Page 37 of The Jackal

I held his eyes a while. Most men flinch from that look. Craine stood in it. I'll give him that much.

"I'll see you around, Director Craine."

Then, I turned my back on him and his rifles both—slow, so he'd understand what it meant that I could—and walked back to the car where the woman I loved was waiting with her arms full of dogs.

The SUVs sat a moment. Then, they pulled out one by one and were gone.

I crouched in the open door. Mags looked up at me over the heads of her survivors, eyes red and far away, still down in the worst of it. I put my hand to the side of her face and she leaned into it.

"Let's get you cleaned up," I said.

She nodded, dull. A person with a stalled engine.

So, I did the one thing I knew might reach her. Not because it was the moment. Because the only thing that pulls a person out of that pit is being needed by something that isn't done needing them.

"And one more thing," I said, "I'd like to meet Max. As soon as you’re ready."

It went through her like a current. Her eyes came back and found my face, and something moved behind them—the grief still there, but under it, a second thing, older and stronger. Purpose. The set of a woman who's remembered she has work to do and someone to do it for.

Good girl, I thought, and didn't say.

She was going to be okay. It would take time. But she was going to be okay. We were.

And Craine had another thing coming. He'd put his hands on the thing I loved and counted on my fear to keep me in line.

I don't have any fear. He'd just handed me the one weapon I've never had a use for, and pointed it at himself, and called it a courtesy.

I'd see him around. I meant it as a promise.

19

MAGNOLIA

Dominion Hall looked different in the gray light of the worst morning of my life.

The first time I'd come up that long drive, I'd felt like a peasant at the manor gate, all wrong in my dusty car with my clipboard and my dog hair. Now, the gate opened for me like I belonged to the place. I understood that I did, that somewhere in the last impossible day I'd become a thing this fortress protected.

I'd have given anything—the house, the belonging, all of it—to have my old dog back and my old, ordinary life where nobody had to protect me from anything worse than a squirrel.

Cash carried me in. I could have walked. He carried me, anyway, up the steps and through those church-tall doors, Beans and Tiny pressing at his heels because they would not be more than a foot from me now. I let him, because I'd learned somewhere around three in the morning that letting him was a thing I was allowed to do.

Then, the women took me. That's the only way I know to say it.

There was a low current of talk, Cash's mouth against my hair telling me he'd be close, that he had a thing to handle and then he'd be close—and then his arms were gone and other arms were there. The men peeled off toward whatever grim business the day held for them and left me to the people who knew what to do with a woman in the state I was in.

Claire reached me first. Of course, she did.

She took one look at me—the blood dried brown on my shirt, my face, my hands, the flat blankness of a person who has seen too much too fast—and her whole face went fierce and wet at once.

She didn't say a single useless thing. She didn't ask if I was okay. She just said, "Come here, honey," in a voice with steel under the sugar, and folded me in. Over her shoulder, I saw Joy already coming, one hand under the great curve of her belly, her gentle face gone soft with a grief that was for me.

"Oh, Maggie," Joy said, and that was all, and it was enough.

They got me upstairs. I have almost no memory of the stairs. I remember a bathroom bigger than my bedroom, all pale stone and soft light, and I remember Claire turning the water on hot while Joy sat me down on a bench because she'd read, correctly, that my legs were about done.

I remember them not making me talk. That was the mercy of it. Nobody asked me to narrate the worst night of my life. They just moved around me with the quiet competence of women who had, every one of them, clearly had their own worst nights in this house, and knew that the first thing you do for a person in the wreckage is get the blood off her and put her somewhere warm.

"Your dogs are fine," Claire said, reading the one thing I was frantic about before I could ask it. "They're right outside the door. Nobody's separating you. I already told them if anyone tries to crate your dogs, I'll write a podcast episode about it." A beat. "Too soon?"