The PowWow

Here is a thing nobody tells you about the worst night of your life: it doesn't have the decency to stop being the worst. It just piles on.

The parking lot lights came back on eleven minutes after they went out — I know because I counted, because counting things is what I do when my hands won't stop shaking and my brain needs somewhere to put itself that isn't my sister is gone. Eleven minutes. Long enough for a coordinated abduction. Short enough that the hospital's night security guard, jogging out to find two grown men on the pavement and no idea why, still had his coffee in his hand. He offered me a sip. I have never wanted anything less in my life and I have wanted very few things as much as I wanted him to stop asking if we were okay.

We were not okay. My brother was still fuzzy after the hit he’d taken and that scared me. I had been hit half a second after that, fast enough that the machine — the thing in my head that reads a room before the room knows it's being read — never got so much as a flicker of warning. My sister had been carried into an unmarked van by something with hands, and the last sound I heard her make was not a scream. It was worse than a scream. It was controlled. Roiya doesn't panic. Roiya fights smart, right up until smart runs out of options, and then apparently she goes quiet, and I am going to be hearing that particular quiet for the rest of my life.

Jacob wasn't talking. Jacob does this thing where the less he says, the more is actually happening under the hood, and right now he had gone all the way down beneath single words to grunts, which meant the engine room was on fire.

"Jeremiah," he said, finally, pulling himself up off the asphalt like the asphalt had personally wronged him. "Now."

I didn't ask why. I already knew why, and it's the kind of why that arrives all at once instead of in pieces, the way real thoughts rarely do for me — usually I get there in installments, snark first, substance later, but this one skipped the queue. They knew our abilities. Jacob's strength. My reading. They studied us specifically, individually, in advance. Which meant this wasn't a decision made in a parking lot. This was a plan with a shelf life, sitting in a drawer somewhere, waiting for the right time.

And if somebody had studied us that carefully, they hadn't stopped at us.

"They know who we go to," I said, already moving toward the Highlander, my voice coming out steadier than I felt, which happens sometimes — my mouth apparently keeping its composure independently of the rest of the operation, like a department that didn't get the memo the building was on fire. "If they know you and me that well, they know Jeremiah's the guy we run to when we don't know what to do."

Jacob was already in the passenger seat, which told me everything about how rattled he was, because Jacob usually moves like a glacier and this time he flowed into the Highlander like a fog.

"Drive fast," he said.

"I was already going to drive fast."

He turned to me with that glacial precision I’d missed, "Faster."

I drove faster than that.

Here's the thing about Jeremiah and Rebecca's porch light. It's been on every single night of my life that I can remember, going back to a childhood I don't always trust the edges of, but I trust that light. Warm, yellow, a little old-fashioned, the kind of bulb that probably violates several energy codes. I have attempted to knock on that door drunk on relief and knock on it hollowed out by grief and every single time, before my knuckles even reached the door, it had opened.

Tonight the porch light was on.

The door didn’t open.

I want to be very precise about what that felt like, because I've spent my whole professional life cataloging the specific textures of dread, and this one gets its own entry. It wasn't the ordinary tension of a bad feeling. It was the tension of a habit breaking — thirty-some years of a door opening before a knock, and my hand froze somewhere around knock number one, because some old, stupid, hopeful part of me needed one more half-second of the world still working the way it was supposed to.

Jacob didn't wait for the half-second. Jacob went through the door.

Not smashed it — the door was already unlocked, hanging half off one hinge like something had opened it in a hurry that wasn't its own — but he went through it the way you go through a door you already know, in your body, before your mind catches up, is a crime scene.

I have been in a lot of ransacked houses. I did a lot of it before the machine and I really understood each other, back when I was just a detective with a good eye and no idea what "good eye" was actually catching. Ransacked has a grammar. Drawers pulled and dumped, not shattered. Cushions slit, not scattered whole across the room. Somebody looking for something leaves a house that reads like a question.

This house read like a period. A hard one. Maybe even an exclamation point. Furniture in pieces that weren't going back together. Jeremiah's study — his study, the room I have sat in a hundred times while he found exactly the right verse for whatever mess I'd walked in carrying — looked like something had picked up the entire bookshelf and used it as a verb. Not one book left with its spine intact. Rebecca's reading lamp, the one with the cracked stained-glass shade she refused to replace because Jacob made it in seventh grade, was ground into the carpet in pieces too small to be an accident of violence. Somebody had stepped on it. Repeatedly. On purpose.

Nothing was missing that I could see. The safe was untouched. Jeremiah's wallet sat on the kitchen counter exactly where he always left it, next to his reading glasses, next to a mug of coffee gone cold with maybe a third of it drunk.

This wasn't a search.

This was a message, and the message was: we can get to the people you can't protect, whenever we want, and we didn't even need to hurry.

"Jeremiah," Jacob said again, into a house that was not answering him, and his voice on the second try had a crack in it I have heard exactly twice before in my life, both times right before he did something I couldn't stop.

I checked every room. No blood. I said that out loud, at some point, mostly for myself. "No blood, Jacob. That's — that's something. That's not nothing."

"No blood is not the same as safe."

"I know that." I did know that. Knowing it didn't stop me from needing to say the other part first.

We found nothing. That is the whole and complete result of a room-by-room search of the only house in my life that has never once, not once, failed to have an answer waiting in it. Jeremiah gone. Rebecca gone. No note, no struggle resolved into a body on a floor, no demand taped to a mirror in movie-villain cursive. Just the specific, complete absence of two people who are supposed to always, always be exactly where you left them, wearing the exact same cardigan, ready to tell you what a hard thing means.

I have stood in the wreckage of a lot of terrible nights in this family. I want to be honest about something, because Jeremiah taught me that honesty is worth more than composure: every single one of those nights, I had somewhere to bring the wreckage. A person older than me, steadier than me, who could take what I was carrying and hand it back with a verse and a shape and a here's where we go from here.

I was standing in his ruined study with my sister taken, a mark already darkening along one cheekbone , and no idea — none, genuinely none — of who to call to make this make sense.

So I called the only other person I had left who might actually pick up.

"Rachel." My voice did the thing again, steady on the outside, somebody else's voice wearing my face. "I need you to come to Jeremiah's. And I need you to bring backup, and I need you to bring it now, because—" I looked at the room. At the glass. At the coffee going cold on the counter, a third of it drunk, like whoever drank it had every intention of finishing the cup. "Roiya's gone. Jeremiah and Rebecca are gone. And I don't —"

I stopped. Started again.

"I don't have anybody to call who's going to tell me what this means. That's never happened before. I don't like it."

There was a pause on the line, and then Rachel, God bless her, didn't ask me if I was okay. She didn't offer me coffee I didn't want. She said, "I'm fifteen minutes out," and then, quieter, the part that actually got through: "You don't need somebody to tell you what it means, Levi. You need somebody to stand in the room with you while you figure it out. I can do that part right now. Fifteen minutes."

I hung up. Looked at Jacob, who was standing very still in the wreck of a room that had raised us both, staring at a coffee mug like it might explain something if he looked at it long enough.

"He didn't even get to finish his coffee," Jacob said.

It wasn't a big statement. It wasn't dramatic. It was just true, and it was the truest thing either of us had said since the parking lot, and for some reason it was the detail that finally cracked something open in my chest that I'd been holding shut through pure spite since the lights went out over the hospital.

"No," I said. "He didn't."

We stood there, the two of us, in a house that had never once failed to have an answer, waiting for the sound of a car in the driveway, and for the first time in my entire life, nobody older and steadier was coming to tell us what any of this meant.

I did not know it yet, but that was going to have to become a skill. Starting tonight.