The PowWow

Adrenaline is a loan, not a gift. It always comes due, and it came due for me sitting on the porch of Jeremiah's house, watching my own hands shake in a way they had flatly refused to do inside the house, like my body had been waiting for permission and only just gotten it.

"Walk me through it again," I said to Jacob, mostly because talking was better than the alternative, which was sitting there listening to my own pulse redecorate my skull. "From the top. Slow."

Jacob was leaning against the porch rail, arms crossed, the bruise on his face finally starting to announce itself now that nothing more urgent was competing for his attention. "The lights went out."

"Right. And then?"

"Something hit me."

"I know something hit you, Jacob, I was there, I got the sequel. I need the something. Height. Build. Anything."

He was quiet long enough that I thought he might not answer at all, which was its own kind of answer. "Fast," he said finally. "Faster than it should have been able to move, carrying that kind of weight. I felt mass behind the blow. A great deal of it. And then it was already gone before I could turn."

"Fast and heavy." I turned that over. In my experience those two don't usually travel together — you get fast and lean, or slow and enormous, and the universe generally insists on the trade. "You're sure about the weight."

"I have been hit by heavy things before, Levi." Flat. Not annoyed, exactly, just correcting a data point he considered settled. "I know what heavy feels like."

"Okay. Heavy and fast." I pressed my palms against my eyes until color bloomed behind them. "I got maybe half a second more than you did, and everything I saw runs the opposite direction. Whatever came for me moved clean. Economical. Nothing wasted. That's not heavy, Jacob, that's precise. Those aren't the same fighter."

"Perhaps you are wrong."

"Perhaps I'm—" I stopped myself before that went somewhere neither of us needed it to go tonight. We'd been over this twice already in the last ten minutes, in exactly the same two ruts, and neither of us was going to walk out of those ruts by shouting the other one into it. "Okay. Fine. Let's say we're both right, and it's just one very unusual guy having a very good night."

"Or there is more than one."

I hadn't wanted to say that out loud first. I was glad he'd been the one to get there.

Rachel's headlights swept the driveway a few minutes later, and something in my chest loosened at the sight of them in a way I wasn't proud of and wasn't going to apologize for either. She was out of the car before it had fully stopped rolling, badge already up for the uniforms trailing her, and she crossed the yard straight to me and put a hand under my arm — not asking, just there, solid, the specific quiet support of somebody who has learned exactly how much weight a person can take before they need to be caught instead of merely accompanied. Her cane was nowhere in sight.

"I've got you," she said, low, just for me. "Stand up slow."

"I'm not going to fall over, Rachel."

"I didn't say you were. I said stand up slow." She didn't let go until I was actually vertical and staying that way, and then she kept her hand loosely at my elbow anyway, which I noticed and decided, for once, not to make a joke about.

She surveyed the house over my shoulder, jaw tight. "Tell me everything. Now, while it's fresh, before either of you starts smoothing it into a story that makes more sense than what actually happened."

So I told her. The lights. The hits — heavy on Jacob, clean on me — the gas, the van, the plate I'd had for one perfect second and then hadn't. Jacob added what he could, which wasn't much more than fast and strong and a description of the driver that amounted to the same three words I'd already given her: tall, fast, wrong.

"Wrong how?" Rachel pressed.

"I don't know how to answer that in a way that'll hold up in a report," I admitted. "It moved like it had done it before. Like getting into a van under those specific conditions, at that specific speed, without looking like it was hurrying, was a thing it had practiced enough times to stop thinking about. You know how a professional athlete makes something insanely hard look boring? Like that. Except the insanely hard thing was folding itself into a Ford Econoline after clubbing two grown men into the pavement."

Rachel's mouth thinned. She didn't write that down, which told me she was already filing it somewhere other than the official report, the place she kept things that were true but not useful to anyone who hadn't already lived through nine books of our particular flavor of Tuesday.

"Okay," she said. "Let's build a list. Who's strong enough and fast enough to do what you're describing, and angry enough at this family to do it twice in one night?"

I started running it. That's what the machine is actually good for, when it isn't busy getting sucker-punched in a dark parking lot — not reading a room in real time, but combing back through every room I've ever read, looking for the pattern that fits the one in front of me. I said names out loud as they surfaced, mostly to hear how wrong they sounded leaving my mouth.

"Elias Crane's gone, moved away. Aldric Vale's stable, and last I checked stable men who found actual peace with God don't relapse into coordinated kidnapping. Silas Auren's institutionalized and about as physically dangerous right now as a throw pillow." I kept going, working backward through cases worth of enemies and near-enemies, instruments and dupes and one memorable interior designer who'd turned out to be exactly what she appeared to be. None of it fit. Every name I pulled came with an asterisk — dead, contained, reformed, too old, too slow, never actually strong in the relevant sense, all flash and no follow-through.

