by Catie Rhodes
“A relationship between us won’t work. You know that. Then what? We don’t talk for another five years?” I pulled his hand to my lips and kissed it, the smell of cigarettes and heaven-knew-what-else stinging my nostrils. “I want things to be right between us.”
Even as I spoke the words, made the commitments, I asked myself if I really wanted this level of Tubby’s friendship. The boundary issues, the obnoxious intrusions, the nosiness would be worse if he considered me an unconditional friend. But what about the fun stuff? I gave his hand an extra squeeze and tried to ignore the tears filling my eyes.
Tubby nodded slowly, brow creased. He pulled his hand out of mine, stood, and leaned over me. I stiffened, worried what he might do, but he wrapped his arms around me and squeezed hard. “Nobody wanted to be my friend before. Least not anybody I believed.” He kissed the top of my head and let me go. “But I really thought I was gonna get laid.” He watched me as though I might take off my clothes right there. I shrugged and shook my head. He let out a sigh. “All right. Done. We friends, and it goes both ways. So here’s a friendly question. Are you gonna tell Wade that King is willing to sacrifice him to keep you in line?”
“Later tonight.” I didn’t tell Tubby about the opportunity I’d had to tell Wade and blown it because I was too busy angsting over my lust for him.
“Good. Wade’s gonna be our inside man for this job. No matter how loyal he is to the Six Guns, nobody’s that loyal.”
I was still lost. “What’s he going to do for us?”
Tubby rolled his eyes. “I thought you’s smart. Only way we’re gonna win is to ambush the Guns wherever they got Hannah. You even know where that is?”
“The compound.”
Tubby groaned and threw back his head, making his Adam’s apple jut out. “They’ve got an arsenal up there.”
“So what do I do to keep Wade safe?”
Tubby jammed a cigarette between his teeth and passed his lighter over it. “You and me don’t need to worry about nothing other than getting Hannah out safely. Wade’ll figure out his end.” His grin reminded me why, friends or no, I’d have to be cautious every step of the way. The same way I would if I had a lion for a pet. Didn’t exotic pets sometimes eat their owners? The skin on the back of my neck prickled.
“You going in with me?” Raw nerve endings burned all over my body. Now that I knew I was going to rescue Hannah, the severity of it sank in.
Tubby blew smoke in my direction and nodded, his grin cold as an alligator’s. “In addition, I’ll provide transportation to and from and a place to hole up. King Tolliver’ll consider this an insult. Be after us.”
I shook my head, still puzzling over how King went from being a sort of friend to my archenemy.
“You wondering why he don’t like you no more, ain’t you?” Tubby’s grin chilled me all the way down to the tips of my toes. I nodded my yes. “Dunno. But I do know King Tolliver put out the word you’re no longer under club protection and talked to me about arranging a hit. I refused, of course, and told him what would happen if I found out he’d done such a thing.”
My mouth dropped open. “When?”
“Right after you was cleared of charges over Michael Gage’s death and it became clear you wouldn’t be prosecuted for beating the Jesus out of Joey Holze and family.”
My brain did whirlies. Wade must’ve known, but he never said a word. Why hadn’t he warned me? We weren’t as close as I’d tried to pretend. All of a sudden, I didn’t feel so bad for not telling him earlier that King had threatened his life. Questions about what that meant in terms of the romance I wanted with Wade flooded my mind. Not the time. I let them go and asked Tubby the question I couldn’t let go of. “What started King’s vendetta against me? Any ideas?”
“Not a one,” Tubby said. “But the only things that matter to a snake-eyed sumbitch like King Tolliver is his motorcycle club and staying out of prison. Whatever you did might be somewhere in one of those.” Tubby checked his phone and frowned. “Now you get on out to Wade’s. Take you longer than you think on those dirt roads. Make sure don’t nobody follow you.”
Tubby walked me out to my car. I let him give me a chaste kiss on the cheek. The vein throbbing in his neck gave me a good idea how much more he wanted, but he stroked my cheek with one thumb and didn’t ask.
