Page 2 of Crow’s Shadow

“River?” she asks.

“Ground.” Loco’s orders.

“He have people?”

“Everybody has people.”

“Not you.”

The rake stops. Shadow keeps writing.

“Careful,” I tell her.

“I am.”

The courier had people, and people ask, a headstone with a false name answers better than an empty chair. We’ll drop the bag under a real casket next week when the Petersen woman goes down. Two for one hole. The club is nothing if not thrifty with the dead.

She writes it. Ground. The pen stops. And then she does the thing I brace for every night, which is nothing, which is simply sitting in the orange light with her wild green smell and her torn voice and her eyes I refuse to meet, being the one warm thing in the coldest room in Oregon.

I seal the bag. I clean the rake. I do not look at her, and the not-looking is its own kind of labor, harder than the burning, harder than anything Loco ever sends down the hall with a bag over its head.

The motion light trips outside the shop.

Not the deer light. That one is soft amber on a slow timer, tuned so the herd drifting through the graves at night doesn’t have us up at all hours. This is the hard white one Byte wired to the fence line, set high enough that four legs won’t wake it. Whatever tripped this one stands on two legs.

I move before I decide to. The bag goes on the table, the pistol comes out of my waistband, and I am at the window with my back to the block wall while Shadow slides off her stool, book closed, silent, reading me now instead of the pages. She doesn’t ask. She is smart enough not to ask.

Through the grime on the glass, I see, the lot, the roll door of the coffin shop, the fence, the black wall of the tree line. Nothing. Then something. A shape at the edge of the white light, out past the last row of stones where the ground goes soft, a man standing where no man should stand at three in the morning. Not moving. Not hiding. Watching the building the way Shadow watches me.

He is too far for a face. Too still for a drunk. He wears the dark like he had it tailored, and even across the lot I feel him clock the light he tripped and decline to care.

Nobody comes to a crematory at three in the morning. Nobody stands in a club cemetery and watches a cleaner work. The dead here do not get visitors. The dead here get us.

“Crow.” Shadow’s voice at my shoulder, low, and she has followed my eyes to the glass. “Who is he?”

“Nobody,” I say, and the word tastes like a lie, because nobody is the one thing he isn’t. Somebody stands in our graves tonight. Somebody found the single place in Grimstone we swore no one would think to look, and looked, and stayed to let us know he found it.

I thumb the hammer back.

“Lock the book in the floor. Stay inside.”

Her hand closes on my sleeve. First time she has touched me in a year. I feel it everywhere, and I hate the everywhere, but I do not shake her off.

“Be careful,” she says.

I go out into the dark to meet him. By the time I cross the lot, he’s gone. No footsteps in the wet earth. No gate moving. Nothing.

Except something sitting on the headstone where he stood.

It’s a cheap black phone, it's screen cracked across one corner.

I pick it up, the screen lights up.

DOES SHE KNOW YET?

Chapter two

SHADOW