Chương 131: Fifteen This Time

The storehouse smelled the same as it had the first time, oiled leather and old sawdust, and Ant hated how familiar that had become in the space of a few weeks. Grant hadn't moved the lamp. He hadn't moved much of anything by the look of him, unimpressed and immovable as ever, except this time the yard behind him wasn't empty. Ant counted without meaning to. Ben, arms crossed near the door. Priya, already talking to someone Ant didn't recognize, hands moving faster than her mouth.

Marcus, off to one side, running a thumb along the edge of his blade the way he always did before anyone had told him there was a reason to. Beyond them, filling out the rest of the yard in twos and threes, more faces than Ant had seen in one place since intake. Men and women he half-recognized from the training yard, none of them looking especially concerned, all of them looking like people who'd been told this was routine and had no reason yet to doubt it. Fifteen.

He counted twice to be sure, and the number didn't change. That's a lot more than four, Mahkir said, close at Ant's side, dulled coat catching none of the lamp's light the way it never did anymore, not since Copper had become a name Ant used without flinching. Yeah. I don't like it. Neither do I. Keep it off your face. Grant raised a hand and the yard's low chatter died fast. Nobody had to be told twice. Ant had already learned exactly how little patience the man had for being ignored.

"Fifteen of you," Grant said, "because last time wasn't enough. That's all you get for now." He let his eyes move once across the group, unhurried, cataloguing rather than reassuring.

"Where we're going and who we're meeting, you'll be told once we're moving and not before. I know some of you don't love that. I don't much care."

"Bigger job, bigger secret." Priya's voice carried easy across the yard, half a joke, half a real question.

"That supposed to make us feel better about it or worse?"

"Neither. It's supposed to make you focus." Grant didn't look at her when he said it.

"You'll get gear issued at the gate. Full kit, not patrol loadout. We move within the hour." Priya pulled a face at his back once he'd turned, silent commentary meant only for the people close enough to catch it, and went to find her own gear without pushing it any further.

The yard broke into its own smaller noise after that, people finding friends, checking straps, and Ant let himself drift toward the gear stacks with the rest of them, doing the math he couldn't stop doing no matter how hard he tried to keep his face calm. This wasn't a patrol. It was overkill, and overkill only got ordered when somebody wanted to guarantee there'd be nothing left on the other end to fight back. Whoever they're sending us at, Mahkir said, they're not expecting a fair fight.

Nobody brings this many people for fair. I know. Do you know who it is yet. No. And that's the part I don't like most. I don't like any of it. Not knowing who, not knowing where, standing in a room with fourteen strangers who have no idea what's coming. Mahkir's tail flicked once, sharp, the closest he came to pacing without actually moving his feet. If this turns into what I think it's going to turn into, I want you close enough that I don't have to guess where you are. I'm always close.

You wandered off from a badger fight once. I still don't understand how you managed that. That badger had a grudge and you weren't helping. I was helping. I was helping by not embarrassing either of us against a badger. The dryness had gone out of his voice by the time he spoke again. I mean it, Ant. Whatever this is, I'd rather know you're beside me than clever. Noted. Try not to make that a permanent standard, though. Clever's saved my life more than once. So has staying close. We're even.

He found Rebekah near the supply carts a few minutes later, doing exactly what she always did when something needed doing quietly — being somewhere ordinary, holding something mundane, looking like she had every reason in the world to be standing there. She had a tally book open against one hip, pen moving in slow, deliberate strokes that weren't recording anything Ant could see.

"Same as you, I'd guess," she said, before he'd gotten close enough to say it himself.

"Counted from the loft window. Wanted to be wrong."

"You're not."

"I never am. It's exhausting." She closed the tally book, unhurried, and fell into step beside him toward the shade of the wall where the noise of the yard wouldn't carry their voices as far.

"You look worried. More than usual."

"Rebekah, the warehouse." He kept his voice low and flat, the same register he used for everything that mattered now.

"Forget it. Whatever it was going to tell us isn't worth what we'll both pay for it if we're still chasing it when this goes wrong." Her eyebrows went up, just slightly.

"That's not like you. You've been sitting on that thread for weeks."

"Things changed. I need you doing something else instead." He made himself say the next part plainly, no hedging in it.

"Get word to Andy. Garrick will be with him, same as Natalia's had them since the serpent order — find one, you've found both. And Natalia herself, before anyone else, because whatever's coming, she's the one who'll know what to do with it." This novel is published on a different platform. Support the original author by finding the official source.

"Do with what? I don't have a target."

"Someone's about to be attacked. Tell them that plainly. Tell them it's coordinated, it's soon, and whoever it lands on needs to know they're not looking at what they think they're looking at." He looked at her, throat tight around the next part.

"I can't get that message out from inside this. You can."

"All right. I'll go." She didn't move yet, though, still watching him the way she did when the performance had dropped out of her completely.

"You're one of them, out there. You keep talking around that part."

"I noticed. I'm choosing not to dwell on it."

"Well, I am, because somebody should." Her voice stayed level, but there was an edge under it now the yard's noise couldn't quite cover.

"This isn't a raid, Ant. Somebody's already decided to fight a battle, and you're walking into it under a fake name, pretending to be someone you're not."

"I've got Mahkir. And whatever's left of my own gear once I need it."

"A cat with no collar and no fight in him that anyone's seen, and gear you can't reach until it's already too late to matter." She said it flat, not unkind, just true.

"I'm not trying to frighten you. I'm trying to keep you frightened, because you get careless the second you're not."

"I'm plenty frightened."

"Good. Hold onto it." Some of the hardness eased back out of her, into the wry, easy look she usually wore, though not all the way.