I sat in my truck, body too hot for the chilly night, almost regretting my decision not to hook up with Tubby. Might have been my last chance to get laid before I got myself killed for good.
Tubby was right about the dirt roads. I traveled down some of them at less than ten miles per hour, despite being behind the wheel of a heavy-duty pickup truck. The directions Wade had sent to my email ended at a clearing barely big enough to hold a cabin and a carport.
I did as Wade instructed, parking my truck in the carport and covering it with a filthy canvas tarp. I tiptoed to the cabin, struck by the way the moon sparkled on the rippling water of Piney Lake. I hadn’t even known there were houses on this side of the lake.
Using the combination Wade gave me, I unlocked the padlock holding the front door of the cabin closed and went inside. My nose, honed from years of cleaning houses, picked up the telltale smell of mildew. I left the lights off and crept through the silent house. Moonlight streaked into the kitchen, brightening it enough for me to see a table and chairs. I sat down, put my head in my hands, and listened to the drone of the frogs singing outside.
On the drive over, I’d thought of all the ways I could tell Wade he was expendable. Wade could be mule-headed. He might decide to win the argument by crossing his big arms over his chest and shutting down. There had to be a way to convince him. Fatigue scratched around in my brain. I laid my cheek on the table so I could think better. My eyes fluttered shut, and I slipped into a tense doze.
A floorboard creaked. My eyes shot open. A figure stood in a doorway off the kitchen. I half-stood, already calling to my magic even though I didn’t have a spell prepared.
“It’s me,” Wade rumbled. “Don’t do whatever you’re planning.”
“I don’t have a plan.” I tried to push the magic back where it came from, but it came a lot easier than it went. Finally, I aimed it at a plastic jug of water and let it fly. The water in the jug began to bubble, rocking the jug back and forth. After a few seconds, it burst. Water cascaded over the floor.
Wade cursed and flicked on the overhead light.
“I’m sorry.” I went for the paper towels.
“No. Use these.” He tossed several frayed bath towels at me. “There’s no garbage pickup out here.”
I knelt on the floor and sopped up water. “It’s so quiet here that you could hear a mouse fart for a mile. How did I not hear your motorcycle?”
Wade grabbed one of the towels I wasn’t using and helped. “I hid it about a quarter mile from here and walked the rest of the way.”
I kept working, thinking about the implications of what he’d just said. It made sense he didn’t want anybody knowing I was here. But he lived here. Why hide his presence?
“King offered me this place right after you left town. I was supposed to cut you off in exchange for it.” He wadded up the towels and went into the laundry room off the kitchen. The washing machine’s lid squealed open. Wade threw in the towels. They landed in a wet thump.
He came back into the kitchen and started a pot of coffee. We sat down at the table. “Obviously I was unable to cut you out of my life.” He reached out to touch me but drew back his hand. “You look beautiful, you know it?”
“That mean you’ve changed your mind about us?” I winked. In the words of William B. Travis regarding the siege on the Alamo, I’d never surrender or retreat. Wade was the only man I wanted.
He heaved out a sigh. “You know the reason I won’t. That card reading my sister did—and her predictions—are no joke.” His voice rose on the last couple of words.
I held up one hand. “Sorry I asked.” Not for the first time, I wondered what, exactly, his
sister had seen in her fateful reading of Wade’s and my future. I didn’t dare ask. Not after Wade had already started holler-talking.
He growled and got up to get us coffee. While he poured, I told him about the way Hannah’s parasite attacked me and about Hannah’s plea for me to come get her.
“Yeah. Right about the time your mojo bag let me know something was wrong, I saw her go lucid.” The corners of his eyes crinkled into a smile. “She pushed King off her and ran off to the bathroom. Puked all that tequila up.”
Must’ve been around the same time she sent me the text message. “She say anything?”
“She came over and said to tell you she couldn’t keep it off her. It had gotten too big.”
“Too big? Meaning too powerful?”
Wade nodded slowly. “I called my sister Desiree earlier about Hannah’s situation and to let her know what was going on with me, what I was about to do. Desiree said those nasty little things feed on their hosts. Some feed on fear. The more they can scare their hosts, the more they have to eat. The more they eat, the bigger and stronger they get.”
