Devil's Spawn: Satan's Devils MC Colorado Chapter #6

by Manda Mellett

  “I’ll tell you everything,” I repeat. “There’s no reason and nothing to gain from me telling you lies.”

  “Dirt. Drive her car inside.”

  I’d left the keys in the ignition, so when the prospect does what Mace demands, I’ve no option but to walk through those gates as he goes to his bike. But I wouldn’t run anyway. I’ve already decided that’s not an option for me.

  I catch up with Mace after he’s copied Lizard’s actions and manoeuvred his bike into a spot left vacant. Idly I wonder whether they have assigned parking spaces, and whether it’s because he’s the enforcer that his is closer to the main door. Not the closest, but about fourth in line. Then I realise, it really doesn’t matter whether or not that’s the case.

  “Come.” Mace stands back and indicates I should precede him inside.

  I enter what is obviously a clubroom. The air’s tinged with cigarette smoke and beer, and men are standing around with drinks in their hands. I notice it’s pleasantly painted and there are matching sofas, tables and chairs. My eyes spot Lizard and I turn away quickly, having spied a woman he’s got his arm draped around.

  Oh no. I bang the heel of my hand against my forehead. Of course he’s moved on and has someone else. Deep down I’d acknowledged it as a possibility, but being faced with it hurts, really, really hurts. I’d stayed lost in the past while Lizard has found someone else. Why should he have waited when he couldn’t remember he had a wife? My steps falter as I reconsider my decision to come to the club. Can I deal with the pain of seeing Lizard with another woman? Gritting my teeth, I remind myself I didn’t come here for me, I came here for my son.

  That he’s with someone new shouldn’t stop him stepping up and being a father to Cas. Maybe Cas will get on with his stepmother? Maybe she would get through to him more than I can. But looking back, my eyes narrow. The woman with her arm around my husband looks more like a hooker. Is she really someone I’d want to spend time around my son?

  “Move.” The snapped instruction gets my feet moving, then I pause, wondering where I should be headed. Mace waves his arm. “This way.” Now he’s in the lead, and trailing in his footsteps, I’m led across the clubroom and down a short hallway.

  Raising his hand, Mace raps on a door.

  “Enter.”

  “Wait here,” Mace instructs, and his eyes catch those of a man behind me and some sort of silent conversation goes on.

  Swinging around, I see another biker who’s appeared at my rear and is standing with folded arms. Guess my escape route has been blocked. Though I wasn’t going to take it, the fact I haven’t one does unnerve me. But as well as fear, I feel anger. The one man here who should have my back doesn’t acknowledge me. Not for the first time, I’m reminded of a saying Lizard used to use. It describes our situation exactly, FUBAR. We are certainly fucked up beyond all recognition.

  Time ticks past, and I wait. I take out my phone to check the time, my guard growls, and I put it away. Six-thirty. I’ve a two-hour drive ahead of me and need to leave at the latest in an hour and a half, if I’m to make it back to Lindy’s.

  Christ, I wish they’d hurry up.

  Five minutes later, and at last the door opens.

  “Come in.” Mace’s voice is no less stern than it was.

  There’s a man sitting in front of the desk and another behind it whose dark unwelcoming eyes glare at me. “Heard you’re here to cause trouble for our brother.”

  “No, I’m not.” Well I am, of a sort. Cas could certainly fit the definition of trouble. I hate that they’re not introducing themselves, and there’s no name plate on the desk to give me an indication. “Sorry, you are…?”

  “Demon, President of the Satan’s Devils MC. Next to you is Beef, our VP, and you’ve already met Mace.” He sprints through the niceties. “Let’s cut to the chase, what do you want?”

  I wonder where to start, and whether I should first appeal to his better nature. “Have you got children?”

  He’s surprised by my question, but pride makes him answer. “A son, yes.”

  “How old?”

  Again, a parent’s automatic response, “Eighteen months.”

  I give a quick smile. “A nice age. Mine’s fourteen and he’s not such a bundle of fun.”

  “Enough about fuckin’ kids, what are you here for?” Mace snarls out behind me.

