Page 11 of Crow’s Shadow

“Darkwater?” I frown. “That’s Renner’s stretch of road.”

Stryker snorts. “So she drove into a supplier’s backyard at dawn for kicks?”

“No. She must have found something.” I don’t know what. That’s the part with teeth in it. Shadow found something in that book of hers, something she didn’t bring to me, and she didn’t bring it to me because last night I made real sure she knew the shut door was the only thing I’d ever give her. “She doesn’t spook and she doesn’t wander. If she drove out there alone and quiet, she had a reason, and it’s sitting in a book none of us can read but her.”

Stryker leans forward. “You’re saying she went to run down a bookkeeping error. By herself. At dawn. The morning after some ghost cornered her in our own lot.”

“I’m saying that’s exactly what she’d do.”

Because it is. Because she’s loyal to that book past all sense, past her own safety, and because I spent last night making her feel like the one thing she’s sure of, her place in this club, was being taken away from her. And if she went looking for answers because of me, I handed whoever is out there exactly what they needed.

Somebody else set the trap, but I’m the one who sent her out into the dark alone to walk into it.

“Alright.” Loco’s voice cuts the room. “Everybody breathe. We don’t know she’s in trouble. We know she’s somewhere she shouldn’t be, being stubborn, which is a Tuesday.” He looks at me. “You. You’re wound like a spring and it’s making me nervous. She’s a smart girl. Odds are she’s already halfway home with a chip on her shoulder.”

“Odds are,” I agree, and I don’t believe that either.

“But.” Loco stands. “We don’t leave it to odds. Grim, Crow, take the county road to Darkwater, find that address, find her car. Byte, you keep working the phone. Get Nova to call every woman she knows and every diner on Ruin Road. Anybody hears from her, I want to know inside a minute.” He plants his hands on the table. “Probably nothing. We treat it like something anyway. That’s how the something never happens.”

Chairs scrape. The room moves.

And under my sternum the slack line gives one small tug, faint, wrong, a pull toward the west road, toward the black water, and I’ve spent two decades not feeling things and I feel that, and it terrifies me more than any gun ever has.

We take the hearse.

You don’t drive out to a place where your girl might have left blood on the floor in a pickup. The long black car is built to carry whatever waits at the end of the road. I don’t look too hard at the empty deck behind the seats, and I try not to think about whether it stays empty on the ride home.

Grim rides shotgun and doesn’t talk, which is one of the better things about Grim.

The county road unspools gray and wet through the pines, the river showing black on our left, and I know this road. I’ve driven it at three in the morning with something wrapped in plastic where Grim’s boots are now. I know the bend where the water goes deep and slow and keeps what you give it. Shadow knows it too. She’s written a dozen drops to this exact stretch. She’d have driven out here reading the river like a page in her own book, unafraid, because she’s never once been afraid of the dead.

It’s the living she should have been watching.

“You’re doing the thing,” Grim says. First words in twenty miles.

“What thing.”

“The jaw thing. You do it when you’re about to kill somebody but you haven’t picked who yet.”

I unclench it.

“You want to tell me,” Grim says, watching the road, not me, giving me the mercy of not being looked at, “why you’re driving this car like it owes you money? Over the bookkeeper?”

The wipers drag. The black car eats the miles.

“No,” I say.

“Didn’t think so.” And that’s the end of it, because Grim doesn’t push. Now I’m the one being read, and I hate it, and I let him have it, because there’s no man alive I’d rather have in this seat driving into a thing I can’t see the shape of yet.

The boat repair shows up right where I knew it would. Corrugated steel, a dead marina sign, the whole place squatting at the water’s edge.

No cars in the lot.

Grim sees it the same second I do, and his hand drops to his piece. “Where’s her car?”

“I don’t know.” I’m already out before the hearse has fully stopped, gun up, moving on the building, every rule I’ve taught a prospect about clearing a structure slow gone out of my head, because the slack line in my chest is screaming now, hauling me at that open side door hanging off its one hinge.

Inside is one gutted room. Gray light. A single wooden chair dead center on the concrete.