CHAPTER 40
Sloane
◆
The runway light string came up out of the dark in three slow flashes, and I stopped breathing for the length of all three.
One. Two. Three. Amber dots strung across black wet tarmac, blinking on, off, on, off, on, then steady.
All clear. Home. I was pressed to Grant's back with my arms locked around his ribs and the brass round riding warm in my coat pocket against my hip, and I felt the signal in my chest before my eyes finished reading it, the way I'd learned to feel everything about these men first and explain it to myself second.
The wolf in him went easy under my hands. I felt that too.
"Hollis," Grant said, flat, into the comm. "Three flashes. You sentimental old bastard."
The string flashed once more, deliberate, like a wink, and held.
We came down the apron under the last of the day, four bikes in loose diamond, Omar out front because Omar was always out front when we were coming home, Julian sweeping behind, and the great hangar door already rolling back on its track with that long iron groan I would have known in my sleep, in a coffin, in another life.
Warm light spilled across the cracked tarmac and met us.
Chrome under work-lights. The smell of cold jet fuel and machine oil and, threaded through it, the percolator already going.
There it is, I thought. A place I would know in the dark by the way the door sounds when it opens. For thirty-two years I had worked to keep that true of nowhere on earth, and here it was anyway.
They let me get myself off the bike and stood close enough to catch me if I was lying about being fine.
I was lying a little. Two days since the vote, twelve since the city, and my whole body felt like a brief I'd over-argued.
But I got my boots on the tarmac and stood up straight, because the door of Hangar 7 was open and full of people, and the first one through it was small and fast and pink-streaked, and Cady hit me at a dead run.
"You won," she said into my neck, and her arms were so tight I lost the breath I'd just found. "You absolute terrifying woman, you won."
"The duress argument won," I said, into her hair. "I just read it out loud."
"Shut up. You won. " She pulled back, eyes wet, and held my face in both hands like she was checking it was still attached.
She could see things the rest of us couldn't, glamours and lies and the shimmer of borrowed years.
She looked at me now and I watched her decide nothing was hiding behind my face.
Whatever she saw made her laugh and cry at once.
"No ozone," she said, her thumbs tracing my cheekbones like she was reading me by touch.
"No bay leaf clinging to your collar, none of that sweet-rot the coven left in the air around you for weeks. You smell like rain and that's it. It's over, Sloane. It's actually over."
Behind her the rest of them came on. Dane Voss filled the doorway the way mountains fill a window, granite and gray and scarred, and he didn't hug me, because Dane didn't, but he put one heavy hand on my shoulder and held it there until I looked up, and he said, "You gave forty packs their law back.
I've been alpha thirty years and I never managed that.
" His voice did something rough at the end.
"You're pack now. Whether you signed anything or not. "
"I read the clause," I said, because it was all I had.
"I know you did. " His mouth moved, almost a smile. "We heard. Cady played the recording four times. Hollis cried into a carburetor."
"I did not," Hollis said, materializing at Dane's elbow with a flask already out and the lid already off.
Old as a barn, deadpan as a grave. He pressed the flask into my hand without asking, the way he'd been doing since the first lockdown night when I was a stranger and a liability and a problem he hadn't decided to like yet.
"To the lady lawyer," he said, loud enough for the whole hangar, "who read the one page nobody else would, and stole a coven's confession, and didn't die. Drink, Counsel. That's an order from the only man here who outranks the alpha."
I drank. Cheap whiskey, going down like a struck match, exactly as terrible as I remembered. I'd missed it so much I had to look at the chrome for a second so nobody saw my eyes.
"Where's Wren?" I asked, when I could.
"Here, here, I'm here. " And there he was, the youngest of them, pushing through, too thin still and moving careful on the left side where the warlock's working had nearly emptied him out on a foreign perimeter a lifetime ago.
But he was upright and grinning and whole again, color back in a face that had gone gray as ash the last time I'd seen it.
He stopped in front of me and didn't seem to know what to do with his hands, so I solved it.
I pulled the kid into a hug, which was not a thing I did, and he made a startled noise and then hung on.