"The warehouse can wait. I've put weeks into it and I'm not happy about walking away, but it's not worth arguing about. Priorities change."

"I know it wasn't nothing. Doesn't change the answer." Rebekah held his eyes a moment longer than she needed to, and whatever she found there settled whatever argument she might have made.

"I'll go the moment you're through that gate. Faster route than yours, most of the way." She reached out, brief, and set two fingers against his arm, not quite a hand held, not quite nothing either.

"Don't do anything out there that gets you killed before I've got the chance to be properly furious about it."

"I'll try." She kissed him then, quick and hard, one hand fisted in the front of his shirt like she needed something to hold onto while she did it. It didn't last long. She pulled back before anyone in the yard could have seen more than her back turned to him. Ant hadn't seen it coming. For a second he just stood there, catching up to what had happened, and underneath the surprise he found he wasn't sorry about it at all.

"Try harder than that." Her voice had already dropped back into its ordinary register, folding the tally book under one arm like the conversation had never happened.

"Go get your gear, Ethan. You'll want the good boots. It's a long walk to nowhere they're telling us about." The column moved out inside the hour, exactly as Grant had said, humans and their Kithren strung along a dirt road that climbed slow out of the valley and into country Ant didn't recognize from any map he'd studied since arriving. Priya talked for the first hour, mostly to Marcus, mostly about nothing. A cousin's wedding. A dispute over grain tithe.

The light coming through the birch leaves this time of year, which she swore made the whole road look staged for someone's benefit. Marcus said little back, same as always, checking his gear at every stop with the same order every time, buckle and blade and the strap on the anteater's harness, glancing up at his hawk on the wing above them more than the flight strictly required. Ben walked near the back of the column, saying nothing to anyone, and Ant felt his attention the way he'd learned to feel it.

Not on his face. Not on his hands. On Mahkir, always Mahkir, a weight that never fully lifted no matter how many uneventful vortex clears passed between them. Watching Priya laugh at something Marcus hadn't quite meant as a joke, watching Marcus check that same buckle for what had to be the tenth time since the gate, Ant found himself doing arithmetic he didn't want any part of.

The whole column walking toward something none of them had chosen, and two of them were people he'd have called friends if the whole arrangement between them wasn't built out of a lie he still hadn't found a way to end. He didn't know yet what today was going to take from either of them. He suspected, watching Marcus's hands settle again after the buckle passed inspection, that he was about to find out whether the favor Ant had once done him would matter as much as he needed it to.

By the second hour the road narrowed and the trees thickened, and Grant finally called the column to a halt at the crest of a low rise, the ground falling away ahead into open pasture and, beyond it, the low huddled roofs of a town Ant had never seen before.

"This is it," Grant said, low. Nothing like the shout he'd used two weeks back.

"Down through the pasture, past the mill, and we hold at the tree line on the far side. Wait for my signal before anyone so much as breathes wrong." Ant's stomach had already gone tight before Grant finished talking. Some animal part of him read the ground and the angle of approach faster than his conscious mind could catch up: open, exposed, the sort of field you picked when you wanted room to work rather than room to hide. Then he saw the patrol.

Five figures moved along the tree line on the pasture's far side, unhurried, dark green over grey catching what little light made it through the cloud cover, and Ant's whole body went cold before he'd consciously placed a single face. He didn't need faces. He knew the woman at the front by her posture alone, spare and economical, like the ground owed her nothing and she wasn't about to ask for any of it. Raven.

Beside her walked Ray, unmistakable even at this distance, a build too big for subtlety, gesturing at something with both hands the way he always did when a story needed room to breathe. Ant could almost hear the laugh carrying across open ground, even though nothing had been said yet. Mahkir. I see them. Mahkir's voice had gone very quiet, very controlled, the same register he'd worn the last time this exact horror had crossed both their minds at once. Raven's patrol. Fifteen against five.

It's not going to stay five. Look past the trees. Further back, half-hidden in the deeper shadow of the wood behind Raven's patrol, more figures waited without committing to the open ground. A second unit. Exactly what the doubled-patrol order he and Natalia had put in place was supposed to give them. It still wasn't going to be enough. Against anything short of the whole clan, this wasn't a fight worth calling one.

A soft rustle in the undergrowth at Ant's left told him Rebekah had gone before he'd turned to check, already moving low and fast along the tree line's inside edge, quiet enough that nobody not specifically watching for her would have caught it at all. She'd have the layout memorized in seconds: the road, the mill, the exact angle of the pasture, everything Andy and Natalia would need to close the distance fast once she reached them. She's clear, Mahkir said. Good.

Now we just have to survive long enough for it to matter. Grant's hand came up, fingers spread, and nobody made a sound. The whole column settled into the tree line's shadow without a word needing to be said, like they'd done this a hundred times before.

Somewhere below them, Raven's patrol kept walking their slow, unsuspecting line along the pasture's edge, five people who thought they had all the time in the world, and Ant stood among the group about to prove them wrong, close enough now that he could see Ray's mouth still moving through whatever story he hadn't finished telling. Grant leaned in, voice dropped to almost nothing.

"On my mark. Nobody breaks early." Ant's hand found the grip of the plain sword he'd been issued out of pure habit, muscle memory reaching for a blade that wasn't there yet, since the real one still sat folded away behind the small black door only he could open. Beside him, Ben's eyes flicked once toward Mahkir, then back to the pasture, unreadable as ever, and further down the line Priya had gone quiet for the first time since they'd left the gate, one hand resting light on the hilt she hadn't drawn yet.

Grant's hand stayed raised, patient, waiting for the exact moment the ground and the light and Raven's own unhurried pace lined up into something he judged close enough to certain. Then it dropped.