The PowWow

Roiya didn't answer her phone.

Not the first call, or the fifth, or the tenth. It rang through to the voicemail I'd never once heard her set up, and rang through, and rang through, and by the third round of it the machine in me — clean now, cold now in the useful way and not the ruined one — had already started building the shape of something bad.

We called Curtis. Even after the no. Even knowing what it would cost him to be asked. Curtis loved that woman with everything he had, and a man who loves someone that way keeps tabs whether he means to or not — keeps a weather eye on where she is the way you keep one on a storm you can't stop watching.

"I can't find her." Curtis's voice was tight, the fear in it out from under the fury now, naked. "She's dark. Phone's off or dead. She's not — Levi, she's not anywhere I can see her, and I can see almost everywhere." A breath. "But I found something else. While I was looking." A pause I didn't like. "I found Hawk."

Of course he had. And I knew, even in that first second, even before the rest of it arrived, exactly what had bought us that address — the weeks of brutal work my sister had been doing in the dark to put us here, the split knuckles and the hospital source and the complaint on paper, all of it finally paying out the coordinate it had been grinding toward. Roiya had beaten Byron Hawk out of the shadows. And then she'd gone silent.

"When did she last check in," I said.

"Yesterday. Midday. She was running a lead. She said —" Curtis stopped. "She said she was close."

The whole thing assembled itself in front of me, clean and terrible, every piece dropping into a slot that had been machined to receive it — except this time the tabs weren't beaten into shape, this time it fit because it was true.

Jacob was watching me. I knew that look. It was the look he'd give me for the rest of our lives now, the checkpoint look, the one that asked is this the idol talking — and he had every right to it, because the last time I'd been this certain about Byron Hawk I'd been three months down a hole, and my certainty had been a symptom.

I held up a hand.

"No," I said. "Look at me. This isn't the wall. The wall is gone, you watched it go." I made myself say it slow, so he could read it, so he could run me through his own machine and check. "This is me, clear-eyed, doing the thing I'm actually built to do. Roiya went hunting Hawk for me and dropped off the earth mid-lead. Hawk is exactly the leverage a cornered man reaches for. And delivering her into his hands — using my hunt, my idol, the thing he built in me, to walk my own sister into a trap — that is precisely the kind of thing Suriel does. That's the endgame. He said the room was the point. She's the room."

Jacob looked at me a moment longer.

Then he nodded, once, and I have never in my life been so grateful to pass a test.

"Address," he said to the phone.

Curtis gave it.

It was a body shop off an industrial frontage road, dead after dark, the kind of place that stops being a business at six and starts being wherever you want it to be. One roll-up door, one side entrance, windows painted over from the inside.

We didn't discuss it much. We didn't have to; we'd been doing versions of this our whole lives, and the wordless choreography was still there under everything, intact, waiting.

"Front," I said.

"Back," said Jacob, and was already gone into the dark along the side of the building, barefoot and silent, a mountain that had learned to move like fog.

I gave him a slow count. Then I went in the front.

The shop was one big bay, lit by a single work lamp clamped to a lift, and everything in it threw long hard shadows. Byron Hawk stood in the middle of the light.

I'd spent three months on this man's face. Booking photos, surveillance stills, a wall of him. And here he was in the flesh at last, smaller than the wall had made him, an ordinary ugly dangerous man with a pistol in his hand — and the pistol was pointed at my sister.

Roiya was cuffed to a metal chair.

Beaten some. A cut over one eye, dried blood, her lip split. But her head was up, and here is the thing that put a splinter of ice in me even in that moment: she wasn't afraid. A normal person cuffed to a chair with a gun on them is afraid, and under the fear a normal person is pleading, even if only with their eyes. Roiya wasn't doing either. She was looking at Byron Hawk with a flat, hard, patient hatred that had no bottom to it, the look of someone doing arithmetic about what they'd do to him if the cuffs came off, and it was not the look of a victim, and everyone with clear eyes in that room would have known whose look it actually was.

Byron's gun didn't leave her. His eyes came to me.

"There he is," Byron said. "The one who won't quit. You know how much noise you've made? You and this—" a jerk of his chin at Roiya "—animal you sent after me?"

“Let her go, Byron.” I wasn't giving him Hawk. I'd spent three months making that name bigger than the man wearing it. He was Byron now.

"Here's how this works." He was calm, transactional, a man who'd been in rooms like this before and lived. "You stop. All of it. The hunt, the girl, the whole circus. You call it off, you walk out, you never look for me again, and she walks out behind you. That's the deal. That's the only deal." He shifted the gun a half-inch, a reminder. "I just want to be smoke again. That's all I ever wanted. Tell me you'll let me."

And a version of me from four months ago would have said whatever it took, and meant none of it, and been calculating the shot the whole time.

"No," I said.

Byron's jaw tightened.

"When you shot the woman I love," I said, and I kept my voice level, kept my eyes off the dark behind him where a shape had begun to separate itself from the shadows, "at the happiest moment of my brother's life, in a garden full of lanterns — the day she agreed to marry me — your wants stopped mattering to me. Permanently. You don't get to want things anymore, Byron. You spent that."

"Then she—"

"You put her in a chair for the rest of her life." I took a step, keeping his eyes on mine, only mine. "You think I'm here to make a deal. I'm not. I'm here because you hurt people I love. You hurt Rachel. You hurt me." Another step. Behind him, the shape had a size now, and a stillness, and bare feet on the concrete. "You hurt my brother."

Byron scoffed — actually scoffed, this small ugly man at the center of a thing so much bigger than he'd ever understand.

"Your brother." His mouth twisted. "Who the hell is—"

Jacob took him.

