by Star, Amy
Carefully she slid out of Blake’s arms and stood up, naked. Looking down at Blake, she saw he was deep in sleep, and hadn’t even flinched. A sudden desire to flee gripped her and she found herself already pulling her panties back on along with her pants. Carefully and quietly she redressed and looked down at Blake again—he was still sleeping and hadn’t stirred. Yes, he was handsome.
But that was as far as she was willing to let herself go.
I need to get out of here, she thought again, picking up her small backpack. It was a cold thing to do, she knew that instinctively. What did it matter? Blake was the leader of a biker gang. He wasn’t looking for anything permanent or long-term, and she wasn’t either—still, just as she opened the door and shut it again quietly with a gentle snick of the lock she allowed herself a final look at the tattooed man in her bed, half-draped in the sheets like a painting out of Boticelli.
Goodbye Blake, she said in her own thoughts, thanks for a good time.
CHAPTER THREE
“Something wrong with the Spondon arm,” the mechanic informed, pulling his head out from under the Harley and tapping the side of his filthy head with the edge of a wrench. Jimmy was the best damn mechanic in Beaver Creek, and had earned a reputation as such—he was a weird kid though, skinny as a broom and had already started to lose his hair. What was left of it had turned prematurely grey and stuck out of the sides of his head and under his Blue Jays cap.
Blake rubbed the bridge of his nose and pulled a cigarette from the pack in his jeans. Two left. He didn’t consider himself a smoker per se, but the last two weeks had been hell. It almost didn’t seem real, but he knew, looking out at the weather as it tried to make up its mind, that he was running out of time. First Damian dying, then the wake, then that encounter with Lily.
Two weeks already, he mused. She had been beautiful, wily, and one of the few women he’d ever met who could actually keep up with him. Sure, he’d known that it was just a fling, and she had too—hell, she’d left without even saying a word, and that had left him confused. Normally, it was the other way around, so in a strange unafflicted way, he felt a certain respect for her having turned the tables on his expectations like that.
Then why can’t I keep her out of my head? he wondered, turning back to Jimmy who was still scratching his head with the wrench. He had more important things to worry about and he needed to focus.
“Don’t suppose you got a replacement?” Blake asked, not expecting much.
“I can rig up something homemade,” Jimmy offered, “but it’ll take some time—in the meantime, I’d take it easy on the ol’ girl. Try to ease up a bit—don’t know what you were doing with her, but she’s got some stress fractures in the gear. I fixed that up.”
“Thanks, Jimmy,” Blake offered, and patted the leather lapel of his coat.
“No, no,” Jimmy said when the bigger man tried to offer him an envelope of money, and held up his hands in a gesture of surrender. “My treat. You don’t pay here.”
“You’re too kind,” Blake said.
In fact, ever since Blake had rescued the skinny kid from another rogue band of bikers in another gang that had been cruising through from down south, he’d considered himself in debt. No matter how many times Blake tried to pay the prematurely old mechanic, Jimmy wouldn’t hear anything of it, and the two of them had developed a rapport.
“Just out of curiosity,” Jimmy said, tentatively, “what’s the deal with the Ursas lately? I keep hearing things, and don’t know what’s true and what’s not. True you got in a fight with Ogre?”
Blake frowned. His encounter with the grisly biker back in Jack’s pub had become something of an apocryphal tale—how he’d single-handedly tried to keep order among the gang, and ended up dispatching one of the strongest members. The history of that encounter had had repercussions, both good and bad. On one hand, those who looked to Blake and saw him as an evidently strong leader thought it was self-evident proof of their faith in him. Those on the other side of the fence—and their numbers had been growing—who were now looking to Connor to step up in his father’s stead, had seen it as a blatant affront to the hierarchy of power.
With me in the middle, he thought distastefully.
“Hard to say, Jim, things are balanced on a knife edge,” Blake replied as Jimmy went into the back of the tiny renovated garage and plied two beers from a grubby white fridge in the back, returned and handed one back to his friend.
