Page 46 of Crow’s Shadow

My nose is pouring blood. My knees have gone to water. I grab the truck’s mirror to stay up. The dead women slide back down into the ground, satisfied, the fire still climbing the slope behind them. The road ahead is open at last, straight up to the dark shape of the house at the top.

We are through. We cracked it. And I cracked it.

Up the slope the last of the shooting dies. Grim’s voice calls the all-clear, ragged. Buck drags two of ours down to the trucks, one moving, one not. Wolf comes up the road on foot with a dead kid over his shoulder and a look on his face I will carry a long time. He does not say a word to me. He does not have to.

Crow reaches me and grabs my arm. “You did this.” Not a question. His eyes are wild on mine. “You’re bleeding. Can you walk.”

“I can burn,” I say, but the words come thin. The fire took nearly all of me. My legs have gone to water. The world has a gray edge crawling in at the sides.

“Get behind me.” He pushes me back, moving us up toward the house through the smoke, the crew fanning wide, the big black lodge rising out of the burning slope with its door standing open. Held open. For us.

And Renner walks out of it.

No gun. No men at his shoulder. Hands loose at his sides, unhurried, watching his mountain burn with something close to joy.

“There she is,” he says, and his voice is warm and wrong. Under my boots the dead women vanish. “I hoped. I did not know. Now I know.”

“You buried them behind your own house,” I say, and my voice does not shake, because the dead in the ground will not let it. “All those women. I felt every one of them help me light your mountain. They hate you, Renner. Dead, and they still hate you.”

Something flickers across his face, there and gone. “They always do, by the end,” he says. “It changes nothing.” He comes down the steps. “You are everything she was and more, and you did all that half-trained and bleeding in a ditch. Imagine what you’ll be when I’m done teaching you.”

“Stay back.” Crow steps between us, gun level on Renner’s chest. “One more step.”

“Or what. You’ll shoot me.” Renner does not stop. He does not even look at the gun. “Go on, then.”

Crow fires.

I see the round hit. Center chest, a killing shot. Renner takes it and does not fall, does not slow, and where the blood should come there is something dark and wrong beneath his shirt. Whatever he stole from those women, he put inside himself.

He does not break stride. Crow fires again, and again. Renner walks through it the way you walk through rain. His hand closes around Crow’s gun and crushes it, steel folding. His other hand closes around Crow’s throat and lifts him clear off the ground.

“No.” I throw what fire I have left at him but it barely catches.

Crow grunts. Renner only turns his head to me and smiles through the flame.

Around us the crew has guns up and not one of them fires, because Renner is holding Crow between us as a shield, and because every man here watched three rounds do nothing. Nobody fires again. Three rounds did nothing, and every man here knows exactly what that means.

“There it is. The last of it.” Renner’s hand tightens around Crow’s throat, and his boots kick uselessly above the ground. “Now choose sweetheart. Open that door for me, or watch him die.” He steps closer, Crow hanging between us, and plants his free hand against my chest. “Give me what your mother wouldn’t.” His fingers press in. “Freely.” Crow’s kicking slows. “Or I take it.”

And I feel his hand start to pull.

Chapter nineteen

CROW

Renner’s hand is around my throat and my boots are off the ground, and through the roar in my ears I feel him reach into Shadow and start to take.

I have killed men every way there is. Not one piece of it helps me now. My gun is folded scrap in the dirt. My hands are on his wrist and his wrist is stone. The edges of the world go soft and gray, and the last thing I will see is her face while a monster empties her the way he emptied her mother. I cannot stop it. I have never once in my life been able to stop it, and when it matters most, I fail her.

She is fighting him. Chin up, her mother’s chin, teeth bared, refusing to give him a fucking thing. But she gave the mountain her fire, and there’s nothing left in her tank. He’s going to drain her dry and leave her dead in my arms.

No.

I stop pulling at his wrist because strength isn’t going to save either of us. Instead, I reach for what the cannery woke inside me, the thing I’ve spent every night since trying to shove out because the dead are fucking loud and I am man enough to admit they scare the shit out of me.

I open the door. All the way. For the first time I do not brace against it. I let it come.

And the mountain answers.