CHAPTER 20
Sloane
◆
The loft smelled like blood and bay leaf and burnt coffee, and Wren was alive, and I could not make those three facts add up into anything that let me breathe.
He was on the cot under the high window, half-swallowed by the one wool blanket the bunk gave him, his face the gray of someone who had lost more than the body could spare and been hauled back from it by people who refused to let go.
Cady sat on an overturned crate beside him with the sat phone in her lap and her pink-streaked hair flattened on one side where she'd been pressing her cheek to his shoulder, listening to him breathe.
A smear of his blood had dried brown along her jaw and she hadn't wiped it off. She kept her hand flat on his chest, counting, the way you count a thing you are afraid will stop counting itself.
I stood in the doorway and pressed Ruth's pen once between my fingers, hard enough to feel the steel barrel bite.
The same thought always surfaces when the world has gone wrong in a way I can't draft my way out of: that I had gone through this contract line by line, every subsection and footnote and buried definition, and the cost had still come due somewhere I'd never thought to look for it.
"You can come in," Cady said, not looking up. "He's not contagious. Hex burns don't catch."
"I know how hex burns work now. " I made myself cross the floor. The boards gave under me, old steel-truss bones flexing. "Cady. I'm sorry, I should have."
"Don't. " She looked up then, and her eyes were red-rimmed but level.
"Don't say sorry. He'd hate that. He'd want me to tell you he took the hit like a legend, and then he'd ask if you saw it, and then he'd ask if Grant saw it.
" A wet laugh broke out of her. "He's nineteen.
He's been waiting his whole life to matter in a story.
Don't you dare make this the part where he gets to feel like a mistake. "
The copper-and-ozone stink of the wound still hung under everything, wrong against the clean cold runway air sliding in through the cracked window.
I'd smelled it on the apron an hour ago, on my own hands when I'd dragged him clear of the second hex by the collar of his cut, and I understood I would smell it for the rest of my life whenever I closed my eyes and went looking for the place I'd put this.
"He bled because of me," I said, and I made it as plain as a finding of fact, because this was cause and effect with nothing softer than that in it, a thing too clean to call guilt. "I'm the reason there's a coven within a hundred miles of this airfield."
Wren's eyes opened, slow, like coming up through deep water.
"Nah," he croaked. "You're the reason there won't be."
He had none of my brief, none of the Day-12 clock, none of the conversion clause that handed every pack's vote to a woman who treated people like ingredients. All he had was a hex burn the size of my hand under that blanket and a smile he was trying to make work.
"Did Grant see?" he asked Cady.
"Grant saw," she said softly. "Grant said you did good, you absolute disaster. His words. The disaster part's mine."
"Worth it," Wren breathed, and closed his eyes, and the smile stayed.
I had spent my whole adult life arranging things so that no one would ever bleed on my account, building myself into the most self-contained creature in any room, the one nobody would miss when the firm finally restructured me out of existence the way it had restructured Ruth — so that the day they did it, there'd be no one standing close enough to catch the shrapnel.
And here was a boy who had run toward it.
For me. A stranger he'd known four days.
This is exactly what I was afraid of, I thought. This is the bill coming due for letting people matter.
And underneath that, quieter, in a voice that didn't sound like Ruth and didn't sound like fear: And he'd do it again. And so would you, now. For any of them.
---
Dane found me on the bike floor when I went down to be alone and failed.
The chrome was dimmed to the work-lights nearest the back bay, the rest of the great hangar gone to shadow and the long shapes of the bikes, and the storm-scrubbed cold sat in the steel like it lived there.
He came across the floor without hurrying, because Dane Voss never hurried.
He was built like the building, granite and fair and scarred and certain, and when he stopped in front of me he neither loomed nor softened.
He just looked at me with the steady gray patience of a man who'd spent forty years catching falling people.
"You're about to do a stupid thing," he said. "You're about to put that boy on your ledger."
I let my face go to the stillness I wear right before I end a negotiation, fingers laced, nothing moving. "I have a very accurate ledger, Mr. Voss."
