Page 51 of The Jackal

"They found Craine," I said. Quiet. Plain. "I have to go."

I watched her take it in. And here is the measure of Magnolia Bennett, the thing I'll hold about that moment as long as I live: she didn't argue. She didn't ask me not to, didn't ask if it had to be me, didn't hand me one ounce of her fear to carry into a night where I couldn't afford the weight. Her father's daughter, all the way down. She'd spent her whole childhood watching people she loved walk out doors like this one, and she knew the only gift you can give a man at that door is a clean exit.

"Okay," she said. Steady. Then, because she is also entirely herself: "Don't forget about my dad. He lands tomorrow, and if you stand up the colonel because you were out doing—" she waved a hand at all of it, the robe, the dark, the war "—whatever this is, I cannot protect you."

I chuckled. Middle of the night, on my way to a hunt, and the woman made me laugh. "Wouldn't miss it," I said. "I can't wait." And the strange thing was, I meant it.

She caught my hand and pressed her mouth to my knuckles once, hard, and let me go. That was the whole goodbye. It was exactly right.

I dressed fast and quiet—dark, practical, the clothes of my old life that had been waiting folded in my pack for a night like this. I was at the door with my hand on the latch when I stopped.

Max.

I'd nearly forgotten him, and it shames me to say it, except that forgetting only lasted the length of a heartbeat and he'd never have allowed it, anyway. I eased open the adjoining door, and he was already standing.

Not sleeping. Not startled awake. Standing, in the middle of the dark sitting room, facing the door, ears up, eyes on me—dressed for work himself in the only clothes he owns. Beans and Tiny snored on around him in their heaps. Max stood in the middle of them like a man who'd heard the phone ring through the wall and gotten up without being called.

Of course, he knew. Of course, he did. He'd been listening to the frequency his whole life; he'd heard the change in the house the way he'd once heard bombs sleeping under roads. Somewhere out there was work, and the work was mine, and what was mine was his.

I didn't say come. I didn't say anything. I just held the door, and he crossed the room and fell in at my knee, and we went out together into the sleeping house.

Man and dog, down the long, dark hall, moving quiet through a fortress full of family—and I'll tell you what walked with us, because I felt it plain as the floor under my feet. Not nerves. Not the cold arithmetic of a hard job. Something older and steadier than either.

Certainty. The kind I've only ever trusted when it comes up from all the way down. Whatever was about to happen in a dead admiral's house on the edge of the water—whatever this night decided to be—it was supposed to happen, and we were supposed to be the ones walking into it, and we were going to do it the way we'd do everything from here to the end.

As one.

27

MAGNOLIA

The bed was too big without him in it.

That was the first thing, and it was a stupid thing, because I'd slept alone in a bed my whole adult life and never once found it too big. But he'd been in it an hour ago, warm and mine, and now there was a Cash-shaped absence where all that warmth had been. My body kept reaching into the cold half of the mattress in its sleep and waking me up when it came back empty-handed.

I gave up around the hour when the dark goes its deepest, when even the harbor outside the tall windows had gone flat and black and stopped pretending to be anything but night. I lay there doing the thing I'd sworn I wouldn't do—running the reel.

Cash, out there somewhere in that dark. Our dog, out there with him, the dog we’d just adopted, just gotten whole, walking into whatever the night held at the knee of the man he'd decided to keep. I'd told Cash to go with a clean face and a steady voice, and I'd meant it, and I didn't regret it. But meaning it and being able to sleep through it turned out to be two entirely separate skills. I only had the one.

So, I got up.

Beans and Tiny were off their cushions before my feet hit the floor, because, of course, they were—they'd clocked that half the pack was gone, Max vanished into the night with Cash, and they were not about to let me out of their sight.

I pulled on the softest thing I could find, one of Cash's shirts that came to my knees and smelled like him, and the three of us slipped out into the sleeping fortress to go find something to do with the fear besides lie under it.

I didn't know where I was going. I just followed the one warm light burning at the bottom of the great, dark stairs.

It led me to a room I hadn't seen yet—a long, grand sitting room on the harbor side of the house, all tall windows and good bones, the kind of room that had clearly been standing there absorbing other people's worst nights for a while. There were sofas in it the size of small boats, deep and soft and heaped with throw blankets, arranged to face the black water. A low fire going in a fireplace you could have parked my car in. And every one of those sofas had a woman on it.

They looked up when I came in, and not one of them looked surprised to see me.

"There she is," Claire said, from the middle of the biggest sofa, and patted the cushion beside her. "We wondered how long you'd last up there. Nobody makes it through the first one. Come sit."

Banjo lifted his big head from where it was pillowed on Claire's lap—Banjo, who I'd delivered to this house a lifetime ago that same day, already sprawled across the sofa like he'd been born to it, like he'd never spent a day in a concrete run in his life. He saw me and his tail went, but he didn't get up. He'd found his person. He wasn't leaving her for anybody. I loved him fiercely for it.

"Is that dog on the furniture," I said, and my voice came out steadier than I felt, "or is that furniture just growing dogs now?"

"Oh, the furniture's a lost cause now,” said a woman I didn't know, bright and quick, curled sideways over the arm of a chair with the boneless ease of a person who'd never once sat in a chair the way it was designed. "The men built this whole place from the ground up and thought of everything—blast doors, the works—and not one of them thought to plan for dogs. Then, you rolled up and now there's fur on a sofa that cost more than my first car, and honestly? Best thing that's ever happened to it. I'm Vivi, by the way." She grinned. "Sit anywhere. You've already ruined us. Might as well enjoy it."