  “I know you’re going to question every word coming out of my mouth,” I begin, “so I’m going to ask that you hear me out without interrupting. I need to get back to my son, and this will take forever if you refute everything I’m telling you.”

  Demon stares at me for a moment, then gives a sharp nod of his head. “We’ll play it your way. For now.”

  “The reason why I’m here is that I’ve stayed faithful to my husband, Lizard. I’ve not wanted another man, well, maybe I have needs, but I’ve a son to raise, and my focus has been on him. I’ve tried to do everything right, but Cas is… difficult. My father is dead, I have no brothers, or sisters come to that. No family at all really, since my mother and I fell out. No, I’m not looking for sympathy, but my son needs help. Cas has no male figure in his life, and I think now he needs one.” I hold up my hand and turn around fast as I hear Mace’s intake of breath. “Cas is pushing boundaries. First it was mischief, what all kids do. Sneaking candy without paying for it. But it’s escalated. He’s fourteen years old and last week hotwired a car. I’m doing all I can to keep him out of jail.”

  “You do realise you’re in a one-percenter club, darlin’?” I look to my left and notice Beef, their VP, has a twinkle in his eye.

  I turn back and address the president, “I’ve been a good mom, or tried to be. Yet the choices facing my son are either juvenile detention or being taken away and put into the system unless I can get him back in line. I’m at the end of my tether. So yes,” I nod at Beef, “I know what you are. But at the very least, if you break the law, you know how to hide it.”

  “We don’t break the law,” Demon snarls, his eyes seeming to flare, and he sends a warning look to the man sitting beside me.

  “Bit late to come looking for a dad for your son if you hid him all these years,” Mace snarls. I don’t even turn to look at him. “Should have thought of what might happen when you decided to keep that shit from him.”

  He’s so far off the mark, I ignore him. Not having finished, I continue now. “I hoped Lizard might have recovered, thought time might have healed him. Thought perhaps now he’d acknowledge he had a son and would step in to help him. Cas needs a man, needs someone he can look up to.”

  “Lizard didn’t even recognise you,” Mace remarks, almost spitting the words out. “You say you’re married—”

  A knock on the door causes him to stop speaking and step away from it. When he pulls it open, yet another man steps inside, this one so pale he looks like the sun never touches his skin.

  Entering, he nods at Demon. “All checks out, Prez.”

  “How did we not know this?” Demon’s hand slams down on the desktop, so loudly, it makes me jump.

  The pale man shrugs. “Before my time, Prez. Lizard joined what, ten years back when he started prospecting? I was a bit later. Buzz did the background checks before me, and probably didn’t have access to everything I have. He would have checked his service record, but seems he didn’t dig deeper.”

  Demon’s eyes burn into me. “Why didn’t Lizard recognise you?”

  Three men’s heads turn to face me.

  I take a deep breath, having already decided Cas is more important than invading my husband’s privacy and sharing what, obviously to these men, is his secret. “Because he’s got retrograde amnesia.”

  There are four audible gasps at my answer.

  “Amnesia?” Mace scoffs, being the first to recover. “That man remembers everything. Talked to him enough. Over the years I’ve heard everything about his home life, his training in boot camp, his tours, particularly the first which is the only one he wants to talk about.
Of course he can’t remember the incident that got him invalided out of the service, but that’s common enough. He’d remember if he had a wife and a kid.”

  Tears fill my eyes, and my voice weakens. “Yes, there was an incident. He was standing next to a truck when it was hit by a rocket grenade and exploded. He had a brain injury, it was severe. He was in a coma, and I… I sat with him. Cas was just two years old. I prayed and prayed he’d come round. He coded a couple of times, but they managed to revive him. For weeks I sat at his bedside, refusing to give up hope. At last, one day, he opened his eyes.” I sob, loudly and then once again continue, “His first words to me were, ‘Who the fuck are you?’”

  I’m not aware I’m crying now until I get a tissue placed into my hand. I dab my eyes, blow my nose, and then thank the VP.

  “Did he get therapy?”

