Page 5 of Crow’s Shadow

And when I look down, there is only one set of prints in the frost.

Mine.

Chapter three

CROW

She is standing in the middle of the lot when I come through the door, and she is not screaming, which is worse.

Shadow does not spook. Years around corpses, blood, and men who deserved what they got, and I have never once seen her flinch. Now she is dead still under the floodlight with her arms locked around herself, staring at the fence line, and I’m halfway across the gravel before I realize I’ve moved.

“Shadow.” I put myself between her and the dark. “Look at me.”

She doesn’t. First time in twenty years I ask for her eyes, and she will not give them.

“There was a man,” she says.

“Where.”

“The fence.” Her voice is wrong, thin, scraped down to wire. “He knew my name, Crow. He said” She stops and swallows. “He said I was a long way from my mother.”

The word hits somewhere behind my sternum and stays there. I keep my face shut. Keeping my face shut is the one thing I have ever been truly good at.

“Stay here.”

I walk the fence with the gun low. The frost holds the whole story plain, her boot prints in a nervous little dance, mine coming up hard behind. Nothing else. No tread, no scuff, no drag. A man stood forty feet from her, spoke her name and left the frost smooth as poured glass.

I have burned enough bodies to know what death leaves behind. Whoever stood at the fence wasn’t dead. And a live man who leaves no prints is a man who knows how not to, which is a short and ugly list of people, and not one of them has any cause to stand in my graveyard whispering to my—

I cut the thought off before it reaches the word.

“You believe me.” Shadow has followed me, because of course she has.

“Yeah.” No point lying. She reads a lie off me the way I read one off everyone else. “I believe you.”

“Nobody knows about a mother. I don’t know about a mother.” Her laugh comes out cracked in half. “You can’t be a long way from a thing you never had.”

“Go inside, Shadow.”

“Don’t.” Heat in it now, the wild coming up under the fear, and it is the first thing all night to sound like her and not like prey. “Don’t send me off to the women and go hold church without me. Whatever walks in tonight, I keep the book.”

For a second she holds my eyes, and I let her, which I never do, and something passes between us I refuse to name.

She is right. I hate it. I hate worse how the wanting sits in me even now, even here, with a stranger’s voice still hanging in the cold between us.

“Then keep it,” I say, and walk her in.

Lash is in the mouth of the hall when we pass, a prospect with a mop he is not using, and he looks at Shadow, then at me, then at his boots, too fast, a man reading a card he has already seen. I file him next to everything else and keep moving.

The table fills slow. Church at two in the morning means no prospects, no girls, no ears we do not own. Loco takes the head of it under the founding brand burned into the wood, the grinning skull the Virginia crew scorched onto everything they touched before they scattered west forty years back. Loco came up under it. He wears it in his face, in the flat patient way he has of looking at a problem until the problem quits.

“Talk,” he says.

I set the phone in the middle of the table. “Watcher on the grounds tonight. Two sightings, maybe the same man twice. First at the tree line during a burn. Second at the fence, in the lot, close enough to talk to Shadow.” I do not sit. “He left this.”

“Talked to her how?” Storm asks.

“Knew her name. Knew things he had no right to know.” I leave the mother off the table. It is hers, and it is mine, and it does not belong here yet. “Left no prints in the frost. Byte.”