Page 36 of Crow’s Shadow

Not anymore.

Chapter fourteen

SHADOW

Bones has a curved needle in my scalp and a curse under his breath. The fluorescent light over the back-room table is the brightest thing I have seen in four days.

“Hold still. You keep flinching and this closes up crooked.”

“It already hurts crooked.”

“It’ll hurt worse if I redo it.” He draws the thread through and knots it, gentle for a man the size of a door. “Split lip’s mending on its own. Ankle’s raw where the chain sat, but nothing’s broken.” He sits back and studies me, and there is a question in his eyes he is too kind to ask. “You want to tell me how a four-day-old scalp wound looks two days along?”

“No.”

“Didn’t think so.” He cuts the thread. “Fifteen years I’ve patched this club. I have never once watched skin knit the way yours is knitting. Fast. The wrong kind of fast.”

“Maybe you got good at your job.”

“Maybe.” He does not believe it. Neither do I. I feel the cut drawing shut under his hands, warm, itching, some new thing in my blood hauling the edges together. Renner named it in the dark. A witch mends faster once she wakes. My body knew what I was before my head was ready to admot it. Now, there’s no pretending I am anything else.

The door has not moved in an hour. Neither has Crow. He’s planted beside it as if anyone who wants me has to go through him first.

“You going to breathe down my neck the whole night,” Bones says, not turning. “Or let me work.”

“I’m letting you work.”

“You’re looming.”

“Same thing tonight.”

Bones snorts and packs his kit. He sets a warm hand on my shoulder, brief. “Rest. Water, sleep, no arguments.” He points the roll of tape at Crow without looking at him. “She heals faster than any of us, and she still needs the dark and the quiet to do it. Don’t be the reason she doesn’t.”

“Out, Bones,” Crow says.

“Going.” At the door he pauses beside Crow and drops his voice to a thing meant for one man. I hear it anyway. I hear everything now. “Whatever’s got into the pair of you, brother, the whole club can feel it in the walls. Tread careful.”

Then he is gone, and the noise of the clubhouse comes muffled through the wall.

Loco’s voice comes down the hall a moment later, low, wanting his report, and Crow’s jaw works.

“Two minutes,” he tells me. “He needs the shape of tonight out of me before it goes cold. Two minutes. Then I’m back.”

“Go,” I say. “I’m not going anywhere. Not this time.”

He goes, and the door swings. Nova is through it before it settles, as though she’s been waiting on the other side for Crow to leave. She sits on the edge of the cot and takes my hand. The second her skin meets mine, a low hum runs up my arm. The same current I’ve felt from her my whole life, except now I know what it is.

“You know,” she says. Not a question.

“I know what I am now. What you are. All of you.” My throat works. “You knew. The whole time. You let me believe I was the one strange thing in a house full of ordinary men.”

“We didn’t know how to tell you.” Her usual easy expression is gone. “We weren’t sure you were one of us until Renner reached for you. Being wanted like that, by a man like that, it wakes the thing in you. It woke you.” Her hand tightens on mine. “I’m sorry, Shadow. For every half-answer. For the beer I put in your hand instead of the truth.”

“Later.” I cannot carry her sorry and my own in the same hour. “You tell me all of it later. Every part.”

“Every part,” she promises. She kisses my hair and rises, and at the door she stops. “He’s coming back. I can feel him in the hall.” A pause, weighed. “Whatever’s between you two now, it’s loud. Be careful with it.”

She slips out past him as he comes in, and it is the two of us again and the low lamp and the wire strung tight between my chest and his.