  “Yes.” I pull myself together and respond to Demon’s question, asked in such a level tone it helps me to pull myself together. “But it didn’t work. He remembered, as you say, growing up, joining the Marines, even his graduation ceremony. He remembered his first tour, then, blank. Nothing after that until he woke up in the hospital. Me? He didn’t recall. In fact, he was suspicious of me.” A sob makes me shudder, but I try to swallow it down. “When he met Cas, he didn’t believe he was his son.”

  “You split up, then?” Beef’s shaking his head. “You gave up on him and left?”

  I give him a what do you think I am? look. “No, I did not. I spoke to his therapist who suggested once he was well enough to leave the hospital, that he come home with me. The idea being that back in his home with his familiar possessions it might help his memory. But it didn’t.” I pause, lost in the past for a moment. “He couldn’t remember the house we’d moved into, could only remember living alone on base. He’d been overseas when Cas was born, came home to see him, but we didn’t have any photographs to prove it. I just hadn’t thought to take any. Pictures of Cas and me, but most without him there. I did manage to find a couple, but he couldn’t remember. He… he used to get angry, and he accused me of photoshopping them.”

  “He violent toward you?” Beef asks.

  I shake my head. “Never raised his hand toward me. He was angrier that he couldn’t remember.” My voice drops to a whisper. “He wasn’t comfortable at home, his memory wasn’t triggered by things familiar. It made him worse, he kept berating himself. Worse, he kept denying that Cas was his.” My eyes close and I draw in a loud breath. “As well as retrograde amnesia, he had short-term memory problems. Each day was a new one for him. Each day he’d wake up unable to remember what had happened the previous one. He was stuck in the past, unable to learn new things. We tried for a year and a half, and then we had an argument. He told me I wasn’t his wife, and Cas wasn’t his son. Cas was four…” My breath hitches. “He pointed at Cas and said that kid is not mine. Cas still has nightmares about the day his dad walked out.”

  “Fuck,” Mace says from behind me.

  “I think I made it worse. I was, still am, proud of his dad, and I let Cas know that. What happened to Lizard wasn’t his fault. I didn’t want Cas to feel he’d been fathered by a bad man. So I’d tell him stories. But the memory of that day is lodged in his head. He even asked when he was older, if Lizard had been such a good man, why had he left? I think he blames me, and questions himself.”

  “You think that’s the reason your boy’s acting up?” Demon asks.

  I shrug. “I think it’s linked. Cas can’t understand how Lizard has forgotten, and why he can’t remember.”

  “That why he still goes to the VA?” This from Mace.

  He still goes? I nod my head. “If he’s still attending his appointments, yes. But early on, he decided he was their experiment, to see if he could remember things he’d lost from inside his head. He thought they were treating him like a guinea pig, and for all I knew, they were.”

  Chapter Six

  Mace

  Christ. I don’t know what to think. Vanna’s finished her heart-breaking-if-true story and is now quietly sobbing but also making an effort to compose herself. I go over the way Lizard was today, giving no sign he recognised her. But if what she said is true…

  “Vanna,” I address her directly. “You said you lived together. So he knows you from after the explosion that fucked with his head. Why did he blank you today?”

  She shakes her head. “Who knows how the brain works? That was the short-term memory loss as I said. Each day seemed like a fresh start. Each morning, I was greeted as though I was a stranger. It’s as if he couldn’t keep a memory of me or Cas in his head. As if a tape was constantly being rewritten.”

  “Just you?” I ask.

  Another side-to-side movement of her head. “Memory is a strange thing. As far as Lizard knew, he was twenty-two. They got him a job as a mechanic when he recovered enough, he could do that, remember a trade, but couldn’t remember the way to work. He could drive a car, but not remember a route. Other things he never forgot, like how to draw. He was always a good artist.”

  “He functions normally now. Wouldn’t have gotten past his prospect patch if he had problems with remembering shit.”

  Now her head moves up and down. “He improved. I kept tabs on him via his therapist. I suggested going back and confronting him again, but I was told he was getting to a good place and perhaps I was somehow bad for him, was holding his recovery back. I always hoped he’d return, so just settled back to wait. I knew gradually, he was beginning to learn new things and remember them. But still, his doctors thought I should stay away, make a clean break. Eventually he moved and I lost track of him.”

