Page 13 of Run Rabbit Run

"Rue stays here," I say, standing, and it's not a request. "She stays right here, in this booth, where I can see her through that window, and if I'm not back in fifteen minutes, she does exactly what she's thinking about doing."

Something moves behind Vane's eyes. Not anger. Closer to pleasure, like I've done a trick he hoped I'd do.

"She's smart," he says to Luke, not to me, and there's an awful warmth in it. "You didn't tell me she was smart. You told me she was tough. Tough I expected. Smart is the part I'll enjoy."

He stands, and buttons his coat with two fingers, unhurried.

"Fifteen minutes," he agrees, and holds an arm toward the door like a gentleman, like a host, like a man who's never once in his life been told no and meant it. "After you."

I don't move right away.

Standing here in the aisle, I take one more read of him, because Gramps taught me you never turn your back on anything you haven't finished measuring, and I haven't finished.

I can't.

That's what's wrong.

Every other threat I've ever stood in front of, I could find the edges of it, the reach and the weight and the tell that says where it'll break.

Vane doesn't have edges I can find.

He's a locked room with the lights off, and the only thing leaking out from under the door is patience, and patience in a man like this is the worst news I've ever gotten in my life.

He watches me try. He waits. He'd wait all day.

I reach down and squeeze Rue's shoulder once on my way past, and I hold onto the feel of it, her warmth, the ordinary vinyl and the ruined biscuits and the sun through the glass.

"Fifteen minutes," I tell her.

"Fifteen minutes," she says back, and it's a vow, both directions.

Then I walk out into the parking lot, with my brother trembling behind me and a stranger's pale eyes on the back of my neck the whole way.

The cold hits my face.

Behind us the door swings shut, and the little bell over it rings, bright and stupid and cheerful.

I'll hear that bell in my sleep for the rest of my life.

I don't know that yet.

Right now it's only a bell, and he's only a man in a good coat, and I still believe, crossing this gravel with the mountain air in my lungs, that whatever he's about to offer me is something I'll be allowed to turn down.

CHAPTER FOUR

Wren

Out in the parking lot the sky's gone the shade of gray that signals a coming storm, and the wind coming down off the mountain smells like rain that hasn't decided to fall yet.

Vane walks us to the far edge of the gravel, away from the windows, away from the two trucks and the one car that make up the diner's whole Tuesday-morning congregation.

He picks the spot the way he seems to pick everything, without appearing to choose at all, and it happens to be the one place in the lot where nobody inside can read our faces.

I notice that. I notice everything about him now, because my attention has pulled down to the single task of finding the edge of this man, and I still can't.

There's a car waiting that wasn't here when we went in.

Black, long, expensive in a hushed way that doesn't bother with a logo you'd recognize. A man stands beside it who is built like a door, hands folded in front of him, eyes that pass over me once and file me somewhere and move on.