CHAPTER 22
Omar
◆
I'd been dressed for an hour, humming under my breath and running roads in my head that we hadn't reached yet, which is the whole job and has been since I was old enough to be useful at it.
While the turboprop ate the last black miles toward the crossing, I had the map open across my knees, the soft paper one I'd inked over in my own hand for fifteen years until it went limp as cloth at the folds.
I ran my thumb down the pencil line I'd drawn at the refuel strip: two-lane through the foothills, a fuel stop, a contact, then the sister-club's field on the far side.
The line home, even though home was a thousand miles behind us and getting farther by the minute.
Tonight my whole mind sat on the way through, the road that carried us forward across the line and into whatever waited past it.
Sloane came up the cabin still pulling her hair into that low twist, the steel pen pinned through it, and the smell of her hit me before she sat.
Expensive shampoo. Sleep, finally, a little.
And under it, way under, the thing I'd been trying not to name for two days — that she'd started to smell like trust. Like she'd quit bracing.
I didn't tell her. You don't tell a woman that her body has decided to believe you before her mouth has.
You just put it in your pocket and carry it careful.
"Border," she said, not asking so much as confirming. She read my face like I read a road.
"Border," I agreed. "Easy one, on paper. Julian's papers are art. We roll up, we smile, the marshal stamps us through as cargo crew, we drive ninety minutes, we sleep somewhere that isn't a plane. " I tapped the map. "All downhill from here, sweetheart."
She gave me a look that could've stripped paint. "You only say things are downhill when you've already counted the cliffs."
God, I liked her. "That a complaint?"
"It's a deposition, and you're under oath. You hum when you're scared."
I hadn't even noticed I'd been doing it.
I made myself stop, which is its own kind of tell, and folded the map away into my jacket where it sat against my ribs like a second heartbeat.
A pencil line can't be jammed or rerouted or talked into lying to you the way a man can.
People are the variable, and a glamoured face is a person somebody else wrote.
---
The strip on the far side wasn't lit for us. Julian set us down on a dark apron with a single sodium lamp leaning over a chain fence, and the second the door cracked the smell came up and grabbed me by the back of the skull.
Kerosene, same as home, that cold sweet bite of jet fuel and machine oil I'd know in my sleep, the smell of every field I'd ever loved.
Laid over it, though, was a diesel that ran wrong, heavier and sulfured, foreign trucks idling somewhere past the fence, and threaded all the way through the whole of it came cold resinous pine off a black ridge I couldn't see.
It was my own kitchen with every drawer moved one to the left.
My wolf put its ears up at it. This isn't ours, it said, but it's pretending to be.
Grant came down the steps behind me, gone quiet the way he goes quiet, counting the dark. "Three ways off this apron," he said under his breath. "Gate, fence gap east, the way we flew in. Stay on me."
"Stay on the map," I said, easy, "and you'll stay on me. I'm the one who knows where the cliffs are."
His mouth came within a hair of a smile and stalled there, and from Grant I'll take the near miss every time.
The contact had a panel van and a cigarette and a face I'd seen in a photo Cady forwarded — a freight handler the sister-club used, paper-mover, knew the marshals, took a cut and asked no questions.
He lifted a hand. Lifted it slow and friendly.
And everything in me said yes, that's the guy, get in the van, and the sat phone in my hip pocket buzzed against my leg like a hornet.
I answered without breaking stride. "Talk to me, Cady."
Her voice came thin and shredded through the bad connection, riding the relayed feed off the strip's one camera that she'd patched into from a thousand miles away in a dark loft I was suddenly homesick for. "Omar. Omar, don't get in the van."
"Why am I not getting in the van."
"His face. " She was breathing fast. Cady never breathes fast. "Omar, I can see it. There's a shimmer on him. Right at the jaw, where it doesn't sit on the bone. He's wearing somebody. That's not your handler. That's a glamour."
Here's the thing about Cady that the coven never figured into their math: she's touched. She can see the shine on a glamour the way the rest of us see a wet road. Two weeks ago that was a party trick. Right now it was the only reason I didn't walk my whole family into a van.
I kept my feet moving — you never stop, stopping tells them you know — and I let my voice go warm and stupid and loud.