  “But you knew where to find him today?”

  “He left San Diego, and I didn’t immediately know where he’d gone. Then a year later, I learned he’d come to Denver to stay with his friend, Hatch. I, er, I know it sounds stalkerish, but I moved there too.” At the mention of Hatch, my eyes meet Demon’s.

  “Go on.” Demon chooses not to enlighten her.

  “I hoped one day he might remember. If he saw me around, saw me with Cas… but it didn’t work. By the time I’d completed my move, he’d disappeared again. I went to Hatch’s address, found the place locked up and for sale. The realtors said they didn’t know where the previous renter had moved. I couldn’t uproot Cas again, so we stayed in Denver. A couple of years back some paperwork caught up to me, it had been chasing me halfway across the country. It had his current address on it.” She breaks off and looks at each of us in turn. “This MC in Pueblo.”

  “But you didn’t come to find him then?”

  “I was scared. Scared of exactly what happened today, that I’d come, and Lizard wouldn’t recognise me anyway.” Her hands gesture around. “Nine years ago, I might have tried. But it’s been ten years now. Eight before I knew where he was.” She shrugs. “I’d made sure people knew where I’d gone, so if Liz wanted to find me, he could. That he hadn’t come knocking meant one of two things. Either he’d remembered and moved on, or his memory hadn’t come back.” She pauses for breath, then carries on, “It wasn’t until I thought I had no other option if I was going to help Cas that I made the decision to come and see whether anything had changed. As you know, it’s been a wasted trip.” Her shoulders slump in defeat, and she makes a weak dismissive gesture. Then she lets out a sigh. “Look, I’ve got to get back to Cas. You know I haven’t been lying, so please, let me leave. I’ll just have to think of something else to do, some way to get my son’s life back on track.”

  From the look on her face, she’s at her wits’ end. I exchange glances with Demon. We know only too well what happens when someone gets onto the wrong side of the law. Some pull themselves back up, we’ve got examples of that in the club, some continue the downward spiral, never learning from their mistakes and end up serving a long sentence or dead.

  Demon picks up his phone. “Vi, can you come to my office?” Then he puts it back down. “When my wife comes in, I want you to go with her, Vanna. Give u
s a moment to talk about your situation.”

  “I’ve got to get back to Cas,” she protests. “I’ll be late if I don’t leave now.”

  “Your friend okay with him staying a bit longer?”

  “She would be, yes, but it’s a school night…”

  “Not going to do the kid any harm to stay up late for once. Give her a call and sort it out. We’ll be as quick as we can.”

  She’s got no choice, and she seems to know it. Vi comes in, and Demon calls her over and whispers to her quietly. Vi nods her head and smiles Vanna’s way.

  Vanna stands. “I’ll clear it with Lindy, but I might as well leave. Lizard’s not going to be any help, there’s nothing more you can do.” Her lips purse. “I’m sorry I laid that all on you. Please, don’t think any the worse of Lizard. He can’t help what he doesn’t know.”

  Prez nods. “Vanna, I understand. But please, give us a moment to talk.” He regards the woman who looks like she’s carrying the weight of the world on her shoulders, staring her down until she nods and turns to go with his old lady.

  When Vi guides her out, I plop down in her now vacated seat. “What do you reckon, Prez?”

  “I was going to ask you that,” he unhelpfully replies.

  I don’t try to pretend I don’t know what he’s asking. I’m longing for a smoke, but in deference to the prez and VP, refrain from lighting up in his office. Well, to be honest, I don’t want my ass kicked. But nicotine levels low or whatever, I try to think.

  “Liz gets headaches, sometimes bad ones. I know he’s going to the VA, thought it was just for that. Knew he’d got a bang on the head, didn’t know it was so serious.”

  “You’ve known him since he was a prospect, Mace. Her story add up? I’m wracking my brain and I can’t think of anything to either support or disprove it, but you were closer to him than I was.”

  He means, until I made my promotion to officer, I was just a lowly member like Liz. I speak slowly, gathering my thoughts as I do so. “He’s spoken at length about his first tour but wouldn’t go into the others. That’s not unusual for someone who’s served, some things you don’t want to remember.”