Raven’s POV
The mountain looked different coming down.
Going up in the dark, everything had been threat-shaped, every shadow carrying the potential of something worse behind it, every sound catalogued and measured against a threat index that had been running at maximum capacity for approximately eighteen hours straight. Coming down in the gray pre-dawn, the trees were just trees. The road was just road. The ice beneath the tires was still treacherous but it was honest about it, not hiding anything, just cold and indifferent the way the natural world is cold and indifferent, without agenda.
My mother rode behind Eli.
He had insisted, with the particular quiet insistence of someone who had spent twenty-three years not getting things he wanted and had decided tonight was the night that pa
