Page 48 of Crow’s Shadow

Shadow crawls to him. She does not touch him. She lets him see her face, her mother’s face, up close, at the end.

“Because we’re not you,” she says. “There’s your whole answer. We were never you.”

And Maren, through me, with the last of the thread before she goes, gives him the only goodbye he ever earned.

“You spent twenty years hunting my daughter,” I say, and it is my mouth but her voice, and Renner’s ice eyes go wide, because he knows it, knows exactly whose voice. “And she grew up surrounded by people who loved her. You lost her the night you killed me, Sy. You only found out tonight.”

He falls apart. There is nothing left to fall.

The mountain goes quiet. One by one the women fade back into the ground, but something is different now. The rage is gone.

They got him.

They finally fucking got him.

Shadow is in my arms. Or I am in hers. We have stopped being able to tell. She is shaking and bleeding and alive, so alive, and I hold her in the ash of the worst and best night of my life.

“She was here,” Shadow whispers. “I felt her. Through you. I felt my mother.”

“She saw you.” My voice will not work right. “She got to see you. Grown. She said...”

I stop, because Maren is still here, barely, a warmth going thin at the edges. She has one thing left, and it is not for me.

Tell her, Maren says, so faint now I strain to hold it. Tell her I never stopped looking for her. Tell her the last thing I did for her was to make sure she’d be loved. Her presence weakens. Tell her I’m proud of her, and she can stop being afraid now.

Maren—

Tell my baby, I love her.

And she is gone.

I tell Shadow everything her mother said. She breaks, and I catch her and hold on.

Behind us, Wolf is yelling for Bones while Grim gets Byte onto his feet. The Ruin Ridge kid is dead and there’ll be a coffin for him. A good one, built by hand.

We came up this mountain knowing it was a trap, and we still lost one of ours. Renner is ash, Shadow is alive in my arms, and somehow we fucking won.

But I’m a cleaner. I count what’s left when the fire goes out, and kneeling here with Shadow’s heartbeat against mine, I remember the one thing tonight didn’t destroy.

Somewhere out there is another copy of our book.

Every sin. Every grave.

Renner is dead.

The book isn’t.

And a dead man’s secrets never stay buried. Somebody always comes to dig them up.

Chapter twenty

SHADOW

We bury the Ruin Ridge kid on a Tuesday, and for the first time in the club’s history, the cleaner says the words out loud.

His name was Deke. Nineteen, a sister down in Boise, a laugh Wolf says filled a room. We do not have a body to give the ground, because the mountain took most of him. But we build a box anyway, the best oak in the shop. We fill it with his cut, his colors, and a photograph his sister sent up. Crow builds it himself, every joint, and he does not let a prospect touch it.

At the crematory he stands where he has stood a thousand times, at the mouth of the fire, and Mercy starts to step up to say the words the way he always does.