“Don’t know if I should be saying anything,” Jimmy began, “I try to stay out of things, especially with the Ursa Majors—just like you told me to. But sometimes, other folks come to get serviced and sometimes I hear things, y’know?”
Blake raised an eyebrow and sipped at his beer. It tasted foul, but it was alcohol, and that was enough for him. “Go ahead, Jim,” he coaxed.
“Well, one of the other folks, don’t know his name for sure—I think he’s one of Connor’s guys though, the two of ‘em grew up real close,” he stammered and then seemed to remember he had a beer in his hand and took a deep draught from it before finding the courage to continue, “I heard ‘em talking about things. Like maybe there was going to be a big discussion or meeting, a final one to call on a leader for the gang. Maybe, I could only hear a fragment, y’know. And I try to keep my ears clean.”
Blake frowned. So there were plans going on beyond his earshot in the background. It stood to reason, but he had hoped that the oldest members of the gangs would generally come together in the wake of Damian’s death and hold the morale and sense of community together. High hopes, he thought.
“I appreciate it,” the Beta offered Jimmy, but his thoughts were elsewhere. He almost didn’t feel his cellphone vibrating in the breast pocket of his leather jacket and held up his finger to the mechanic for a moment. “Yeah, this is Blake, what’s up?”
Gavin’s voice came across on the other end. The kid sounded rough, like he was half-breathing into the phone, and he was panting. Blake knew at once that something wrong—the usual vivacity in his protégé’s voice was gone, mixed with a sort of weariness and pain.
“Blake, that you? Christ, thank god…” he whispered on the other hand.
“Gavin, what the fuck? What’s going on? Why do you sound like you just ran a marathon?”
“Kinda got cornered,” Gavin gulped. “Didn’t see ‘em coming.”
Blake’s stomach dropped and he felt a wellspring of anger bubble forth from some subterranean part of his mind—the part that was devoted to his inner bear. He tried to calm his voice so that Gavin wouldn’t pick up on it.
“Just explain what happened. Where are you?”
Gavin seemed in a stupor. “Uh… where? Right, uh… I’m, I’m at the gravel pit. Thought it was a good place, y’know? No one comes here. Wasn’t followed, I don’t think, I hope. Uh… Blake, man. The fuck, we’re all fucked.”
“Just stay there,” Blake barked, and slammed the phone shut. Jimmy looked at him incredulously—if he’d been born a bear like the rest of them, Blake thought, he wouldn’t have lasted this long. In the Ursa Majors, in all tribes, it was survival of the fittest. It didn’t matter how smart you were, how kind. Those things would just as soon get you killed. And still, I feel pity for Jimmy, he thought. “Toss me the keys, Jim.”
“Problem?”
“Always a goddamn problem,” he growled, swinging his leg over the Harley and switching the ignition—the black vesper of a vehicle growled impatiently, and he felt the horsepower of the engine biting at its bit to be let free. “Thanks again,” he shouted at the mechanic as he tore out into the street and headed south.
The wind whipped at his face as he cruised down the open highway, and he let it rake through the bristles of his hair, but it did little to alleviate the ball of wrath growing in his stomach. He didn’t know the details, precisely, but he could at least guess at them—Gavin had been ambushed, either by a rogue gang or by other members of the Ursa Majors. It was something he had feared, and hadn’t
dared to actually believe could really happen. Melissa and Connor surely wouldn’t go so far as to brutalize members of the gang, he thought. And yet—he could not detach himself entirely from the peril of possibility.
“Hell,” he murmured again, cranking hard on the throttle.
The gravel pit was just outside of the town limits, and was a notorious hangout for teenagers and high school students to get drunk on the weekends or experiment with their first toke on a joint. It was also a good place to reconvene after a job, or if the cops—in one of their rare pursuits—decided to chase them as far as their territory. Blake slowed and pulled off onto the dirt road and idled into the open pit area, his eyes trained not just for signs of Gavin, but for any other unexpected guests.
