Dead Man Walking (The Fallen Men, #6)

by Darling, Giana

  He stared down at me, his face hidden from the moon’s light, so dark he seemed like an abyss with a disembodied voice. “‘When she carried on her whoring so openly and flaunted her nakedness, I turned in disgust from her, as I had turned in disgust from her sister. Yet she increased her whoring,’” he quoted from Ezekiel in the Bible. “I almost turned from you, sweet Bea, because of your sister and your filthy relationship with the biker, but that would have been a mistake. I am the Prophet of God, I have the power to cleanse you of your sister’s taint, of your biker man’s touch, of your many recent sins. I will help make you pure and whole again so we can be as one.”

  Tabby hadn’t followed us, which was why, I’m sure, he felt secure in touching my cheek tenderly and whispering, “I’ll kill her, too, my sweet Bea. So we can be together in all ways as man and wife. Just be patient.”

  Be patient.

  I would be.

  I’d wait until the moment presented itself, and then I would run. If I couldn’t run, I would fight. I would not go gracefully into Seth’s fucked-up night.

  He stepped into the creek, wading into the middle where the water was hip-deep. He lowered me into the stream, the icy water shocking my system. The feeling began to burn through me, thawing my limbs of desensitization with the cold.

  Hope sprang spring green and delicate in my chest.

  I held very, very still as sensation returned first to my fingers and toes.

  Above me, Seth began to spout scripture as he held me half-submerged in the arctic flow. “‘For we were all baptised by one Spirit to form one body…’”

  I tuned out his zealous babble, gently clenching the muscles in my feet, feeling the pull in response, then seizing the ones in my calves, forearms, and thighs.

  My body was coming to life, not through God but through science and my sheer will.

  I was going to get free.

  I would not die here with this madman. I would not leave Loulou, not my niece and nephew, not the club I called my home.

  I would absolutely not leave Priest without his heart, once more a dead man walking through his life without love.

  “‘Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: The old has gone, the new is here!’” Seth finalized my baptism with a flourish of raised voice, plunging me completely beneath the freezing waters.

  I held my breath and sent a quick prayer to my God that I would survive this.

  Then I moved.

  With still reawakening arms, I shoved violently at Seth’s hands on my shoulders. He was unprepared for any movement, so immediately, his grip slipped. My hand found a large rock by his knee and pushed off against it, propelling me down the river.

  Spluttering, I breached the surface for a gasping breath and saw Seth powering through the currents after me. I prayed as I was pulled beneath the surface that God would make the waters quicker than the man.

  When I scrambled to the surface again, I was three metres away.

  Then four.

  Then six.

  The river bent, taking me around the corner and out of sight of Seth. I fought my uncooperative limbs, trying to make it to the river bank. The rocks were slippery in my weak hold, the cold water robbing me of breath even when I surfaced to gulp it into my tight lungs. The effort exhausted me, but I was able to drag myself over the rocks to dry ground. I lay panting for only a moment before I heard the shush and splash of Seth still chasing after me.

  I didn’t hesitate.

  Priest had told me once that people seemed the most lucid in those moments right before he killed them, even if he’d spent hours decimating their minds and bodies. A clarity and calmness overtook them, and they submitted almost peacefully to their imminent doom.

  I felt the clarity, but I fought tooth and nail against the inevitability of my doom.

  I pushed my numb limbs and started to run, straight into the dark forest.

  The crunch of snow beneath my feet, the hard bite of cold into my soles, and the icy fingers of air clutching at my wet hair and my drenched clothes—none of it registered. As I tore over the ragged terrain and sharp branches of bare alder trees slashed my skin like tissue paper, all I could see was hope dangling at some interminable point in the distance, drawing me forward. My breath was a steaming hiss in the cold as I forced myself faster, harder.

  I had to escape.

  I had to.

  He would kill me, I knew, if not the moment he caught me, then soon after. There was no reasoning with madness, no words I could use that would properly translate into the language of his insanity. He was gone to it, as lost in his own mind as I was in the thicket of dense, dark trees.