"You scared the hell out of me," I told him.
"You scared the hell out of everyone," Wren said. "Dane said you walked into a coven Vault with a steel pen."
"I had a drive too."
"With a steel pen, Mercer. " That was Omar, coming up on my other side, sandy hair falling forward, chipped tooth showing in a grin that had been my fixed point through three countries.
He shoved the hair back. "Don't downplay it.
She walked into the Ashwell Vault with her grandmother's pen and walked out with the deed to everyone's freedom.
That's the whole story. That's the only story. "
"It's admissible," I said. "That's the story."
He laughed, the real one, the one that started low and broke open. "God, I love it when you talk evidence."
And there, behind all of it, last because he was always last, sweeping, counting exits even now in a room where the only thing left to fear was joy, came Sable.
She was in a chair, because the hex that had been built to read like a stroke had cost her something the doctors couldn't fully give back, and she'd refused the chair for nine days at the hospital out of pure spite and then accepted it for the flight home out of pure strategy, which was so exactly Sable that I'd laughed and then had to leave the room.
Julian was pushing it. Of course Julian was pushing it.
The polished one, the diplomat, the man who'd spent thirty years pricing everything, wheeling my mentor across a hangar floor like she was the most valuable cargo he'd ever transported, which, for the record, she was.
"Sable," I said, and my voice cracked clean down the middle.
"Don't," she said. Sharp. Founding-partner sharp.
"Don't you dare cry in front of the motorcycle club, Mercer, you'll undo forty years of me convincing them women lawyers are made of titanium.
" But she was holding her arms up, and I went down on my knees on the cold concrete and let my mentor hold me, the woman who'd warned me with the last clear sentence before the hex took her down, the woman who'd come back from the dead to testify in a chair because she'd be damned if she'd let them win.
"You finished it," she whispered. "The thing I started. The thing I couldn't finish. " Her hand was thin and cold on the back of my head. "I taught you to read the clause."
"You taught me everything."
"No. " She pulled back to look at me, glacier-clear, the way she looked at opposing counsel right before she ended them.
"I taught you to read the clause. The rest, you taught yourself.
The part where you read it and then do something that costs you.
That part was never mine to teach. " She glanced past me, at the three men arranged loose around us, at Grant's stillness and Omar's hum and Julian's hand still resting on the back of her chair, and something moved across her face that on anyone else I'd have called approval and on Sable I knew was love.
"I see you found people who read the same clause," she said.
"Good. About time. I was getting tired of being the only one. "
---
They wanted to talk about my future, of course.
Everyone did. It came out over the next hour, in the galley, around the battered farm table with the percolator ticking and the propane flame burning its small blue, while the storm-tail wind off the apron rattled the hangar's steel truss and somebody, probably Wren, kept the chess game nobody ever finished half-set in the corner.
Sable laid it out like a brief, because that was how Sable made anything bearable.
Halloran Thorne was finished as it was. Preston Thorne was disbarred and indicted and would spend the foreseeable future learning what the inside of his own clauses felt like.
The Concord had voted to keep its self-governance by a margin that would be a footnote in shifter law for a century.
And there was a partnership on the table for me, rebuilt, my name beside Sable's, the practice scrubbed clean.
"Or," Sable said, watching me, "there isn't."
"There isn't," I agreed.
I'd thought about it on the flight home, with Grant asleep against the bulkhead and his hand loosely closed around my ankle even unconscious, with Omar's map open on his knee tracing the route home in ink, with Julian across the aisle, his father's watch silent in his breast pocket, finally stopped.
"I don't want the forty-first floor," I said.
"I don't want a corner office in a glass tower where the lights die one at a time.
I want to do what you built the firm to do, before they bought it.
A practice that reads the clause for the packs that can't afford to.
The land-poor ones. The ones a coven could buy if nobody was looking.
" I laid my palm flat on the table, fingers spread over the scarred wood, feeling the percolator's tick come up through it.
"On my terms. My clients, my name, my clause. I'll keep an office wherever, but I'll keep the bikes within range of it. " I looked up. "Within ninety minutes."
There was a silence in the galley that had weight to it.