He doesn’t flinch. “How long?”
“Trail’s three, four hours cold at the wing. The pickup’s more recent. Two, maybe three.”
“Then she’s on the corridor and moving.” He’s already turned, already barking orders. “This changes everything, and everyone needs to understand how. We thought we’d track the network and get there before it could go cold. They’re going to know what we’re doing now.” He looks at me. “The quiet game is dead. We go loud. Now.”
“Tracking?” Jericho’s already moving to it.
“The only phone she has is theirs.” My teeth grind. “Nothing of ours to ping.”
“Then we don’t trace her. We trace them.” Viktor is fully cold now, working, and for once I’m glad of what he is. “Vanya will step in. She has contacts. And the Nocturne Court watches every lane on that corridor.”
“I’ll get word to Crowe,” says Jericho. “Tell him to find out if his people saw a vehicle running south before dawn, moving like it has somewhere to be. Faine’s people will have seen it, or they’ll find who did.”
People scatter, moving with purpose. I stand at the bend in the road with her boot prints going to nothing in front of me and the bear leaning south so hard I’m fighting to stand straight.
I turn and pull myself back through the gate with the rest and work at staying useful. Every cell inside me is screaming to go after her. To get on that road and run until I pick up her scent again. I don’t. Because the best thing to do right now is use what she just gave us without realizing it.
Something to follow.
The word comes forty minutes later, and it comes from the Court.
Jericho finds me in the armory, where I’m loading magazines because I need something to do or I’ll start breaking things again.
“Crowe,” he says. “A watcher below the weigh station logged a dark sedan before first light. Moving fast, no stops, headed south down the corridor into Faine’s ground.” He holds my eyes. “Vanya says her intel points the same way.”
South, down the corridor. A direction, a distance, hours to run it down.
A trail.
One they’ve been on for hours.
And I gave them every hour of that head start.
Chapter 41
Grace
The inside of the car smells like coffee and drugstore shampoo. That’s the first thing that reaches me, and it lands harder than the two men settling back into the front seats. All those calls in the dark, and the other end of the line smells like anybody on her way to work.
She doesn’t look up. She has a phone in one hand, thumb moving, and she finishes what she’s typing before she gives me anything at all. On the calls, there was always a pause before her answers. I thought it was a method, a way of keeping me small, making me wait. Sitting beside her, I can see what it really was. I was one task in a night that had several. She was just multitasking.
“Belt,” she says.
The voice is exactly the voice. Hearing it come out of a person is worse than hearing it come out of the dark. She’s fifty-something, dark-framed reading glasses pushed up into gray-brown hair, a raincoat, a travel mug in the holder between us with lipstick on the lid.
I put the belt on. Up front, both doors shut, and the locks drop.
She holds out her hand, palm up, eyes still on her screen. I lay the phone in it, and it disappears into her coat. The car pulls off the gravel. The phone was never mine anyway.
Nobody pats me down. Nobody ties my hands. There’s no need, and everyone in this car knows it. I’m not a prisoner being taken somewhere. I’m a delivery being driven.
I’m not shaking. I keep checking for it, and it isn’t there. What’s left in me is cold and quiet. Under the cold, low behind my ribs, the pull keeps on. Back the way we came. Up the road, up the mountain, to a man standing at a fence line in the dark.
I’m still furious with him. And I miss him with an ache that doesn’t come only from the wolf. Both of those ride down the mountain with me, and neither one cancels the other out.
The sky comes up gray on my side of the vehicle. We pass the dead weigh station, and where the river bends wide, the car swings east and runs along the water. Warehouse roofs. A gravel bank. Light moving on the current.
Nobody talks. The two in front don’t even look at each other. I let the light come all the way up off the water before I say the thing I got in this car to say.