  Behind me, the sound of crunching snow under his heavy tread and the sharp crack of tree limbs giving away to a moving force. He was gaining on me.

  I started to shout for help, my voice breathless and too shrill to carry. It was my last hope. My body was flagging, feet dragging through the snow. I couldn’t feel them anymore in the cold, and my head was spinning from the exertion and the remnants of drugs.

  I wasn’t surprised when the harsh puncture of heaving breath broke through the air behind me, and a few seconds later, after dodging around a tree to outmaneuver him, a heavy, cracking weight settled against the back of my skull.

  My legs crumpled beneath me, my torso impacting with the cold ground before I could get my hands out to catch my fall. The air shot from my lungs in a painful, bursting exhale.

  The next second, he was on me, pressing his full weight into my back, my relatively recently healed ribs aching with the pressure.

  “You can run, Bea, but you are God’s plan for me. There is no escaping that,” Seth cooed into my ear even as he tried to pin my hands behind my back.

  He was close enough I could reach him with my teeth. I lunged before he could process the movement in the dark, clasping my teeth over the edge of his jaw and jerking hard. Flesh came away in my mouth; his coarse cry blasted in my face before he reared back and away.

  “Fuck that,” I said before I spat out the piece of him I’d torn away.

  Using the slippery nature of the snow to my advantage, I rolled to my front and wildly scratched at Seth’s face.

  He screamed as I caught flesh and tore from forehead to chin, his flesh collecting under my nails, his blood trailing after them. Taking advantage, I writhed out from under him, my hands burning in the snow as I struggled. When he lunged blindly after me, I kicked him in the chin, delighting in the way his head snapped back with a crunch before I flipped over and got to my feet.

  I ran again, lungs burning with acid, muscles spasming as I pushed them too hard. Sobs racked my chest, tears falling hot from my eyes onto cold cheeks as I sprinted for my life.

  If I could just get out of this godforsaken forest, Priest might have a chance of finding me. I knew he wouldn’t stop until he did, that every thought, breath, and action he took since I was taken would be in service of finding me.

  I made it another kilometer, maybe, but my body was failing me, dark spots obscuring my vision, my feet so numb I could barely move over the ground.

  I collapsed before he could reach me, dragging myself by the fingers through the snow, hoping to find some kind of hiding place where he wouldn’t find me.

  God was not with me.

  Something tangled in my hair and wrenched my head back, Seth’s voice descending softly sinister in my ear. “Stop fighting me. You’re only hurting yourself. You are mine, Bea. This is God’s divine plan.”

  “You aren’t a Prophet, Seth. You’re a fucking madman,” I seethed as I struggled.

  It was too dark to see more than the outline of his face, but I sensed the twisting of anger in him seconds before he lashed out and hit me sideways across the jaw. Pain exploded in my head, my thoughts fizzing out into nothingness, white noise filling the space. His hand came up to grasp my chin, forcing me to look over at him, but he ventured too close to my mouth, and I claimed his thumb with my teeth. The hot tang
of his blood flooded over my tongue as I dissected the pad with my bite.

  He made a fierce noise of anger like a waking dragon, but he didn’t release his hold on me. Instead, he picked up a loose rock and banged it against my cheek, the skin splitting open like an overripe peach. At that point, there was so much pain and numbness from the beating, the running, and the cold that I was beyond feeling it.

  I had the sticky, iron slick of blood on my mouth, but I wasn’t certain anymore who it belonged to. Both of us were bleeding from multiple contusions, a thick ribbon of it falling off his jaw from the deep gouge I’d made in his left cheek.

  “Look at me,” I demanded, wrenching to look over my shoulder at him as he successfully pinned my hands to either side of my torso with his knees. “Look at the blood on my hands, your skin under my nails. I am not what you want me to be. I never was.”

  He studied me in the darkness, shafts of moonlight cutting through the trees like knives. I shouldn’t have taken that as a symbol of hope, those bladed points of light, but they were too much Priest, too much me not to take courage from them.