As he came around the corner, however, he saw his friend sitting on the slope of a gravel pit, his bike parked beside him, and as he drew nearer saw the telltale signs of blood on the younger bear’s face.
“Blake,” he murmured, when he saw the Beta approaching.
Gavin leered at him through one eye that was half-swollen shut, and his jaw was ripening with a fresh bruise as well. There was blood on his leather jacket that had already dried, and not all his own, but the cuts on his face and near his scalp were deep and clotted dark.
“Geezus,” Blake said, approaching and examining the damage. “Who did this?”
Gavin shrugged. “I-I don’t know… they had masks, Blake. I was just taking a ride down past the empty homesteads, out on that valley stretch past the bridge? Didn’t even notice them until they were right behind me in my mirrors, and when I tried to hail them the motherfuckers brought out fuckin’ clubs. It was all I could do not to get sucked under my own tires when I skidded to the side of the road. But they were on me, fast.”
Blake squinted. Most of the damage was superficial, but it was pretty obvious that whoever had inflicted it had wanted to send a message. “Did you recognize their bikes?”
Gavin’s good eye blinked, but he turned away. “So, I tried to fight ‘em off, best I could, but there were too many. Clubs and fists coming at all directions. All I could do… just to protect my skull from being bashed in. Shit.”
Blake growled again, low in his throat. “Did you recognize their bikes, Gavin?”
The kid gulped. “I-I’m not saying I did or didn’t,” he said, clearly terrified. “Hell, like I just said, I was getting pummeled right, who knows what I saw? I wouldn’t even trust me to know.”
“Gavin!” Blake barked, and saw the bear shrink.
“It… I don’t know, Blake,” he said. “I think… I think one was Connor’s. But I’m not saying it was! They all had masks. And I was being beat around like a piñata, it’s just… that bike. I could’ve sworn, I saw a skull on the handlebars.”
Blake swore and stood up and punched the air. Goddamit! Everything he had feared was coming true, like clockwork. That was too obvious a detail, too specific, even for someone being assaulted. He knew what Gavin was speaking of—Connor’s bike was a gorgeous modded Harley, but what made it iconic was the engraved skull on the front of the handlebars. Almost like the bastard was driving death down the middle line.
“Maybe I was wrong!” Gavin pleaded.
“You know you weren’t bloody wrong,” Blake said, sighing and sat down beside him. “They wanted to send me a message, and they bloody well did. By beating you up. I should have known Melissa wouldn’t just let things go.”
“They wouldn’t.” Gavin shook his head in disbelief.
“I didn’t think so, at first,” Blake replied caustically, “but this is just the beginning.”
There was a tense silence between the two men, and it was clear that both were mulling over their options and individual regrets—for Gavin, he wanted nothing more than to be a soldier at Blake’s behest. But for Blake, the idea of putting others at risk for the possibility of leadership was reprehensible.
“What are you going to do?” Gavin finally asked, massaging his jaw.
“There’s only two things I can do,” Blake said. “Either I step down my sponsorship for Alpha, and let it fall retroactively to Connor…”
“You can’t!” Gavin exclaimed, rising to his feet. There were streaks of dried blood in his Russian blond hair that Blake hadn’t noticed before, and it made him look even more grim with his swollen face and that one lingering open eye, furious as a hawk. “Connor just wants power, you know that. If he takes control of the gang, it’ll be the end—it’s not just a matter of splitting loyalties. He’ll lead us all to ruin. Hell, you remember how he handled some of those encounters with other gangs.”
Blake rubbed his chin where the faintest hint of a beard was beginning to surround his cheeks again. If Connor did become Alpha, what would that mean? He had run over scenarios in his head, trying to guess at the young man’s prerogative, but it had always been bathed in obscurity. However, Gavin had often been on the same missions with Connor—and it was well known that Connor had always thought of his father as being too prudent, and had often tried to expand the territory of the Ursa Majors. Often at great cost and embarrassment to his father, who had spent a lot, monetarily and in terms of integrity, trying to heal the rifts in diplomacy left over by his son.
“Do you think it would actually be that bad?” Blake asked, seriously.
