Page 10 of Crow’s Shadow

Then the practical part of my head catches up with the animal part, and I see it.

Her car’s gone.

The rusted-out Corolla she keeps parked nose-out by the shop, always nose-out, because I taught her that without ever telling her I taught her it, a car you can leave fast is a car pointed at the road. The space is empty. A dark rectangle of dry gravel where the fog didn’t reach under her, so she’s been gone a while. Hours.

Something in my chest goes very still and very cold.

Shadow left.

I make myself think it plain, because the plain thought is the safe one. She got her back up last night, she does that, the wild in her comes off the leash and she goes and sulks somewhere until it burns down. She drove into town. She’s sitting in the diner on Ruin Road with a coffee going cold, being angry at me, which she’s earned. That’s all this is. She’s twenty-five and she’s furious and she left. People leave. It’s the most ordinary thing a person can do.

I stand in the empty parking space and I do not believe one word of it.

Nova’s coming across the lot with two coffees when I come back around the shop, and she reads my face before I’m within twenty feet, because that’s the thing about the women, they read fast, and her easy walk goes tight.

“Where is she,” Nova says. Not good morning. Not what’s wrong.

“You tell me. When’d you see her last.”

“Dawn. The chapel.” Nova’s already looking past me at the empty space, and the coffees are shaking now, just slightly, the surface of them trembling. “We had coffee. She was asking me...” She stops.

“Asking you what.”

“Nothing. Girl stuff.” She’s lying. I know the shape of a lie, I make my living downstream of them, and Nova’s just told me one, but her fear is real and it’s climbing, so I let the lie go for now and file it, the way Shadow files things, and God, even her habits are in my head now.

“Nova.” The tone in my voice causes her to freeze. “This is the part where you stop protecting her from me.”

“She wanted to know about the book.”

“What about it?”

“I don’t know, she wouldn’t say.”

“Her car’s gone,” I say.

“She wouldn’t just leave.” Nova says it fast, too fast, a woman convincing herself. “Not without telling me. She tells me everything.”

“Does she?”

Nova’s mouth closes. Because no. Shadow tells no one everything. Shadow keeps a book behind her eyes nobody’s allowed to read, and the two of us standing here both know it, and the knowing sits between us like a third person.

“Get Loco up,” I tell her. “And Byte. Now.”

Church at seven in the morning is a different animal than church at two. No ritual to it. Men come in half-dressed and hard-eyed, Buck with his shirt untucked, Storm still working his boots, Stryker already annoyed because Stryker wakes up annoyed. Loco takes the head of the table in a wife-beater with the founding skull faded on his shoulder, and he looks at me, and whatever’s on my face wipes the sleep off his.

“Talk,” he says.

“Shadow’s gone. Car’s gone with her, sometime before dawn. Nova saw her last, in the chapel, around first light.”

“So, she went to town.” Stryker drops into his chair. “She’s a grown woman, Crow, not a prospect. She doesn’t need a hall pass to buy tampons.”

“She took the back way out.” I keep my voice flat. Flat is the only way I know how to keep it. “Through the blind spot by the north corner. The one the cameras don’t cover.”

That lands. The table goes quiet. Because you don’t sneak out of your own home through a camera blind spot to go buy tampons. You do it when you don’t want to be followed.

“Byte.” Loco doesn’t look away from me. “Her phone.”

Byte’s already got his laptop open, fingers going. “Pinging it now. Give me a sec, give me a sec...” The fingers stop. He frowns at the screen, does a thing, frowns harder. “Phone’s off. Or dead. Or gone. Last ping was oh-five-forty, tower coverage puts it...” He looks up, and his cocky’s all gone again, same as last night. “Puts it out past Darkwater. On the county road. Then nothing.”