  “Not now, maybe,” he conceded thoughtfully, hands twisting mine so painfully I cried out. “Not yet, but you will be again.”

  And then he hit me over the head with a rock, and I descended into blackness once again.

  Priest

  The Fallen compound was littered with bikes lined up in the moonlight, the silver glint of it on the black tanks making them look insectile, some scene from one of Bea’s classic horror flicks. Men in leather gathered in the garage bays of Hephaestus Auto, arming themselves while even more met in the Chapel, discussing tactics, poring over road maps and hand-drawn ones made by men who’d live so long in the mountains of the coast, they knew them better than cartographers.

  Everyone was mobilized to find Bea.

  We’d spent the day trying to track them from the field, but even Kodiak, who had a talent for such things, drew up blank after a few kilometers in either direction. Bea’s friend Eric was in surgery for the bullet wound put there by the cops when they assumed he’d been the one to fire the gun, but Loulou went to his house and spoke with his mother, looking for clues. She came back with an annotated Bible scrawled in splotchy ink, the notes in the margins all adjustments to God’s scripture he’d been encouraged to make by the false fucking Prophet.

  Opal Burns was in custody, cracked open like a nut crushed into the hard wall of police pressure. She was a rule-abiding woman who’d been led astray by the Prophet, and even though Officer Hutchinson told me she was remorseful, ashamed, and eager to talk about the teachings at this Prophet’s ‘New Church’, she had yet to reveal a name.

  Things were moving but not fast enough.

  Not for me, not for Bea.

  I did not imagine horrible deeds being done to her. It was easy enough to get into the mind of a serial killer when, by definition, I was one myself.

  He did not want her to die. She was an essential part of his plan, and her purpose could not be achieved without her alive.

  So he wouldn’t kill her.

  Not if he didn’t have to.

  I ran those words through my head like a chant to focus on the unbridled ferocity that raged inside my cold, hard shell.

  Cressida and Lila kept asking me, when I stalked through the clubhouse on my way to weaponize the men or urge Z to get a fucking move on, if I was okay.

  I didn’t answer.

  In truth, I’d never been okay. It wasn’t in my goddamn wheelhouse.

  But this gave a new definition to not okay.

  If I’d been a breathing corpse before, I was a ghost now, haunting the earth with one purpose. To rectify a wrong.

  Cressida stopped me again with a hand on my arm, Prince held in her other. He was a smiley kid, already looking the spitting image of his dad.

  I almost didn’t halt, and for anyone else, I wouldn’t have.

  Bea was the only thing that mattered.

  What happens to a man who revolves around a singular obsession only to have it ripped away from him?

  I blinked blankly at Cress.

  She squeezed my forearm, brown eyes wide and pretty with sincerity. “I know you’re busy, so I won’t stop you from doing what you need to do to bring Bea home. I just wanted to say, Priest, if anyone can bring her back to us, it’s you. If anyone can descend into this man’s underworld and return with our sunshine girl, it’s you.”

  I blinked at her again because I didn’t understand what she was emotionally implying. Sometimes, that happened.

  A small, sad smile flirted with her mouth as she took her arm away to gently bounce a babbling Prince against her chest. “What I’m saying, Priest, is that you were a hero once for me, and I know you’ll be a hero today for her.”

  The shutter speed of this blink was slow, stuttering as I fought to compute her words.

  Hero.

  The word made me want to laugh.

  Killer. Psychopath. Enforcer of The Fallen MC.

  These were my monikers. I was comfortable with them. Maybe I would have even been proud of them if I was built to be proud of myself for things.

  Hero was not in my lexicon.

  But something about Cress’s overly pretty speech, a habit she had from reading too goddamn much, resonated in my hollow chest.

  For Bea.

  Yeah, for Bea I could be whatever the fuck I needed so long as it meant she was back at my side where she belonged, shooting me one of those bright smiles for no reason other than that she was happy to be with me.

