Page 123 of Flames and Blood

I stop.

“He came back,” she says.

“When?”

“A few days ago. Maybe a week.” She takes her glasses off. “Same man. Same manners. He didn’t want another body.”

“What did he want?”

“He wanted to know how a real accident looks different from a staged one. What impact does to a body that actually hit something, against one that’s been laid out afterward to look that way?”

I stand very still.

“What did you tell him?”

“Everything I know. He paid me for it, and he paid well.” She holds my eyes. “Thirty years in this business and nobody has ever asked me that question. They come to me to make a thing go away. He wanted to know what real looks like.”

“And that bothered you.”

“It’s bothered me every day since.”

I go out to the truck without saying goodbye properly, and I don’t think she minds.

I sit behind the wheel and work it out, and it doesn’t take long.

He isn’t buying another body. He doesn’t need one. He wants to know how to kill her for real and have it pass for an accident.

And he asked the same week she walked back into that hall alive.

He isn’t covering up what he did a year ago. He’s getting ready to do it again, properly this time, and he started the day he found out she wasn’t in the ground.

It’ll be a road, in bad weather, with nobody near her. It’ll look exactly like what it’s supposed to look like, because he’s done the work.

There’s one reason it hasn’t happened yet.

She hasn’t been alone for a minute since she got there. Four levels of household. A mother who keeps her in sight. Aldis at every door she goes through. He can’t get near her inside that mountain, and he’s too careful to try.

She’s safe as long as she stays on it.

She isn’t going to stay on it.

I know that the way I know my own name. I’ve watched her decide things. She’ll push that house as far as it will go, and when it stops giving her anything, she’ll walk down those stairs on her own, and the first empty road she’s on will be the last one.

So I have to get word up there before she does.

I can’t do it from a truck. There’s no phone in that mountain and no line running up to it. Anything I send goes to the gate and then up through the household, and the household is where he lives. A message that reaches her reaches him first.

Aurora. It’s the one place with the standing to put a warning in the Aldrake’s hand and be listened to. Caleb Craven can get a runner up that mountain inside a day, and nobody at that gate will turn him away.

It’s also the only place she’d go if she ever came down.

I tip my head back against the headrest and shut my eyes. And that’s when it happens again. Closer than it’s ever come.

Her teeth on my skin before anything else. The heat I remember. The fire in my veins, her hot flesh against mine.

Then it’s gone, and I’m sitting in a cold truck with my hand pressed flat against my own throat for no reason I could explain to anybody.

I put the truck on the road for Aurora, and I don’t slow down again.