He saw Gavin realize he was on the spot, and his wrecked face became solemn as he chose his words carefully. “Connor doesn’t care how he gains power—it’s a bloody addiction. I always figured that’s why Damian never really gave him more than he could handle.”
Blake nodded. “Well, shit. Then that leaves me only one other choice,” he shrugged, “confront Connor and Melissa head on. Try to salvage this situation before things get out of control.”
“You think that’s really possible?” Gavin asked.
The Beta opened his mouth to respond. “Regardless,” he said, “someone’s gotta pay for spilling Ursa blood—I’d prefer it be outsiders or another gang or bloody rogues. But if it’s gotta be family, then so be it. Connor’s already made his move. If I don’t step up now, I’ll lose what support I have.”
Blake walked back to his bike and sat down on it. From a distance, it looked as if he had suddenly become heavier, as if the weight of his position were finally catching up with him. But more than that, it was a sense of guilt and responsibility. No one else should have gotten hurt because of him, and least of all a novitiate like Gavin. Connor had crossed a line. He ran a callused hand across the back of his neck and sat up straight, one foot braced on the gravel as he looked up at the sky.
Gavin grunted as he stood up.
“What should I do?” he asked meekly.
What, indeed? Blake resisted saying—for all intents and purposes, it would be better for Gavin to simply fall off the radar for a while. The less others saw him, the better off he’d be, at least until Blake could figure out who was on his side and who wasn’t. But as the Russian kid glared determinedly at him through his one good eye, his jaw locked tight and fists bunched at his side, Blake knew that was an impossibility.
“I need you to keep your head down,” he began, and then softened, “but if it’s come to this already, then there is something I need your help with. And given your unique position, you might be in a perfect place to do it. If it was Connor’s boys that roughed you up, they’ll figure you for the type to back down. Old school hierarchy. Probably won’t pay you any mind now.”
“Give me a crowbar and level the field and I’ll make ‘em see how wrong they are!” Gavin interrupted, and he was shaking.
Blake held up his hand. “I know it. Trust me. But we’re gonna use their underestimating of you to our advantage. I have a special mission for you. Ain’t saying it’ll be any less dangerous than whatever the hell it is I’ve gotten the rest of us into. Shit, might even be more dangerous. I won’t force you.”
“Anything,” Gavin replied, suddenly steeling himself with the promise of a special task laid out by his Beta. A
nd in that moment, Blake knew that he had at least one soldier on his side who would be willing to die for him, if it came to that.
Christ, have we come that far already?
Blake motioned for him to come closer, but just as he did, there was another rumbling in his pocket and he swore and fumbled for his cellphone. He checked the caller ID and was surprised to see Jimmy’s number on the screen. That was unusual—had he forgotten to tell Blake something about the repairs to his Harley? It hadn’t seemed to have any problems. Reluctantly he flipped it open and held it to his ears, keeping his eyes on Gavin who waited patiently.
“Jim, what’s up?”
There was a frantic sound of wind and raucous in the background, like someone was ransacking a house, and it took a good three seconds for Jimmy’s voice to pierce through. The first thing Blake thought was how similar he sounded to Gavin, when the young Ursa had phoned him back at the garage.
“Blake, oh, Blake, shit son… you are in trouble, man.”
“Settle down, you sound like you just amped on a dozen coffees. What’s going on?”
“You didn’t see them?” Jimmy said, incredulously. “They were cruising into town about ten minutes ago. Saw ‘em on the main street. Whole slew of red-and-blues, and they looked serious. Hell, they never come into town, they know we police ourselves better than they could.”
“What’s going on?” Gavin intervened, and Blake held up his hand.
“Something about cops.” And to Jimmy, “What’s the big deal then?”
“You haven’t heard? Shit, man,” Jimmy seemed at the end of his tether, and Blake could well imagine the kid’s eyes bulging in his head, whacked out. “It’s all the gossip. Heard it from one of yours, an Ursa guy came in muttering about it. Ogre, man, it’s Ogre.”
