Page 115 of Bought for Blood

They have them in the loading bay in two lines. Gray coveralls. Bare feet on the concrete. Cuffed at the wrists in front, runes going dull blue up both arms of every one of them, handlers walking the lines with tablets.

I stood exactly like that for a year.

A woman with a clipboard comes straight at me, steps past me without knowing she’s done it, and walks away.

“There are more people in this bay than my ward held,” I say low when she’s gone.

“Then they’ve emptied more than one building into this hole,” Odile says under her breath.

My hands have started to shake. There are guards all through this bay and thirteen of us standing in the middle of it. Every scrap of what’s keeping us here is coming out of me.

The pull is not down here. It’s above me now, and east, and I have been standing in the wrong place for ninety seconds.

Then the second truck’s tail-lift starts to rise, and I see her.

Red hair. She’s at the back of the truck bed with her wrists double-banded, and a chain running from the cuffs to a ring bolted through the floor. Two handlers are on her. A third stands well back. Even here, even now, they give her the room.

Her head is down.

“Kalli—”

Crowe’s hand comes over my mouth.

It isn’t gentle, and it isn’t steady either. His palm is against my teeth, and I can feel it shaking. He isn’t looking at me at all. He is looking at that truck bed. His other hand has gone to the front of his coat, over the place where the knife is, and it stays there.

He takes one step toward the ramp.

Faine’s hand comes up against his chest.

She doesn’t say anything. She doesn’t push. She just stands in front of him with her hand there, and Crowe stops with his weight already forward, eyes locked on Kalli. The two of them hold like that while the tail-lift comes up and the doors go across.

The truck pulls out. It grinds up the ramp, and the sound of it goes away over the quarry floor.

Crowe watches the whole thing. He watches the space where it was for two seconds after it’s gone.

Then he takes his hand off my mouth.

“Go and get him,” he says. He hasn’t looked at me. “We’ll take this bay. Odile’s people hold the ramp.”

“Crowe—”

“Go.”

I go.

Through the inside doors into a corridor with strip lights, and the pull drags up and left the moment I’m through them.

The glamour is stretched over thirteen people behind me, and it’s tearing.

I feel it go thin. Then it frays at one edge, and I can’t hold it.

A man shouts behind me in the bay.

The whole thing tears through the middle.

The lights come up properly. An alarm starts somewhere overhead. There’s shooting behind me, deafening in the concrete. A guard is standing eight feet away, looking at my face.

Shit!