Page 21 of Crow’s Shadow

“Boss can come tell me himself.”

“He will.” Church Shoes straightens. “He always does.”

The bread is stale enough to hurt going down and I eat all of it anyway, because Bad Knee was right about one thing, hunger makes you stupid, and stupid is a luxury I cannot afford in here. I drink half the water and cap the rest. Saving half of everything has become a habit. A body that plans is a body still in the fight, and I’m still in the fight, chained to the floor of a dead cannery with a locked room behind my ribs and no key.

I’m wiping the last of the can with the last of the crust when I hear it.

The good shoes. Slow, even, expensive on the wet floor, and the whole building seems to hold its breath around the sound of them. Out past my door the day guards go straight and silent. The sick electric hum of the one working light cuts out. He likes the dark, my keeper. He likes what a room becomes when you take the light out of it.

The door opens and Sy Renner carries a chair in with him, the way he did the first day. He sets it a careful distance from my chain and sits.

“You have your color back,” he says. “Good. The first day you were gray as the walls, and it did not suit you.” He crosses one leg over the other and folds his hands in his lap, an old man at ease. “Maren went gray like that when she was angry. All the blood in her went somewhere else, somewhere useful. I used to know how much trouble I was in by the color of her face.” A soft, private smile. “You are in a great deal of trouble right now, if it runs in the blood.”

“Stop saying her name like you own it.”

“I knew her eleven years, Shadow. I am one of two people left alive who knew her at all, and the other one does not remember her, because the other one was five.” He tips his head. “You. In case the arithmetic escaped you.”

My face stays blank. A lifetime of practice has taught me how to hide everything. So, I give him what he’s given me for three days. Nothing.

Holding it there takes everything I have.

“You blew the lights,” Renner says, gentle, changing tack, going around a thing instead of through it. “Three nights ago. Would you like to talk about it, or shall we keep pretending it was the wiring?”

“Old building. Old wires. Surge.”

“Mm.” He is enjoying this, letting me have the lie so he can take it back slow. “A surge. Except the power to this building runs off a generator my men fuel by hand, and it did not so much as cough. And a surge does not choose. It does not blow forty lamps and leave the bulb in the corridor burning. It does not, above all else, wait.” He leans forward, elbows to knees. “It waited, Shadow. It held until I called you your mother’s daughter and something moved in you with no name on it, and then it came out of you all at once, because nobody ever taught you how to let it out slow. Nobody taught you anything. That’s the point.”

“You’re talking in circles. Say the thing or get out.”

“The thing.” He savors it on his tongue. “The thing is you are a witch. As your mother was. As her mother was, back and back, a line of women running behind you. It is not a figure of speech, it is not madness, and you already know it is true, because three nights ago you reached down inside yourself in a room with no switch and you turned off the sun.”

The word sits in the stale air between us.

Witch.

It should be laughable. In the mouth of any other man it would be, and I would file him under lunatic and go back to counting exits.

But I felt it leave me.

And I think of Nova, folding onto the couch and putting a beer in my hand before I knew I was thirsty. Ember’s fingers finding the salt a breath before Ariea reaches for it. The women moving around each other without looking, without asking, always knowing where the others will be. A thing I have watched my whole life and called love because I never had a truer word for it.

An hour after the fence, I stood in the chapel and asked Nova about it. Her easy face went careful. Her laugh landed a half-beat late.

I let her lie to me.

By then, I was tired to the bone of all the things nobody would say.

Renner watches me get there. He has been watching me the whole time, and he sees the second it lands.

“There,” he says softly. “You have felt it in them. The women in your club. The way they move. You thought it was closeness.” His mouth curves. “It is closeness, of a kind. It is what my people call a coven, though the women rarely know to give it a name. They find each other. They always have, scattered, ignorant, buried in a funeral home full of dead men and gun oil. It makes no difference. Eventually they gather and that it is why they cannot be allowed to. A witch alone and unaware is a candle in a drawer. A witch who finds her sisters and learns her own name becomes something else entirely.” His eyes cool. “Something they come to notice.”

“Noticed by who?”

The question is out before I can weigh it, and I see it pleases him, and I see something else too, quick, there and gone, a flick of his eyes toward the door and the dark past it. A man reaching for a word he did not mean to reach for.

“By people far older and far more patient than I am,” he says, and for the first time in three days the warmth goes clean out of him, and what is left underneath is a man afraid of something. “People who would never sit and talk with you the way I do. Who do not collect. They tidy.” He wets his lips. “Pray you never give them cause to notice you, sweetheart. Pray harder you never learn how close they have stood your whole life, and for how long.”

“You’re scared of them?”