"Nathanial Lim," I said, and the second it was out of my mouth my whole body rejected it, a full-body wince I couldn't have stopped if I'd tried. "No. Scratch that. He's dead. I don't know why I said that."

Except I did know why I'd said it. The machine inside my head thought Nathanial explained the wrongness. I just had no idea what the machine thought it knew.

"He's dead," I said again, firmer, like repetition might make it true in a more useful way. "Forget I said it."

Rachel didn't forget it. I watched her not forget it, filing it the same careful way she'd filed the wrong a minute earlier, but she let it sit without commenting, which I appreciated more than I said.

"What about you?" she asked Jacob. "Anybody come to mind?"

Jacob shook his head, slow, deliberate. "No."

"Nothing? Not even a guess?"

"I do not guess, Rachel." He said it without heat, just as a fact about himself, the same tone he'd have used to tell her his shoe size. "A guess spoken aloud becomes a belief whether I intend it to or not, and a wrong belief sends us looking in the wrong direction while whoever did this keeps moving in the right one. I would rather say nothing until I am certain than say something and be wrong."

"That's not helpful right now," I said.

"I did not say it was helpful. It is honest." He looked toward the tree line at the edge of the yard, dark and still and giving up nothing. "I do not know who did this, Levi. I have never once in my life not known. There has always been a shape — Suriel, a name, a target, something to press against. Tonight there is nothing to press against. Only the fact of it."

That was, I realized, the actual center of the dread that had been sitting in my chest since the parking lot, the thing underneath the adrenaline and the shaking hands and the missing plate number. We had a name we could say out loud, argue with, forgive or refuse to forgive, aim a prayer at. This one didn't have a face yet. It had a build and a speed and an unbothered economy of motion getting into a van, and none of that added up to a thing I could stand in front of and know what I was standing in front of.

"Byron Hawk," Rachel said, slowly, like she was testing the name for weight before she committed to saying it fully. "He's still got people. Old contacts, from before we put him away."

"Byron Hawk is sitting in a cell," I said.

"I know where he's sitting, Levi, I put him there." A little sharp, and fair — I'd meant it as a data point, not a correction, and she'd taken it the wrong way for about half a second before waving it off herself. "I'm saying it out loud so we can rule it out properly instead of just assuming. He's got contacts on the outside, sure. But contacts aren't the same as this." She gestured at the ruined house behind us. "This wasn't hired muscle running an errand. This was rehearsed. Coordinated. Whoever built this plan knew details about this family that Byron Hawk was never in a position to know, and even if he somehow did — running two precision operations like this, on the same night, through a chain of people he doesn't fully trust from behind bars? That's not his profile. He's vicious. He's not patient, and he's definitely not this exact."

"So we rule him out."

"We rule him out." She said it, then stopped, her eyes narrowing at something that had just occurred to her, the specific stillness of a detective's mind catching up to a detail it should have caught sooner. "Wait."

"What?"

"The parking lot and this house." She looked between us. "When did the lights go out at the hospital? Exact time, if you've got it."

I checked my phone, more out of reflex than expectation — the screen was cracked, one corner spiderwebbed from the fall, but it still worked. "Ambush started right around twelve forty. Maybe a minute either side."

"And you got here — what, twenty minutes later? Twenty-five?"

"About that."

"So the house was already like this." She said it slowly, watching it land on both of us as she said it. "Already trashed. Jeremiah and Rebecca already gone. Twenty minutes isn't enough time for anybody to hit the hospital, drive here, do that to a house, and clear out again before you two arrived. Not even close. Whatever happened here didn't happen after the hospital." She looked at the ruined study through the open door. "It happened at the same time."

I felt my breath catch somewhere behind my ribs, an actual physical hitch, because I hadn't done that math. I'd been so busy holding the two attacks in my head as one continuous nightmare, cause and effect, hospital-then-house, that it hadn't once occurred to me to ask whether the timeline even allowed for that sequence. It didn't. It had never allowed for that sequence.

Which meant two things had happened at once, in two different places, executed by whoever or whatever had studied us closely enough to know exactly how to take each of us down individually.

Which meant there wasn't one attacker.

There was more than one, and they'd moved together, on a clock, without either of them needing to see the other's work to know it would be done right.

I looked at Jacob. His jaw had gone tight, the muscle at the corner of it standing out the way it only did when he was working very hard not to say something out loud before he'd finished thinking it all the way through — which told me, as clearly as if he'd said it, that he hadn't done the math either, and that he'd just finished doing it, and that he didn't like where it had landed any better than I did.

"Two," he said, finally, quietly, like the word cost him something to hand over.

"At least two," Rachel said. "Coordinated. Simultaneous. And still no face on either one."

Nobody said anything for a while after that. The porch light burned on, faithful and useless, over a door that had stopped meaning what it used to mean, and somewhere out past the tree line the night went on not telling us anything at all.