Page 42 of Crow’s Shadow

“Okay,” I say. “Then we do this as partners, not as a cleaner and the girl he’s guarding. All of it. You don’t lock me in the floor with the book while the men ride up the mountain.”

“Shadow.”

“No. Hear what I am now.” I set the cup down. “I’m not the thing you protect anymore. I’m the thing they should be scared of. Renner spent twenty years and a war chest trying to get his hands on what’s in me, and you want to leave it in a safe room while you drive off to die on his mountain. Use me. I’m your best weapon, and I finally know it.”

For once he does not argue. For once the wall stays down.

“Say you’ve got a plan,” he says. “Because I’ve got rage and a map and not much else.”

I do have a plan. It came together while Ember’s candle burned.

“We don’t kill Sable. Not yet. A dead rat tells Renner we found her. A live rat we control is a wire straight into his hands.” I lean in. “You said she doesn’t know you made her. So we feed her. We let her carry Renner a lie. We tell her, through the club, through whatever channel she thinks is secret, exactly when and how the Prowlers are coming for the mountain. Wrong day. Wrong road. Wrong everything. She carries it straight to Renner. He sets his whole trap for a strike we never make. We come the other way while he watches the wrong door.”

Crow is quiet a moment, and then something moves in his face I have almost never seen there. Respect. Not the grudging kind. The real kind.

“Cleaner than anything I had,” he says.

“I keep a book for a living. I know how to make a wrong line look right.” I stand. “But a lie about the mountain only works if we know the real one. The true road in. His stronghold, his numbers, his ground. Marchetti gave you a valley and no more. I can get closer.”

“How.”

“The same way you found me.” I hold his eyes. “I reach for it.”

I take Ember’s word for it, and Ariea’s, and my own four nights on a cannery floor. I sit back down. I close my eyes and go looking, not for a puddle this time, not for a candlewick. For a place. For him.

Crow’s hand finds mine on the table, an anchor, the way I anchored him when the dead came flooding in. I push out along the bond, past the kitchen, past the graves, north and east into the hill country. I don’t know exactly what I’m looking for until I feel it.

Renner.

A house in the hills. A gate. A long private road. Men, more men than Marchetti counted. And at the heart of it, warm and patient and horribly awake, a presence turning toward me the instant I brush it, the way a spider feels the far edge of its web tremble.

I try to pull back. I am too slow.

There you are. Renner’s voice, not in the room, not in my ears, in the place behind my breastbone where only Crow has ever been. Delighted. Tender. Home at last. I wondered how long it would take you to come knocking, once you woke enough to try. Good girl. Reach a little further. Let me see how bright you’ve gotten.

Crow’s hand crushes down on mine. “Shadow. Your nose. You’re bleeding. Come back.”

But Renner is not finished. The warmth disappears from his voice, leaving the same cold underneath that I heard in the cannery when he spoke about people older than him. People who tidy.

Tell your cleaner and his brothers to come. Please. I’ve left the road wide open for you. A pause, and I feel him smile. I’ve been ready for days. The one question I couldn’t answer was whether you’d walk up my mountain on your own two feet, or whether I’d have to send for you again. Softer. Final. You answered it.

The wire snaps. I come back into my own body with blood on my lip, Crow’s hands on my face, the candle Ember left guttering out on the table. And I know two things at once, cold and certain.

I found the mountain.

And the mountain found me.

Chapter seventeen

CROW

The Ruin Ridge charter rides in at dusk, twelve deep, and the sound of them coming up the county road is the best sound I have heard since we pulled her out of the cannery.

Their president is a slab of a man called Wolf, gray in the beard, one of the old guard from way back who owes Loco a debt older than me. He swings off his bike in our lot and the two of them clasp hands and hold the grip. No words pass. None need to. Wolf brought guns. Wolf brought men. Wolf brought the thing you cannot buy, which is brothers who ride four hundred miles into a war that was never theirs because a skull on their shoulder matches a skull on ours.

“Heard you got a witch problem,” Wolf says, and grins.

I do not grin back, because he does not know yet how right he is.