Page 10 of Run Rabbit Run

He's looking at me, and he's looking at me like he already knows the exact way I take my coffee, like he's watched me do it a hundred times, like the sight of me across a cracked vinyl table is something he's been patient about for a very long time.

And under all that dead-man's wiring Gramps built into me, every alarm I've got goes off at once.

CHAPTER THREE

Wren

Luke crosses the diner like a man walking to the front of a church he's about to be thrown out of.

He was a beautiful kid.

Nobody warns you about the ones who go the way he went, how they start out beautiful, all lashes and cowlick and a grin that got him out of every scrape a small town could invent.

Marlene used to slip him extra bacon. Teachers passed him on charm alone. The whole world spent his childhood teaching him that a good enough smile means the bill never comes due, and now he's twenty-two, gray in the face and learning, too late, that somewhere a tab was running the entire time.

The stranger follows at a distance that isn't quite following.

He moves the way water moves downhill, no wasted motion, and the room bends around him without knowing it does.

Marlene glances up from the register and forgets what she was counting.

Two farmers in the far booth go a shade quieter.

He hasn't said a word, and he's already rearranged the temperature of the place.

Rue's gone still across from me. Under the table her knee finds mine and presses, the old signal from a hundred bad parties and worse family dinners. I see it too. I'm here.

Luke slides into the booth beside me, close, so I can smell the cold on his hoodie and under it something sour, the sweat of a man who hasn't slept in a while.

"Wren." His hands are flat on the table like he's holding it down. "I need you to listen to everything before you say anything. Okay? The entire thing."

"Who is that?"

Luke flinches like it was a slap.

The stranger doesn't sit.

He takes the end of the table, standing, one hand resting on the back of the empty chair, and up close his eyes are a pale flat blue that doesn't warm when the rest of his face arranges itself into something almost pleasant.

I read him the way Gramps taught me to read anything that might kill me.

He's big, but he doesn't carry it the way big men do, all shoulders and challenge.

He carries it folded up, put away, like he's decided ahead of time he won't need most of it for me, and he's right.

His coat is worth more than my truck. His hands are still.

Men whose hands go still like that in a strange room are either harmless or the most dangerous animal in it.

Nothing about the way the diner leaned away from him says harmless.

He watches me read him.

Worse, he lets me.

He stands there, holds still, and lets me take my inventory, patient as a man waiting out weather, and when I've finished, he tips his head a fraction, like a teacher whose student got the easy half of the problem.

"Ezra Vane." His voice is low and even, pitched for our table and no further. "You're Wren."