Page 27 of The Evening Wolves

“Not him, you—” Words failed him. “You butt-lord!”

A vacuum opened on the other end of the call.

“This is the single greatest moment of my life,” North said.

“Thank you, Emery,” Shaw said. “I’m flattered.”

“Of course, you’re flattered, you horse’s ass. You don’t even know what a butt-lord is.”

“I know what a butt-lord is! It’s like a power bottom, but in chain mail—”

“I swear to Christ,” Emery said, “I will murder both of you if you don’t start talking.”

“His name’s Jace Vermilya,” North said. “And he looks like a walking, talking argument for autofellatio.”

Shaw sounded inordinately proud of himself as he began, “We followed him to these trailers—”

The staccato of gunfire broke through his words.

Then silence.

“Motherfucker,” North breathed.

“Are you okay?”

“Yeah, yeah. It was in the compound. We’re good.”

“Send me the address,” Emery said. “And don’t go in there.”

6

When headlights appeared, John-Henry tensed inside the Mustang. His breath had long since stopped steaming, and the air was arctic; he’d kept the windows cracked so that his breath wouldn’t fog the glass. Not that he could see much—a hundred yards, give or take, of rutted dirt road. Around the car rose tall weeds and prairie grasses, brittle and brown from winterkill. When the air moved, they brushed the side of the Mustang. The sound was alien: feathering and soft, but also metallic.

The headlights drew closer, and John-Henry focused on controlling his breath as he picked up his Glock. By degrees, the shape of the vehicle resolved into the familiar outline of the Odyssey. The van slowed. Then it stopped. The headlights went off, and Emery got out. For a moment, the weak yellow of the van’s interior light glazed the side of his face. The hard line of his jaw, and John-Henry’s memory of how it fit his hand. The angle of cheekbone, and John-Henry’s body knowing how it fit against his shoulder. The dark hair that was a little too long, pulled by the wind, glinting like sable.

Tired. That was John-Henry’s first thought: Emery looked tired. But there was something else, too. A hardness that John-Henry remembered. He hadn’t seen that look in a long time. In years, actually. The set of his mouth. The scarecrow eyes. Every inch of him armored against a world he refused to give ground to. It was the way Emery had looked when he’d come back to Wahredua, ready for a fight. It was the way he’d looked as a boy. And John-Henry was shocked, in the first moment, to see the stranger in front of him. And maybe it was the fact that he knew Emery better than he knew just about anyone by this point. Or maybe it was that he knew himself, as he ought to have known himself all those years ago. Maybe it was simply that they were both older now. But with his next heartbeat, John-Henry was shocked again to see how all that armor only revealed how vulnerable Emery was.

The van door shut with a quiet thud. Steps clipped the frozen dirt. When the wind blew, the winterkill grasses shuddered sideways. Emery crouched at the Mustang’s passenger window, looking in, and he looked like Emery again—the question scrawled in the tilt of his eyebrows, the poor attempt to master his impatience. To his own surprise, John-Henry grinned, the feeling something like relief, and got out of the car.

“I see you’re in a better mood,” Emery said.

“Not really. Happy to see you, I guess.”

That smoothed out Emery’s brow. Then he scowled again. “Do you want to explain yourself?”

“I’m not going to sit on my ass, Ree.”

“That’s exactly what you’re going to do. Your involvement endangers you—”

John-Henry smoothed Emery’s hair back. Sable. And holding flecks of starlight like it had a static charge. “We do things together.”

It was around his mouth. At his eyes. John-Henry wondered how, for all those years, he hadn’t seen it, how easily Emery could be hurt.

Then Emery grunted. “That’ll be a wonderful way to tell people we’re going to prison together.”

Laughing quietly, John-Henry pointed down the dirt road. “North and Shaw are that way.”

They made their way down the narrow break in the prairie grass. The ground was slick and hard and rutted, and more than once, they steadied each other as they made their way through the darkness. After a couple of hundred yards, a darker shadow coalesced in the darkness ahead of them. A dark gray Impala, no frills. Apparently North and Shaw had learned a lesson about driving showy cars.

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