tear ran sideways off his face into his hair, and that was how I knew he'd live — because the dying don't laugh, the dying just go quiet, and I would know.
I looked up.
Sloane was kneeling across from me with her hands still pressed to the dressing Hollis had taped, her sleeves soaked dark to the elbow, Ruth's steel pen back in her fist like a weapon she'd decided not to put down.
She was looking at the blood on her own hands the way she looked at a clause that did something terrible in language that pretended to be ordinary.
I watched the math move behind her eyes.
I watched her arrive at the wrong answer.
"He almost died," she said, the words clipped down to nothing. "For me. A child almost died because I read a clause and wouldn't sign it."
"No," I said.
"Grant."
"No. " I leaned across the boy and the blood and I put one red hand over her two.
The heat of me — I run hot, always have, hotter when the wolf's been up — went into her cold fingers, and I felt her startle and not pull away.
"Listen to me, because I'm only saying it once and then we're getting on that plane.
A boy almost died because a coven sent a curse, and a boy lived because you tore the comms trap with a pen and dragged him out of the line with your bare hands and kept us from going deaf and blind in the first ten seconds.
You're the reason it didn't go all the way.
That's the whole tragedy and the whole grace of you, sweetheart.
You read the thing nobody else reads. And it saves people. It's saving people right now."
She blinked. Once. The blotchy fury and the cold guilt fought across her face and the fury won, which is what I wanted, because fury you can use and guilt just sits on your chest and watches you drown.
"On the record," she said, low, ragged, "I hate that you're right."
"Bill me," I said.
Dane came across the apron then, granite-slow and terrible, and knelt at Wren's head and put one huge scarred hand over the boy's brow and said nothing at all, which from Dane is a eulogy and a vow and a thank-you in one.
He looked at me over the kid. Old wolf to younger one. You got there, his eyes said.
I got there, mine said back.
Then I stood up, because the work never stops for the feeling, and that's the price of carrying the weight at all.
"Hollis, Cady, get him to the loft, keep the iron packed, keep the line warm to Sable for the medical, she'll know the after-care for a hex.
" I was already wiping my hands, already counting the new clock, the one Renata had started when she lost her nerve.
"Omar, that arm, can you fly with it. " Not a question.
"I can fly with my teeth, brother," Omar said, breathless, eyes too bright, the joke and the terror tangled all the way up. "Let's get the line home open before they send something patient."
"Julian. Plane. Now. Window's closing and Renata just bought us a smaller one. " I looked at the turboprop, sitting fat and amber-lit and wanting to fly, and the want of it matched mine for the first time all morning. "We go before her mother organizes the grief into something with a plan."
I turned back for one last second.
Wren had his eyes on me. Just barely there, just barely holding, but on me.
The copper-and-ozone reek of him was already fading, thinning into ordinary blood and ordinary boy and the clean cold runway air taking it away the way the storm had taken the dark.
I crouched, one more time, blood to the elbow, the kid breathing, and I said the thing I'd been trying to say to a translator and her child for seven years through a buckled door I couldn't open.
I said it to the one I'd reached in time.
"I got there. " My voice came out lower than I meant it, rougher, the wolf right at the surface, the round in my pocket gone warm against my hip for once instead of cold. "You hear me, kid? This time I got there."
He couldn't talk, so he squeezed my hand instead, and that was enough.
I stood, and the soldier came back down over the man like a visor, and I turned to Sloane, who was already on her feet, who had spent a whole life refusing to be carried and didn't need it now, who had blood up her arms and a coven's confession zipped over her heart and a dead woman's pen in her fist and the whole tragedy and grace of her written across her face.
"On the plane," I said. "We are not doing that twice."