That made sense. But what was Hannah’s parasite feeding on? Fear was one thing. It was pure energy. But Hannah didn’t seem scared. She seemed incredibly depressed, intent on destroying herself.
The visions Orev had showed me returned to my mind. The parasite had outright murdered a baby and driven Wade’s fiancée to kill herself.
Wade gripped my forearm and gave me a shake. “Tell me. I’m in this too.”
“I’m trying to figure out what this thing—Hannah’s parasite—wants.” The answer seemed right on the edge of my mind. “I—I think maybe it eats life forces. It drives the hope right out of them, feeds on it. But then what?”
Wade shook his head. “Does it matter? Isn’t that horrible enough?”
I gave him an impatient head shake. “Knowing how something operates, or why, is the key to beating it. You know that.”
Wade sipped at his coffee, maybe thinking, maybe wishing I’d shut the hell up. Finally he spoke. “Souls can be captured and used. Look what Amanda did to your father.”
Hot anger rashed over my skin. Amanda, a witch, had imprisoned my father’s spirit in a mirror. She’d made him her ghostly flunky.
Wade didn't look any happier about the idea than I was. “We get it out of Hannah, we’ll find out what it’s up to.”
“Did Hannah stay lucid all evening?” My biggest worry was her not wanting my help by the time I could get to her. She was taller than I and weighed more. It wasn’t like I could pick her up and carry her. Especially if she fought.
“I think so. About the time I left, she and King got into a fight.” Wade rubbed one hand over his beard. “She wanted to go home. He belted her one.”
Hot fury rushed over me. “What’d you do?” I saw the answer in the way Wade flinched and ducked his head. I narrowed my eyes.
He glared at me. “I’m in a real shitty position here, you know it?”
I nodded but didn’t let him see any sympathy.
“Damn it.” He slapped the table. Coffee sloshed out of his mug. “I can’t help Hannah without looking like a traitor to King. He helped me when nobody else would. He—”
I finished the sentence for him. “Saved your life. Right.”
Wade’s irises, so dark they barely stood out from the black of his pupil, flashed even darker with anger. “I was up on a murder charge. Had the Six Guns not gotten involved, I’d be sitting on death row, or dead, right now.” He bared his teeth at me. “You and me woulda never met.”
So he was still glad we knew each other. That stopped me from saying anything mean. Instead I took his hand. He frowned but let me do it. “Do you know what King said to me today on the phone?”
Wade got still, his only movement the rise and fall of his chest. “Threatened Hannah.”
I mirrored his stillness, confirmed King’s threat against Hannah, and then told him about Jesse. Wade, who knew I loved my uncle, paled and started to say something. I held up my hand. Time for the scum on the toilet water. “There’s more. King said if I didn’t buzz off, he’d kill you.” I paused for effect. “And make me watch. Tubby said King’s asked about hiring a hitman to kill me. So I assume me dying figures somehow into your murder.” The very thought called my fury. My magic rampaged through me, ready to hurt something.
Disbelief passed over Wade’s face as the words soaked in. Hurt followed. The fight drained out of him, leaving behind a big, lonely man who’d just realized he’d put his trust in the wrong person. “But I…” He shook his head instead of continuing and stood from the table, knocking his chair on the floor, and stumbled from the room. A door slammed.
My heart throbbed for him, but I let him stew alone. King Tolliver was going to pay. I don’t take sass from an over-the-hill outlaw, much less death threats to my friends. King just thought he didn’t like me. He was about to find out what a crazy bitch looked like.
The sound of Wade blowing his nose filtered into the kitchen. A door opened, and his footsteps shook the house. He’d taken off the Six Gun Revolutionaries T-shirt he usually wore and replaced it with a plain white one. He grabbed his leather jacket off the chair and jerked the vest, which bore all his club patches, off it. He slung the vest onto the kitchen floor. It slid into a corner.
Wade sat back down in his chair and faced me across the table, chin down, eyes raised to mine. “I’m done being loyal and won't fight you anymore. What’s the plan?”
