Page 81 of Ghost’s Awakening

The shotgun went off. Then again, and again, the pump racking between them, until the tube ran dry.

I wasn't looking. I heard all of it. The blasts filled the box and came back out the door at me, a roar that hit my ears and my chest at once, and under it the big glass panels at the front of the mezzanine went out and fell, sheets of them, crashing onto the floor below in a long shattering that went on and on. The shot chewed into wood. Into the floor and the walls, a hundred hard hits, and something heavy tipped over and hit the boards.

But no screams. No voice answered that shot at all.

I turned to look. Hawk's back filled the doorframe. He stood dead still with the shotgun up, and his head moved once to the left and once to the right, slow, checking every angle in there.

"Empty." Flat, and it filled the box. "Blade!"

GHOST

Empty.

I was two steps below the door with the Glock up and Caleb's back in front of me. The word came down the stairs and went into my gut, and my gut went with it. All the way down, through the steel, through the floor of the building. All that fighting. Every brother and sister down there bleeding on that concrete, Trenza's eye and Mateo's arm, the man by the bar with a shirt held to his head, and the ones I hadn't counted yet, and the room at the top of the stairs was empty.

"Nobody here." Blade's voice came through every earpiece on the block, low, hard. "That door hasn't moved. Hawk. You want me in?"

"Hold your door." Hawk, from inside. He went in slow. I could see him through the frame, one step, then another, the shotgun moving to cover every corner as he cleared it.

I came up the last two steps to Caleb. "Let me go first. Get behind me." He didn't move. He was crouched where he'd landed after the kick, his face blank, his mouth open a little. There was nothing behind his eyes at all. "Caleb?" Nothing. "Caleb. Focus. He could still be close."

That got him. His eyes came back and found me. He stood, and he came in behind me. But I already knew. There was nothing in that room.

We went in one at a time, me first with the Glock out ahead of me, sweeping every place a man could put himself. Then the rest of them, Reaper first and Santos last, all of them careful, all of them with weapons up.

The box was a long room along the north wall, and the front of it was gone. Where the glass had been there was only the steel rail and the drop, and dust came through the open front in slow drifts. A desk sat off to one side with one corner blown clean off, wood standing in splinters. A chair lay on its back. The shot had chewed the walls and the floor all the way to the far end, pale holes in dark paint everywhere I looked.

"Above." Reaper. Flat, firm. Every gun in the room went up, and we all looked where Reaper was looking.

Off the center of the ceiling, a square. A big one, steel, set flush into the boards, a hatch the size of a door. One corner of it had been bent outward and hung down an inch from the rest, and the gap showed black.

I stepped under it and stood still. I felt it on my face. Air. Moving, cool, coming down through the gap, and it smelled like night and smoke and desert instead of like this room. "This leads outside." My knees went loose. Gravedigger had had another door. Nobody had known about it, because it didn't open onto any street. It opened onto the roof. A roof with both corners burning and the smoke rolling flat across it, while every eye we had was on the doors underneath, and the three men who'd had a scope on this building had already come down off theirs to fight.

"No… fucking… WAY!" Caleb had come up beside me with his head back and his eyes on that hatch, and his voice broke out of his wrecked throat at a volume that must have cost him. "Get that thing open, I'll fucking⁠—"

"He's gone, Caleb." Hawk's voice came down hard. Firm, the way he'd end an argument at Church, but there was something else in it tonight, and it was anger. His own. I'd never heard that out of him either.

It got Caleb out of it. Gone, no doubt in it, from the president of the Steel Phoenixes, and I felt it land on everybody in that room at the same time. Of course he was gone. A man like that wasn't going to wait on the other side of a ceiling hatch while a shotgun came up the stairs with his name on every pellet.

I came around in front of Caleb. Face to face. He was still looking up. "Tank's on that hospital. Nobody gets past Tank." I kept it low, for him. "His pit's done. He can't run forever, Caleb. This buys us time, at least."

He didn't say anything. He just fell forward onto me.

It wasn't a hug. There was nothing warm in it and nothing soft. His weight came down against me and his forehead landed on my shoulder, and he needed the contact, or he needed something holding him up, and I was what was there. My arms went around him. Firm. I held on and felt the whole night shaking in him. I was sorry for all of it, and I wanted the madness to end more than I'd ever wanted anything.

"Reaper. Take two and get that hatch open." Hawk's voice cut through, and I looked over Caleb's shoulder with my chin resting on it. Hawk stood beside the desk with the blown corner, the shotgun in one hand, and in the other a piece of paper. Folded once, a single sheet with lines of handwriting on it, and he was reading it with his face doing nothing at all. "He's gone, but we make sure." His free hand went to his ear. "Blade. I'm coming down to you through the door. I'm making sure that rat isn't hiding in there. If you see it open, don't shoot. It might be us."

"Irish, Declan, with me." Reaper's voice came out absolute. "Valkyrie, Santos, with Hawk."

I took Caleb's hand.

He let me. He'd gone silent, all the way silent, and he let me turn him and walk him toward the door, slow, to make room for the two teams. At the door I looked back once.

Hawk was folding the paper. Once, then again, and it went into the inside pocket of his cut, and his face still hadn't moved. Then the shotgun came back up to his shoulder, and he tipped his head at Valkyrie toward a second door at the far end of the room, the one that would lead down to Blade and to nobody else.

Caleb's hand was cold in mine, and it didn't hold back.

I held on for both of us.