He came out of the dark as if shadows decided to have hands — one arm across Byron's gun wrist and wrenching up and out, the other coming around, the whole continental mass of him arriving all at once behind a man who hadn't known the room had a back to it. The gun went off once into the ceiling, a flat crack, and then it wasn't in Byron's hand anymore, it was skittering across the concrete, spinning, and Byron was twisting in a grip that should have ended him.

Should have. Byron Hawk was smoke to the last. He dropped, boneless, out of the bottom of the hold the way only a man who's spent his life being grabbed by people knows how to drop, and Jacob's hands closed on a jacket that was suddenly empty, and Byron was moving — for the side door, for the dark, for gone.

The gun spun to a stop against my boot.

I picked it up without deciding to, and I went after him.

I'm faster than Byron Hawk. I'm faster than almost everyone; it's the thing I am, mind and body made for speed. I caught him at the mouth of the alley behind the shop, cut the angle before he knew the angle was cuttable, and put him into the brick, and spun him around, and there we were.

Him against the wall. Me with the gun.

And it came up in me.

The idol was gone. My eyes were clear. I knew, cleanly and completely, that the right thing was to hold this man for the law and walk away. I was not deceived. There was no wall, no black hole, no fever running me.

And it came up anyway.

The rage. The dethroned thing from the empty temple, the raw red original thing that had been sitting quiet in the dark since Rachel's living room, waiting — it came up through me all at once with murder in it, plain and simple and almost sweet, and it had every reason the world could offer. This was the man who put Rachel in a chair. This was the man who'd cuffed my sister to another one. Every cell I owned wanted to close the last small distance between the gun and him and make the world one Byron Hawk lighter, and it did not feel like sin in that second, it felt like justice, it felt like the most righteous thing I would ever do.

My hand came up. The gun with it.

"Levi."

Jacob's voice, behind me. He'd come up the alley slow, and he wasn't rushing now, wasn't lunging for me, wasn't grabbing. He just spoke, low and level, into the half-second where the whole rest of my life was balanced.

"'Vengeance is mine.'"

The words went into me and stopped my hand where it was.

"'I will repay, saith the Lord.'"

And I knew them. Of course I knew them. I'd heard them in this exact form once before, a lifetime and a first case ago, in a lit gym, from this exact brother — except that time it had been Jacob laying the verse over my rage while I stood with everything in me screaming to finish a smiling man, and Jacob's hand had come down on my shoulder and held me while the anger tried to make my arm do the thing. He'd saved me from it then. He was saying it again now, the same verse, the same voice, the same brother, across all the years between, and I heard the echo land the same way twice — heard my own theology, the thing I believed, the thing I'd said to him once about the Lord doing His own collecting, come back around to collect me. 

My hand shook. The rage didn't leave — it never leaves, that's the thing I understand now, it only ever loses its throne — but it lost its footing, and my arm came down an inch.

Then Rachel's chair rose up behind my eyes, and Roiya's, and it surged again, and my hand came back up, because the verse is true and the rage is also real and being right does not make you strong enough on your own, it never has, that was always the whole point —

"Suriel," Jacob said.

One word. The last one. The only one left that could reach all the way down to where I was.

Suriel. This is the endgame. This is the thing he built in me. The damned wall. Rachel in that chair and Roiya in that one and Byron Hawk in front of me with a gun at my feet, and he arranged every piece of it, machined every tab, for exactly this — for me to pull that trigger and become the thing he's been trying to make me since the wedding. Kill this man and Suriel wins. Kill this man and the idol I buried gets up off the floor and takes the throne back forever, and the room is his, and I am his, and everything the Lord walked me out of was for nothing.

Do not let him win.

I stopped.

I lowered the gun. All the way. My whole body was shaking with the effort of it, with the rage still trying to climb back up onto its chair, and I turned the pistol in my hand until I was holding it by the barrel, harmless, a thing and not a verdict, and I put my back against the opposite wall of the alley and I slid down it and I let Byron Hawk stand there, alive, breathing, spared — not because he deserved it, he didn't, but because vengeance was never mine to take, and the collecting was never mine to do, and my brother had come up an alley in the dark to remind me who I was one more time.

"Okay," I breathed. "Okay. He's not mine."

"No," Jacob said gently, and now his hand did come down on my shoulder, warm, tectonic, the anchor it had always been. "He never was."

Byron went to Delgado, and to the law, and to whatever the paper trail my sister had built in blood would finally do to him now that there was a live body to attach it to. Not to me. The right ending, the small gray unsatisfying lawful one, the one that doesn't feel like enough and is the only kind that ever actually is.

We got Roiya out of the cuffs. She stood, rubbing her wrists, steady on her feet, and she looked back at Byron where the responding units were folding him into a car, and what she said, low, almost to herself, is the thing I carried out of that alley heavier than the gun had ever been.

"You should have let him have it worse."

Not thank you. Not I was scared. Not one word about the chair she'd been cuffed to or the gun that had been on her. Just disappointment — cold, flat, bottomless disappointment that a man hadn't been hurt enough — and it came out of her in a voice that was almost, but not quite, my sister's.

I looked at Jacob over the top of her head.

He was already looking at me. And in his face was the same thing that had just gone through me like cold water: that we'd won the alley. We'd gotten her body out of the chair. We'd kept me from the trigger and Byron for the law and ourselves out of Suriel's oldest snare.

And none of it had touched the actual thing. None of it had reached the room.

Our sister was still in there. Still cuffed to a chair we couldn't see, in the dark, and the hands that held her weren't Byron Hawk's, and getting her out of that one was going to be the real war — the one we were, only now, finally, clear-eyed enough to see we'd have to fight.

"We win her back," I said. "Whatever it takes."

Jacob nodded, slow, his hand still on my shoulder, his eyes on our sister rubbing her wrists in the strobing red light with disappointment cooling on her face.

"Whatever it takes," he said.