“Say the middle part again,” Viktor says.
“I hold for the count.”
I mean it while I’m saying it.
Viktor looks at me a long time.
“The fence,” he says finally. “Where Jericho can see you.” He doesn’t say the rest. He doesn’t have to.
“I won’t move until I get the word.”
“Good.” He turns to Jericho. “Lock the logistics. I’ll prep the others.”
Jericho and Nadia build out the rest, and we break. It’s not enough. It’s what I’ve got.
I get through the hours handling gear that doesn’t need handling and staying out of rooms with people in them. The pull doesn’t ease. It builds till afternoon, steady and tireless, and by the time we’re ready to leave, I can’t sit anymore.
“You good?” asks Jericho as we clamber into the back of a van.
“Yeah,” I lie, then sit on a bench and drum my fingers on the seat rest until Nadia tells me to quit it.
We roll for hours, following the path that leads into the darkness that will allow us to reach her.
“Up ahead,” says Nadia, glancing down at a map on a tablet.
The vans turn off at the warehouse row, then the gravel bank on foot, the river on our right, cold coming off the water. Nobody talks. The bank bends, and there it is, exactly what Crowe’s watchers called in: an ordinary tan building behind chain-link, the whole place sitting flat and lit under its own pole lights.
Every step closer, the burning under my skin gets worse.
Flat on the gravel outside the reach of the lights, the pull isn’t in my chest anymore. It’s in my teeth. My mouth keeps filling, and I keep swallowing. Heat rolls up my spine in slow waves. My hearing’s started honing in on the night sounds—the river, no; a door closing deep inside that building, yes. Yes.
She’s in there. I’m sure of it.
Now. Go now!
Nadia settles beside me with the bolt cutters and looks at me once. Whatever she sees, she moves the cutters to her far side.
“All teams set.” Jericho, quiet in my ear. “Hold. Breach on my count. Count starts when south is on the doors. Two minutes.”
Two minutes. I’ve held longer positions in worse cold on less sleep. I tell myself that.
Then the wind swings off the lot and into my face.
Grace.
Hours old. Faint over gravel and wire. But real. She walked this ground, car to door, on her own feet.
The pull hits so hard the building is all I can see. My hands are full of chain-link, and I don’t remember reaching for it. Jericho’s voice is still going in my ear—count, south team, hold—and the words are turning into sound that means nothing.
The change comes without warning, and the bear stands up. There’s no resistance to it. He takes my body the way he takes anything he wants, all at once and without asking, and my last thought goes out.
Nadia’s curse is drowned out by the roar ripping through me.
The chain-link tears out of the ground before me.
Chapter 43
Grace
