Page 9 of Crow’s Shadow

The phone lights brighter. It’s ringing, no sound, just the screen pulsing, a call with no name.

Every part of me says leave. I pick it up anyway, because I’ve spent my whole life needing to know the thing nobody will tell me, and that need is going to be carved on whatever they bury me under.

“Hello?” My voice goes out and comes back small.

“You drove all this way,” the voice says. Warm. Amused. The voice from the fence line, the one that put a mother in my hands. “I’ll be honest, Shadow, I wasn’t sure the book would be enough. You’re a careful, Shadow. But you have one bad habit.”

“What’s that?”

“You can’t leave a question unanswered.”

My mouth goes dry. “Who are you.”

“A friend of your mother’s.”

“I don’t have a mother.”

“You did.” A pause, and something moves through it, something that isn’t warm at all. “Her name was Maren. She had your exact way of tipping her chin up when she was scared and pretending she wasn’t. You’re doing it right now.”

I stop doing it. My chin comes down and my eyes go to the windows, the doors, counting exits like Grim taught me, and behind me I hear it, finally, too late, boots. More than one set. Easy and unhurried, men who already know how this ends.

“Here’s the part you’ll hate,” the voice says, gentle now, almost kind. “You came here to take something back. A line in a book. And the whole time, sweetheart, the run was never the point. The book was never the point.” A breath. “You were the point. You’ve always been the point.”

I go for the .380.

I clear leather and fire toward the boots. The shot detonates inside the steel building. Then an arm locks across my throat from behind. The gun is gone, and my feet leave the floor.

I fight. I want that on the record, wherever the record’s kept. I bite down on something and taste copper and a man swears in my ear, and I rake my heel down a shin, drive back with my skull and feel a nose give. Somebody curses. I bit harder. A fist catches my ribs. Another hand gets my wrist. There’s too many.

Fuck.

It isn’t enough. There are too many hands. They always had too many hands.

A rag comes over my face, wet, sweet, chemical, the same sweetness I’ve smelled a hundred times in the embalming room.

I know what it is.

I stop breathing.

The room tips. The black water rises up through the concrete to take me.

The last thing, before it closes over my head, is the voice again, close now, crouched down beside me where I’ve folded onto the floor, brushing the hair off my face with something that could almost be tenderness if tenderness had teeth.

“There she is,” he murmurs. “Twenty years I’ve been looking for you. Let’s go see if you’re worth what your mother cost me.”

And a phone buzzes in some far-off pocket, and a second man reads it out loud, bored, the last words I take down into the dark with me.

“Boss. It’s the club. The cleaner knows she’s gone.”

Chapter six

CROW

The lot is wrong the second I walk out into it, and it takes me a full ten seconds to work out why, which for me is a lifetime.

Morning came gray and mean over Grimstone, fog sitting low on the graves, and I’ve been up the whole night with a dead man’s phone in my head and a burning doorway I haven’t seen in years behind my eyes. I told myself I’d walk the perimeter to clear it. Habit. A cleaner checks his ground.

The ground is fine. The fence is fine. The wrongness isn’t in the lot at all. It’s in me, low and physical, something gone suddenly slack where she has always been.