Page 1 of Crow’s Shadow

Chapter one

CROW

Three in the morning has a smell, and Grimstone wears it like a second skin, diesel, cold clay, and the sweet chemical rot the vents never fully carry off.

I stand in front of the open door and watch the flame take him.

He was a courier. Skimmed off a shipment, figured the miles between here and Nohaven bought him room to breathe. Loco disagreed. Now, the courier is in the fire. Fat spits in the flame. Something in his chest gives with a wet pop, and the fire takes the sound.

Waiting is the part nobody wants. Prospects think the work is knives, heat and the wet sounds a man makes at the end. It isn’t. It’s patience. A body takes two hours if you want nothing left worth naming. Longer if he carried weight, and the courier carried none, so I have ninety minutes alone with the roar and the orange light painting the block walls the color of a wound.

The Prowlers built this place before I patched in. Mortuary out front, beige carpet, soft lighting and a binder of laminated hymns for the families who come in daylight and never once wonder what runs beneath their grief. Cemetery out back, six acres of it, headstones in tidy rows and a tree line past the last of them where the ground goes soft and private. Between the two sits the crematory, cinderblock and steel, the black heart of the whole operation. People bring us their dead. We bring the club its living.

Through the far door is the shop. Buck keeps the books, but the coffins are mine to load, and loading is where the real trade sleeps. We build them ourselves, every box, oak, pine and the cheap laminate for the county jobs. Good work, honest joinery, the kind Cannon’s people back in Virginia taught the first of us forty years ago. We kept the craft, because a coffin built by hand draws no eyes at the border, and a coffin with a false floor draws no eyes at all. Rifles ride under the dead. Powder rides in the pillows. Some grieving family ships their grandmother to Idaho and never learns she traveled with forty pounds of someone else’s future tucked beneath her spine.

The gauge holds at sixteen hundred. I thumb the log, note the time in the careful shorthand Bones likes even for the jobs no coroner will ever read. The courier is past pain now, past name, past the animal panic he wore when Grim walked him through the door. Soon he’ll be ash and the stubborn white knots of bone the heat can’t finish, and I’ll run those through the cremulator until he’s sand, and the sand goes in the river, or the flowerbeds, or the consecrated ground out back if Mercy is feeling holy about it. Fitting, some nights. A man who died for the club, feeding it.

I feel nothing. Not a boast. Feeling left me a long time ago, or I left it, and either way the absence is a tool, the sharpest one I own. A cleaner who feels makes mistakes. A cleaner who feels leaves a thumbprint, a hesitation, a body half-done because his gut turned on him. Mine doesn’t turn. Hasn’t in in years. Dead men don’t bother me, and the living rarely manage it. I am the last cold room a man passes through, and I keep the temperature low on purpose.

The door behind me opens without a knock, and I know who it is before the air changes, because only one person in Grimstone moves without sound and still lets me hear her.

Shadow.

She doesn’t speak. She never speaks first. She crosses the concrete with the Ledger held to her chest like a hymnal, the big black book with its cracked spine and its pages full of a code only she can read, and she settles onto the stool by the cold table where I lay the tools. She opens the book. She waits.

I don’t look at her.

Looking at her is a thing I do not do. Call it discipline. Call it the one rule I wrote for myself and never broke, in a club with no rules but respect. She logs the dead. Every body I burn, every box I load, every name Loco wants gone, she writes it down in her small sure hand, and the club sleeps easy because Shadow remembers what the rest of us need to forget. She is the memory of our sins. And I do not look at the memory of my sins, because I live inside one of them, on a page she has never read, from a night twenty years gone.

“Courier,” she says. Not a question. Her voice sits low and roughened, a little torn at the edges, like she keeps it in a drawer and only takes it out for me.

“Courier,” I agree.

“Name?”

“Didn’t ask.”

Her pen stops. “You always ask.”

“Not tonight.”

“Loco know that?”

I finally look at her hand instead of her face. “You writing the book or my fucking confession?”

“Depends which one gets you to answer.”

Pen scratch. The fire roars. Two words and a scratch and the heat between us.

She sits close enough for me to catch her under the chemical stink, rain, and something green and wild, out of place in a room built for endings. My body knows she’s there before the rest of me permits the thought. That’s the part I hate. Twenty years of teaching myself not to want what grew up under my nose and one breath of her still puts my teeth together hard enough to ache. Twenty-five years old and grown up in the cracks of this club, underfoot and overlooked, a girl nobody claimed and nobody sent away. The women fold her in. The men forget she’s there. Two decades I have spent making sure I am one of the men who forgets, and I have failed at it every single night she walks through this door, and I will never let her see the failing.

Because I know what I am to her. I am not a fool. I feel her eyes track me across the room, I have felt them since she was old enough to know the shape of want. Shadow thinks I don’t notice. She thinks her wanting is a quiet thing. It is the loudest sound in any room we share, louder than the fire, and I burn it down the way I burn everything else, because the day I turn around and meet her eyes is the day I have to tell her why I can’t.

The gauge drops. I kill the burner, crack the door wider, let the roar fall to a tick and a hiss. Ninety minutes gone. I don’t remember them. Time bends in here, folds and thins, the only clock I trust is the one in my chest, which never once speeds up.

I rake the remains forward. White grit, teeth, the curve of a hip and half a skull, honeycombed by heat. Bone clicks against steel as I drag it toward me. Shadow watches without flinching. She has watched a hundred of these. The first time, she was nineteen and Loco sent her to learn the book from old Loki, and she stood right where she stands now and did not look away, and I hated how much I respected it.

The pieces go to the cremulator. The grind fills the room, a sound like the world clearing its throat, and when it dies the courier fits inside a plastic bag the size of a flour sack. Five pounds of man. Everything he was, down to five pounds, and I have never held a bag of it and felt anything past the weight.