“All yours,” the handler says—to the desk, to the men, not to me—and turns for the door with her coat and her day ahead of her.
“Let’s go.” A hand closes above my elbow.
They walk me off the tile and through the first fire door. My knees want to fold. I don’t let them, because there’s a hand on each arm now, and the last thing I’ll give this place is the sight of me going down.
He begged me not to do this, and I made him the enemy for it. And it didn’t even matter. I didn’t hand them a reason to let her go. There was no her to let go. They’d already been paid.
I bite down on my lips, because a sound is climbing and I won’t let them hear it. The worst of it isn’t this hallway. It’s that I can’t tell him. He’ll never hear me say it—that he was right, that I was wrong to fight him, wrong to think I knew the way through better than he did. I did it alone, exactly the way I swore was my right, and there’s nothing at the end of it.
Nothing. I carried myself all the way here for nothing.
The pull picks that moment to double. It comes up through my chest so hard I turn toward the doors before I know I’ve moved, my whole body aimed back up that mountain at a man who doesn’t know where I am and has no way left to find out.
Because I made sure of that too. No note. No trail. The only phone I ever touched is in her coat pocket. Scent doesn’t sit in a closed car, and we crossed running water at dawn. I did it clean. So clean that the one time in my life I want to be found, there’s nothing of me out there to find.
The pull doesn’t care what I built. It keeps on, low and dumb, aimed back the way we came. A shove between my shoulder blades makes it clear there’s no point in heading anywhere but the way we’re going.
The men steer me around a corner, and the glamour sits up in me the way it always does when I’m cornered, ready to make me small, forgettable. There’s nowhere to put it. The first place that ever held me, I walked out because a tired man on a night shift looked at my face and didn’t see it. These men don’t look at my face. A hand rides above each elbow, and a hand doesn’t blink. Back at that desk, a number went around my wrist, and a number can’t be fooled. I could be the most forgettable woman alive, and both those hands would still be on my arms.
I made myself nobody to get in here. There is no nobody that walks back out.
My wolf has gone low and quiet inside me, ears back. She knows a cage when she’s standing in one.
Badge, door. Badge, door. The building never gets darker, and that’s the thing my skin can’t settle over—it stays lit and clean, hallway after hallway of people doing jobs. A man eats a sandwich over his keyboard behind a wired window. On the wall beside his door there’s a whiteboard ruled into a grid, numbers down the side, days across the top.
One of the men slows just enough to read the board against the band on my wrist. “First draw’s in the morning,” he says to the other. Bored. A man near the end of his shift.
I check the band myself, without wanting to. My number is already written in tomorrow’s first box. Somebody put me up there before I ever got in the car.
Oh God. I’m such a fool.
The last door opens on a clinic room, bright and warm. A reclining chair with a strip of paper down one arm. A steel cart. A folded towel, a coil of rubber tubing, a rack of tubes with colored caps, all of it laid out ready. This is the front end of the thing that’s been draining my sister, and it’s clean, and somebody dusts it.
A man in scrubs looks up when the door opens. His eyes go straight past my face to my arm.
“This the Sangrey?” he says, to the men, not to me.
“Morning list.” One of them lets go of my arm. “Need to log a sample into the file.”
“Looks stronger than the other one ever did.”
The hands turn me and sit me down. Paper crackles under me.
“Wait!” I blurt.
The man pulls the cart closer with his foot and picks up the length of rubber.
“Sleeve up,” he says.
Chapter 42
Decker
The pull moved all night. South. Then east and south again. I stood on the gravel and felt her get driven away from me one road at a time.
An hour past first light, it stops moving. It doesn’t let go. It locks in—one fixed point—and stays there. She’s stopped. Somewhere out there, a building has her.
It still pulls. That means she’s alive. I’ve been telling myself that since the dark, every few minutes, because it’s the only thing keeping me on my feet.