I took the last sip of coffee. “Ain’t really much of one. Tubby’s got protection for Jesse in prison. He said we’re going to war with the Six Guns.”
Wade slowly nodded. “We are. First thing, call Rainey. Tell her to get somewhere safe. Her parents too.”
I made the call. Rainey answered as though she’d been awake. She wanted to know who, what, when, where, and I told her. Then I told her to hide herself and her dog and keep her phone nearby. She blew up.
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” she shouted over the phone. “How dare you cut me off like I’m some delicate flower?”
I closed my eyes. “I can’t protect both you and Hannah.”
The argument went round and round. By the time I hung up, Wade’s impatience had him fidgeting in the chair, shaking the whole table.
“King expects you to make a move for Hannah. Trench Coat and Corman are guarding him now.” He checked the clock on his phone. “When I left, I had until nine in the morning to get back there. I’m how you’ll get in.”
Tubby had been right. Wade had disavowed the Six Gun Revolutionaries on the strength of my word. How did Tubby know what people would do?
“But we’ve got a problem. Normally, if a person is ridden by an evil entity, you want to get it out as quickly as possible. But this is different.” Wade stopped speaking, eyebrows rumpling into a frown. I let him take his time. We sat in silence for several minutes. “Hannah’s hag can come and go as he pleases. You have to trap him inside Hannah until you can get to safe place to perform a banishing ritual.” Wade set a tiny leather bag on the table between us.
“What’s that?” I touched it with one finger. It felt warm and pliable, almost alive.
“Aunt DeeDee taught me to make these when I was a teenager. We sold them to people who wanted protection from evil spirits.” He pushed the bag at me. “Go on and put it in your pocket. Let it charge from your magic. It won’t take much.”
I did as he said but still didn’t understand how something intended to repel spirits would keep one inside. Wade chuckled.
“I see that look on your face. You’re wondering how this’ll work.”
I shrugged. Wade knew his stuff, different stuff than Mysti Whitebyrd taught me. I had no call to question him.
“You can tell the bag is a living thing, yes?” I nodded at Wade’s question. “Spirits can enter the human body through the eyes, the ears, the nose, the mouth, the genitals, even an open wound.”
“Disgusting.” The bag
felt warm and twitchy in my pocket. It was disgusting in its own right.
“This bag works with the person’s body chemistry. It creates a coating over the skin that’s hostile to spirits. It’ll keep the spirit from passing out of Hannah’s body. I hope.” He waited for my questions, but I shook my head to let him know I had none. “You put this in her pocket as soon as you can. Get her to safety and do the banishing ritual quickly.” He slid a paper across the table. “Here’s what I can remember of what Aunt DeeDee said about this. She’s been dead now for twenty years, so I might have forgotten something. I asked Desiree when I called earlier what she knew, but she didn’t know anything else.”
The question of Wade’s sister wormed around my thoughts more than it should have. He was so secretive, and this was the sister who told him not to be with me romantically. I filed away the thoughts for later, took the paper with the instructions from Wade’s Aunt DeeDee, and put it in my back pocket. “But you’ll be there to help.”
His face darkened. “Sure will. But keep it anyway, all right?”
This was Wade’s admission he might not get out alive. The possibility worked its way through me like a disease. Horror came with it. I wanted to call a halt to our plans. Walk away. But I couldn’t. In life, there are fights that must be fought. They all have consequences.
“Let’s talk about the mission now. You need to understand the layout of the compound.” Wade grabbed a fast food napkin and began to draw on it. “The time you visited, all you saw was the clubhouse. King’s got a house out back of that, and there’s a barracks near it.” He drew sloppy boxes for each building. “The ones in the clubhouse will be so drunk at nine in the morning they won’t be able to stand. But they’ll still be armed. The barracks might be full or not. I didn’t pay attention to who-all was staying tonight.”
“Hannah will be in King’s house?” I leaned forward, trying to figure out which box that was.
Wade nodded and marked an x on one of the boxes. “She’ll be in the bedroom alone, sleeping it off. King gets up early and cooks himself and Corman breakfast.”
