Page 3 of Crow’s Shadow

The floor safe takes the Ledger and I spin the dial, because some rules I keep. Crow said lock the book. The book is locked. He said stay inside too, and there we part ways.

The window fogs where I breathe on it. Out past the glass he is already crossing the lot, unhurried, a big dark shape wading into a bigger dark, and the pistol hangs from his hand almost as if he has forgotten he is holding it. He never forgets. Crow forgets nothing. The gun rides loose because a loose gun comes up faster than a ready one, and every inch of him is built to come up fast and cost you before you finish blinking.

I should be afraid for him. I am not. Fear is for people who think Crow can lose.

What I feel instead is the old pull, the one I stopped trying to name years back, a hook set behind my breastbone with a line running out through the glass to him. When he moves, it tugs. When he stops at the edge of the light and goes still, it aches. For years I have hung on the end of this line, and he has never once felt it, never turned, never reeled me in, and still I follow.

He reaches the last row of stones. The white light dies at his shoulders and the dark past it gives up nothing, no shape, no man, and my breath stops working right, because the watcher is gone. My nails bite into my palms. I don’t remember making fists. Someone stood there. I saw him same as Crow did, a cut-out of nothing planted where the ground goes soft over the oldest graves, and now the space holds only Crow and the trees and whatever waits inside them.

Come back. I do not say it. I never say the things with weight on them. I have made an art of the unsaid.

The clubhouse taught me young how to vanish. A girl with no mother and no claim learns the corners of a room, learns which men to slide behind, which mouths to clear out from once the whiskey turns them mean. Loco fed me. Loki taught me the book. Ariea braided my hair when I was small and still does some nights, her fingers sure and warm while she pretends not to notice I am shaking. They love me, the women. I know they do. And I have never once belonged to any of them, because the whole of me points one way, and his name is stitched behind my ribs where the hook goes in.

Movement at the tree line. He comes back into the light the way he left it, unhurried, and my knees loosen with a relief I will lie about later. He carries something small in one hand. He crosses the lot and comes through the door on a wash of cold air, pine, and under it, faint, the copper thread of blood which is not his.

He sets the thing on the cold table. A phone. Cheap, black, screen cracked across one corner, the kind you buy with cash and drown in a river when you are done.

“He ran,” Crow says. “Left this.”

“You went after him?”

“No.” A muscle ticks in his jaw. “He wanted me to chase. I do not walk into tree lines I did not plant.”

“Turn it on.”

“No.”

“Why?”

“Because he wanted us to find it.”

“That’s generally why people drop messages.”

Crow looks at me. “You always this fucking helpful?”

“Only with you.”

“Since when?”

His eyes lift to mine before he can stop them.

There.

One second, maybe less, enough to feel it everywhere.

“Since someone started waiting for me in cemeteries,” he says.

The phone lights up between us. One message, no name. Crow turns it face-down before I reach the end, but I read fast, I have spent a lifetime reading the things people turn away from me. Three words, gray on white. DOES SHE KNOW YET?

My arms go to gooseflesh. “Know what?”

“Nothing.” He pockets the phone. “Not for you.”

But he does not look at me when he says it, and Crow not looking at me tells me more than his mouth every would. I know every version of his silence. This one is fear.

The clubhouse on a Friday is a living thing, loud, hot, thick with leather, spilled beer and the woodsmoke Ariea can never keep penned in her kitchen. I sit where I always sit, the far end of the long couch, spine to the wall, a spot nobody gave me and nobody ever takes. From here I see the whole room. From here I see him.

Crow at the bar, not drinking, because Crow will not blur an edge he has spent his life sharpening. Loco leans in close, talking low. Grim looms on his other side like a piece of the wall.