"I know it. " A corner of his mouth moved.
"That's the problem with you and Julian both.
Your ledgers are accurate. They're just kept in the wrong currency.
" He turned and leaned beside me against the workbench, both of us facing out at the dark bike floor like men at a railing watching weather come in.
"You didn't hex my pup, you didn't sell the firm, and you didn't engineer a grid failure to bury a woman alive in the dark and run out a clock on forty packs' freedom.
" His voice never rose; if anything it dropped lower and got more certain, the way the floor gets certain under your feet.
"You're the one stopping it. You're the only one who read the page.
Vivienne Ashwell put Wren on that apron, not you.
All you did was give him something worth standing on it for. "
No priest had ever offered me absolution, and I'd have had no idea what to do with one.
This was something plainer, a father telling me the math, and the math was correct, and the relief went through me warm and almost unbearable, like the heat that rolls off a shifter's skin when he stands too close.
"He's nineteen," I said.
"He's pack. " Dane pushed off the bench. "We don't get to choose who runs toward us, Sloane. We only get to be worth it. " He paused. "You're worth it. Go win, so it stays true."
I didn't trust my voice, so I gave him the only word I knew was load-bearing. "On the record," I said. "Thank you."
"Bring my boys home," he said. "All three.
And you. That's four flights I'm waiting on.
" He nodded at the high dark window, toward the runway string we couldn't see from here but both knew was strung out there in the cold.
"Three flashes when you're clear and coming back. We'll have the lights warm."
Three flashes. Coming home. I filed it the way I file the clause that's going to matter later, though I didn't know yet how much it would.
---
The goodbyes were short because Grant wouldn't let them run long, and I was grateful, because the long kind has never been something I'm built for.
Hollis came out onto the apron with his flask and his deadpan grandpa face and pressed the flask into my hand.
"Cheap whiskey," he said. "For courage or for the cold.
Whichever lies to you better. " When I tried to give it back he closed my fingers around it the way Cady had closed hers on Wren's chest. "Keep it.
Bring it back empty. That's a contract you can sign. "
"I'll bill you for the refill," I said, and his eyes crinkled, and that was Hollis handled, which was a mercy, because the back of my throat had started doing something I had no use for.
Cady I hugged. I don't hug. I hugged her hard, the sat phone awkward between us, and she said into my ear, fast and fierce, "I've got comms. Whole way.
You're not off the grid this time, you hear me?
I'm the grid. Anything moves on you, I see the glamour before it gets a face.
I'm right here on this phone, the second you need me.
" She pulled back and gripped my shoulders.
"You come home. There's a chess game I started with Omar that I refuse to lose by default. "
"He'd let you win," I said.
"He would, the bastard," she said, "and I'd never forgive him. " She was crying, and she didn't bother to hide it. "Go."
I went up the cargo steps to Wren's cot one last time.
He was asleep, or close to it, his breath even now, the gray gone faintly warmer.
I didn't wake him. Because I am not a woman who knows how to say things out loud, I laid the back of two fingers against the blanket over his good shoulder and held them there a moment, the way you sign a document nobody else will ever see.
"We're coming back," I told him, quiet enough that only the dark heard it. "And when we do, you're going to be insufferable about all of this, and I'm going to let you."
Then I went down to the plane.
---
The turboprop sat on the cracked tarmac with its props ticking, an old workhorse the club kept for cargo that couldn't drive, and I stood at the bottom of its little fold-down stairs and could not make my foot find the first step.
My body had simply stopped taking instructions, the decision wrenched clean out of my hands.
I had flown before — depositions in other cities, a deal in Frankfurt once that I'd white-knuckled the whole way with a redline brief in my lap I never read a word of.
I carry a frank, well-documented terror of being thirty thousand feet up inside a machine I cannot reason with, cannot cross-examine, cannot read the clause of, because you cannot litigate physics.
This machine was older and smaller and louder than any I'd ever let myself be sealed inside, and it was about to take me up into the cold clear dark away — away from the one place in six years that my nervous system had agreed, against all my training, was safe.