  I jerked my chin up at Cress, but she got me, smiling the secret smile of mothers that know better than the rest of us.

  As if prompted by my thoughts, the door to the clubhouse swung open, inviting thick silence inside the walls. I turned, the hairs on the back of my neck standing on end because instinct told me who would be standing there.

  Phillipa Lafayette.

  She seemed small in the same doorframe used by men twice her height and build, with three times the fucking gumption. The artificial lights beaming into the lot behind her cast her all in shadow, but I had good eyes for the dark, and I saw the way she wrung her hands and bit her lip.

  I saw when she tipped her chin into the air the way her daughters did when they were convinced of their own argument before they even started to fight.

  “Mum, what are you doing here?” Loulou asked, standing up from one of the couches where she’d been holding a biker babe kinda vigil with the other old ladies. Her eyes were raw from shedding tears, voice weak from the grip of them in her throat, but she still held herself like biker royalty as she stared down the mother that had disappointed both her and Bea.

  A growl rattled in my chest. Phillipa’s head turned my way, a little shiver rolling through her. I grinned at her, fast and feral.

  She rocked back a little step, then rolled her shoulders and moved farther into the room. “I’m here to help you get my daughter back.”

  “You know something?” Loulou whispered. “How?”

  I moved forward, not stopping even when Phillipa flinched at my approach.

  “Priest,” Nova called as he left the Chapel. “Try not to give the woman a heart attack ’fore she can share her info.”

  I stopped two feet from her, arms crossed over my chest, head cocked as I stared at her unblinkingly.

  She wrung her hands so hard it looked painful. “Lately, I’ve been having a bit of a crisis of faith.” There were a few snorts from the biker babes. “I’ve found myself enjoying the company of the club and I didn’t know how to reconcile that with my beliefs…or maybe the beliefs I’d inherited through my marriage with Benjamin.”

  “We don’t speak that fuckin’ name in this place,” Zeus said from the door to the Chapel, staring down his mother-in-law without sympathy.

  “Well, that’s understandable,” Phillipa agreed awkwardly before dragging in a deep breath. “I turned to First Light for guidance, my community there. In particular, S
eth Linley took me under his spiritual wing, and for a time, I thought he was helping me. Now, I see he just confused me, made me lose sight of everything important.”

  She hiccoughed on a sob. “My daughters, most of all. Now, Bea’s been taken by some killer, and the last words we would’ve spoken to each other were vile.”

  “Get to the point,” I encouraged, baring my teeth.

  Her eyes widened, but she swallowed her fear. “The point is, I was thinking about how I’d done Bea wrong because I’d followed Seth down this zealous path that wasn’t true to me, and something occurred to me. Isn’t that what this Prophet man is doing? Seth is so lovely, so charismatic. But Bea told me these psychopaths could be like that? It’s one of the reasons they’re so dangerous. And Seth? He’s so close to my father’s flock, with Natalie Ashley, who was killed, and Amelia Stephens. He was so close with Opal Burns, he offered to mentor her misguided son. I just wondered if that might be helpful.”

  “Call Lion,” Zeus demanded to no one in particular before turning to head back into our chapel. “Curtains will find this motherfucker’s hidey-hole before the damn pigs.”

  Loulou went to her mother, softly thanking her for the information, but the rest of us ignored her. In my humble opinion, the bitch still didn’t deserve Bea’s affection.

  “We aren’t sharing this information with them yet, right?” Carson Gentry, our new prospect, asked with wide eyes. “They did fuck all to protect Bea.”

  “No,” I promised so darkly the kid’s eyes blew even wider. “We’re past cop justice. This is outlaw territory now, and that motherfucker Seth Linley will be judged by me.”

  * * *

  * * *

  An old cabin high on the mountains beyond Entrance off the winding Sea to Sky Highway had once been owned by a prospector who made a minimal fortune in the 1862 Gold Rush. The forests and peaks were littered with abandoned structures built by outliers and rebels.

  This particular one was built by a Ronald Havisham.