Page 39 of Crow’s Shadow

The cannery was a flood of strangers. This is one voice, and it comes through my hand slowly at first, then all at once. The first thing I feel is not words. It is the fire. Her fire, from the inside, the heat and the smoke and the animal terror, and under all of it one thought she held onto until the end.

The girl. Get the girl out. Where is my girl.

I make a sound. Shadow drops down beside me, her hand flat on my back.

“What? What is she saying?”

“You.” My voice is not mine. “At the end, in the fire, she wasn’t thinking about herself. She was looking for you. Get the girl out. Where is my girl. Over and over.”

The voice pushes deeper. There is more behind the fire. A man. A face. She knew him. I strain for the name—

“Crow.” Grim’s voice, from the top of the cemetery, hard and carrying. “Loco wants everyone. Now. Something’s come to the gate.”

Maren is gone before I can reach the name. I kneel there with both hands in the dirt, knowing the answer was right fucking there and I lost it.

Shadow is already up.

“Something’s come to the gate,” she says. “At three in the morning.”

“Nothing good ever comes to our gate at three.” I get up. We go.

The thing at the gate is a coffin.

One of ours. I know our work the way I know my own hands, the oak, the joinery Cannon’s people taught the first of us forty years back. It sits square in the middle of the access road inside the fence, where somebody set it down clean and drove off before the cameras caught more than tail lights. The club stands around it in a loose ring, nobody touching it, the way you stand around a thing you already know is bad.

“Byte. The cameras.”

“Gate cam caught a flatbed, no plates, gone before I could zoom. They knew the blind spots.” Byte swallows. “They knew our blind spots, Pres.”

Loco looks at me. “Open it.”

I open it, because opening it is my job, and I know before the lid clears what waits inside, because a coffin sent home to men who bury their own is only ever one kind of message.

Lash.

Our prospect. The rat. Somebody cleaned him up almost kind, laid him out in one of our own boxes in his cut with the prospect rocker still on it, hands folded on his chest. The folded hands tell me who did this, because Renner does everything with the same soft ceremony, the tenderness of a man who owns you even in the ground.

The dead stir. One touch and Lash could show me exactly what Renner did to him. I do not. Not here. Not with the club reading my face.

“Well.” Stryker breaks the quiet. “There’s your reckoning. Renner did it for us.”

“His reckoning was ours to give.” I close the lid on the kid, because whatever he did, he was ours before he was Renner’s. “Renner took it so we’d know he can reach into our house and lift what he wants. Lash. The book. Her.” I do not look at Shadow when I say it. I feel her at the edge of the ring, unpatched, uninvited, standing in club business because I will not send her away again.

Stryker clocks it.

“There it is.” He steps off the ring, into the middle, beside the box. “She shouldn’t be standing here, Crow. Church business, patched business, and you’ve got the bookkeeper breathing it in as though she’s got a vote.”

“She keeps the book. It’s more club than most patches.”

“She’s not patched. She’s not a brother. And you broke the code for her.” He turns a slow circle, playing the whole ring now. “Nobody left behind, sure. But there’s a reason it says brother. We’ve bled for a woman who was never ours to reach for, and you’re still doing it. Colt died at the garage. Nineteen. For her.”

Colt’s name is a live wire in this club, and Stryker knows it.

“Colt died because a man put three rounds through him. Not because of her.”

“Because of her. And I’ll say the next part since nobody else will.” Stryker rounds on Grim. “Tell them what you saw at the cannery. Tell them what she did to our Crow. Or are we going to keep pretending the blown lights, the glass hanging in the air, this one going see-through in front of your eyes, all of it, is normal.”

The ring goes dead quiet. Fuck the code. This is what they’re really afraid of.