Chapter 16: What He Heard

Wyatt's POV

I didn't say anything for the length of time it took the first gray to cross thirty feet of frozen ground.

I wanted to be calm, and I was, which surprised me.

A man hears that he has a date to die, and I'd have bet he would shout or sit down.

What I felt was quiet.

It was the quiet you get when a rope you've hauled on all your life finally comes taut.

At last you know what was on the other end.

Then the gray reached the fence, and I stopped thinking.

I took the splitting maul from the truck bed and met it at the rail.

It came with its arms out and its white eyes fixed on the pickup.

I put the maul through its skull and it dropped, and the sound wasn't loud, just a flat thud in the snow.

The second was ten feet behind.

The third was on me before I could swing.

I took it by the collar, spun it against the gate and finished it.

It was over in a minute.

I stood there with the maul hanging and my breath smoking and blood on my hands.

Signe hadn't moved from the cab.

I walked back to the window and looked at her.

"Three thousand people behind a door," I said. "And I held it."

"Yes."

"Did it work?"

She stared at me.

"Did you live?" I said. "That's all I want to know. Did the woman I held that door for get out?"

Her face did something awful.

"No. I drove two blocks, and my mask was torn, and I breathed it. I died that night."

"Then it worked," I said.

"What?"

"You're here. You're alive and warm and you're in Tor's pickup. Something worked," I said.

"Wyatt, that's not."

"Tell me the rest."

She told me.

She told me about the lines in the air, the receipt and the debt and the countdown.

She said the thing had put my name in its tasks four times, and she'd taken it for a guide.

She said it was a collector, and I was what it was collecting.

She said I had paid for her second chance with my life, and the bill came due again on the eleventh.

I listened to every word.

When she finished I leaned both forearms on the door.

I set my forehead against the window frame, because I needed something to hold me up.

"That's why you were leaving," I said.

"If I'm not near you, you can't stand where I stand."

"And you thought you'd tell me this after," I said.

"I thought I'd be gone."

"Signe," I said.

"I was trying to save you."

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