Page 40 of Crow’s Shadow

Grim does not flinch from it. “I saw him vanish. Two feet in front of me. Gone, then back. The dead lamps came apart over their heads and not a piece of it touched them.” He looks at Loco. “I don’t have a word for it. But I’m not going to stand here and say I didn’t see it.”

Loco has not said a word. Loco, who has an answer for everything, who has steered this club through more blood than most me could stomach, is staring at Shadow as though the ground has moved under him. He sent a boy to bury a woman twenty years ago and never knew what the woman was. He never knew what he had been keeping at the edge of his own club all this time, folding her in, feeding her, handing her the book.

“Shadow.” Loco’s voice is rough. “Is it true. What they’re saying. What you did out there.”

Every man in the club looks at her at once. The unseen girl, seen now, standing in the cold in my jacket with her chin up the way her mother’s came up, Renner said, when she was afraid and pretending not to be.

“Yes.” Clear. No flinch. “I don’t understand all of it yet. But yes. It’s true. And it’s not only me.” She lets it sit. “Ask your women, Loco. Ask them how they always know. It was never luck kept this club alive forty years. It was us. You’ve been protected your whole lives by the thing you’re all standing here afraid of.”

The ring comes apart into noise. Men talking over each other, Buck saying something about his wife, Storm trying to hold the peace, Stryker’s voice cutting over all of it.

“You hear her?” Stryker has both hands up, working the fear like a man who found the crack he was hunting for. “Witches. In our own house. Playing us forty years, by her own mouth. And you want to ride on Renner’s mountain to get back a book she says she can’t even fully read.”

“Enough.”

I don’t shout it. I step into the middle, next to the coffin and the body of the kid who sold her. I put myself between Shadow and the whole ring. The dead murmur up behind their door as though they feel it turning.

“I broke the code. I’ll own it in front of God and this club. I went into that cannery for a woman who isn’t patched. I’d do it again if she was on the far side of hell. Every man here who wouldn’t cross the same line for the one thing he can’t live without is a colder man than I am. And I burn people for a living.”

Nobody speaks.

“You want to name what she is? Fine. She’s a witch. So are the women you go home to. So’s yours, Buck. So’s Ariea, Hawk. The thing keeping this club lucky, alive and one step ahead for years has been right under your noses. You never looked. Looking was never your strong suit.” I let it land. “I looked. Took me twenty years, but I looked. And I’m not going back to blind. She’s mine. I’m hers. You’ve got a problem with it, you bring it to me, not to her. And you bring it knowing what I am.”

The ring holds its breath and looks at Loco, because it always comes down to Loco. He looks at the coffin a long moment. Then at Shadow. Then at me. Whatever storm is going through him, he puts it away the way he has put away forty years of storms, and when he speaks it is the president again, iron.

“Here’s where we are. A man we work for reached into our house, turned our prospect, took our bookkeeper, copied our sins. Then he killed the prospect and dropped him at our gate to tell us he can do it again.” His look goes slow around the ring. “What I care about tonight is Renner deciding he can post a body to my door. The code says eye for an eye. So we take his eye. All of it. The war with Renner is open as of right now, and it does not close until his mountain is a hole in the ground.”

Grim shifts. Somewhere behind me Ember has come out with a blanket for Shadow. I catch the half-second Grim clocks her crossing the lot, clocks himself doing it, looks away. I file it and let it go.

“And Shadow?” Stryker will not let it lie.

“Shadow keeps the book. Same as always. If what she says is true, she’s more valuable to this club than any patch in this ring, and she stands under our protection, not our judgment. You don’t like it, there’s the road.” A beat. “Anybody riding it?”

Nobody moves. Sable stands at the clubhouse door, phone dark in her hand for once, watching. Shade drifts near Loco’s shoulder, close enough their arms almost brush. For half a breath something passes between them neither one moves on. Then it is gone. I file it with the rest.

Before they lift the box, I do the thing I would not do in front of them before. I place my hand on Lash’s folded hands, and I open the door.

He does not have much. His end was fast, a mercy Renner grants the used-up. But the dead give you what they hid in life, and what Lash hid comes up thin and guilty and clear.

A phone glowing in the dark of our own hallway. A voice on the other end, not Renner’s. Closer than Renner. A hand passing him cash behind the clubhouse, three times, over four months. And the last thing, the thing Lash carried down into the ground: the face of the one who first walked him to Renner, who fed him pieces of this club the whole fucking time and never once got caught.

The door slams shut. I come up off the coffin with my heart hammering in my chest. I look up across the ring, past Loco, past Shadow, to the clubhouse door.

Sable is standing in it. Watching me. The second my eyes hit hers, she does the same thing she did the night this all began. She smiles too wide, turns, and slips back inside where the girls are not supposed to go.

I know who betrayed us. And I am the only one who does.

Chapter sixteen

SHADOW

Dawn comes up gray over Grimstone, and for the first time in my life I do not wait in a corner for someone to tell me what I am.

I go and ask the women.

Ariea’s kitchen smells of woodsmoke and coffee, the way it has every morning I can remember, and the women are already there, as though they knew I was coming before I did, which I understand now was exactly what happened.

“Sit.” Ariea pours me a cup I did not ask for. “You’ve got questions. We’ve got twenty years of answers we weren’t allowed to give.”