Page 44 of Crow’s Shadow

“You’re not property.” It comes out fierce. “I’m not sewing a patch on you to say you belong to me the way a bike out in the lot belongs to me.”

“No.” Shadow pulls back enough to hold my eyes, and hers are burning, real heat, a witch’s heat coming off her skin. “Not property. Not yours the way a bike is yours. Claim me the way the bond already did. You’re mine, Crow. Say I’m yours.”

I put my forehead to hers, lay my hand flat over the place behind her breastbone where the hook lives, the one I spent twenty years pretending was the furnace, and I say the truest thing I have ever said.

“You’re mine. I’m yours. Not the club’s. Mine, because you chose me. Yours because I finally had the balls to choose you back.” My voice cracks, and I let it. “I claim you, Shadow. In front of God and the dead I carry and nobody else. And if Renner or anything on this earth tries to take you off it, I will walk into whatever comes after and drag you back out.”

“There he is,” she breathes.

Then she pulls me down onto the cot. The fear goes quiet, so do the dead. For a few stolen hours before we ride, there is only her in my bed and the knowledge that I’m not alone anymore.

After, she sleeps against my chest, and I do not, because a cleaner learns to hold still in the dark and let the world talk. I am watching the window go from black to the first bruise of gray when the pounding starts on my door.

“Crow.” Grim’s voice, low and hard. “Crow, get up. We got a problem.”

I am out of the cot and into my jeans before Shadow’s eyes are fully open. I open the door on Grim and Byte, and both their faces are wrong.

“Sable’s gone,” Grim says. “Bunk’s empty, bike’s gone, went sometime in the night.”

“She made us.” My gut drops. “She knew we clocked her, and she ran to Renner.”

“Worse.” Byte holds his laptop against his chest as a shield. His voice has the closet-breathing sound, the one he gets when he opens a door and finds it breathing back. “She didn’t run with the fake. I pulled her last messages off the tower before she killed the phone. She figured the play. She knew the east-road run was a plant.” He swallows. “So she sent him the other one. The real road. The one Shadow pulled off the mountain and marked on the map in the chapel. Sable got in, photographed it, sent it north an hour ago.”

Renner is not fortifying the wrong road anymore. Renner has the right one. The true way in, the door Shadow found, the single path we had to a man already waiting for us with a door held open. He has it. He’s had it for an hour and we were supposed to ride in five.

Behind me, Shadow sits up in the gray light with the sheet held to her chest. She hears it, does the math and I see the answer land in her eyes.

We are not the hunters anymore. We never were. We are exactly where Renner wanted us. He knows the road. He’s had days to ready the mountain and the one advantage we had was handed to him by one of our own.

“Then we ride now,” Shadow says into the silence, already reaching for her clothes. “Before he can move again. Right now.”

And God help me, she’s right. We ride now.

Chapter eighteen

SHADOW

We hit the tree line at first light, three trucks nose to tail on a logging road nobody has driven in years, and the second the pines close over us I know Renner is already in my head.

Not his voice. His attention. Patient and fixed on us, the same feeling I had at the cannery when the good shoes crossed the floor.

“He knows we’re on the road,” I say from the back seat.

“Course he knows.” Crow does not look back. Both hands on the wheel, eyes cutting the trees. “Sable gave him the map. Grim, eyes up.”

“Eyes up.” Grim sets his rifle across his knees.

Byte’s voice crackles over the radio from the second truck. “Wolf’s charter just hit the low road. Loud as hell, drawing everything they can. If Renner’s going to look the wrong way, it’s now.”

“He’s not looking the wrong way.” I lean between the seats. “He’s looking right at us. Tell Wolf to keep the noise up anyway. We take what we can get.”

Crow’s eyes find mine in the mirror for half a second. “You stay in this truck. Whatever happens out there. You hear me.”

“I hear you,” I say, and we both know it for the lie it is.

The road bends and the trap snaps shut.

A tree comes down across the road ahead, dropped on a chain. The lead truck stands on its brakes and slews sideways in the gravel. Muzzle flashes stitch the tree line on both sides at once, and the world turns to noise, glass, the flat hard bang of rounds punching sheet metal.