"Hey, man, gimme a sec, my girl's got a thing about the manifest. " I turned half toward Sloane like I was checking with her, and under the turn I breathed in deep, dragging the night across the back of my throat.
There. Cady was right. Under the cigarette and the cheap cologne, where a man should smell like a man — like sweat and diesel and lunch — there was nothing.
A hole in the air. And rimming the hole, faint as frost, ozone and crushed bay leaf and something sweet gone rotten underneath.
Coven. The smell of magic doing a man's costume.
My stomach went to water. I almost put her in that van. I had her two steps off a glamoured mouth and I'd been humming.
"It's him," I said, just for Sloane, just for the wolf-ears around me. "Cady's right. It's a face. Back to the plane is burned, he'll have it covered. We walk to the fence gap east and we do it now, slow, like we're bored."
Grant swallowed every question whole, which is the gift of him. He just shifted his weight to put his body between the van and Sloane and said, "On me," and started us drifting east along the fence like four people with all the time in the world.
The glamour watched us go. I felt it — the wrongness turning to track us, the friendly hand going still. He knew we knew. The cigarette dropped.
"Run," I said.
---
We ran.
Here's what nobody tells you about being the route guy: when it goes bad, everybody looks at you.
Grant can put a round through the problem and Julian can write a check that makes it disappear and Cady can spot it coming from a loft a thousand miles off, but the second the plan breaks, three people I'd die for turn their heads to me and ask, with their whole bodies, which way.
And if I pick wrong, if I take a turn that dead-ends at a fence or read the dark a half-second slow, the one who pays for it won't be me. It'll be her. It always would be her.
So I didn't let myself think. Thinking is for the map. In the dark you go to scent and shape and the line you drew before you needed it.
The fence gap east put us into a freight lot, stacked containers black against a blacker sky, and behind us I heard the van engine turn over and another behind it — two, there were two, the glamour had friends — and Beckett's people don't bring one car.
I took us left between the containers, into the narrow where a van couldn't follow, and the pine came down hard off the ridge and I used it. Followed it.
Wind off high ground means a slope, and a slope on the far side of this lot meant the access road I'd inked at the refuel strip, the two-lane through the foothills, my line, drawn in my own hand on paper no coven could ever reach through a wire.
"There's a vehicle," Julian said behind me, not even winded, the bastard. "The contact's van. Keys are in it. I watched him leave them."
"Then we steal the steal," I said. "Go."
It was parked nose-out past the last container, our handler's panel van, the real handler's, the man whose face was on somebody else's bones tonight.
I didn't think about where the real man was.
You can't carry that and run at the same time.
Sloane was already in, Grant slamming the side door, Julian dropping behind the wheel because he drives like he does everything, smooth and overpriced.
I went shotgun with the map already out and the penlight in my teeth.
"Out of the lot, hard right," I said around the light. "Don't take the lit road, take the next one, the gravel."
"The gravel goes nowhere on the GPS," Julian said.
"The GPS is a liar and so is whatever face that thing is wearing.
Paper, Julian. Trust the paper. " I jabbed the line.
"Gravel climbs to the two-lane in two miles.
Two-lane's got my contact's field at the far end.
The coven can hack a phone. They can hack a marshal.
They cannot hack a road I drew with a pencil in a fuel stop in the dark. Right. Right. Now."
He took the gravel.
---
Behind us the headlights came on like eyes opening.
Two sets, then a third, spreading across the lit road we hadn't taken, hunting.
I watched them in the side mirror lose us for one beat, two, while we ran dark up a gravel grade with the pine closing in on both sides and the diesel smell of the field falling away behind, and that's when the old terror climbed up my throat and sat on my tongue.
I started humming. Couldn't help it. Some tune Hollis was always butchering on the percolator radio.
"You're doing it again," Sloane said from the dark behind me, her voice low and stripped of the courtroom edge it usually carried.
"Yeah. " I didn't pretend. There wasn't room in the van to pretend, and I was too scared to be charming, which is its own kind of nakedness for a guy like me. "I'm doing it again."
"What is it. " Still quiet. "The real answer."