Kaeden

by Naomi West

  “I know,” she mutters. “You’re a big tough man and it’s hard for big tough men to be all warm and mushy.”

  “I don’t reckon women want that, anyway,” I say, turning away because if I don’t I’ll be here all day.

  “Maybe not at first,” she says, stepping back as I climb onto my bike. “What about your leather, your helmet?”

  “The leather’s back at the safehouse. The helmet’s in the clubhouse.”

  “At least let me get your helmet! And a spare leather, if they have it!”

  There’s something strangely touching about that, so I nod. “Be quick though.”

  She brings me out my second leather, the one I keep in the store closet, and one of Shotgun’s old helmets. It’s the one with the crude carving of a sawn-off on the back. I smile at her, she smiles in return, and then I ride off to save her friend.

  16

  Fiona

  “I want to talk to you,” Dirk, the boss of the club, says. He closes his office door behind me and walks over to the desk. He’s a scary-looking man, or at least he would be if my last few crazy hours had been anything approaching normal. Now, with the haze of sleep hanging over me, he just seems like another tough biker.

  I go to the seat opposite him and drop down. The room reeks of cigarette smoke and stale cigarette butts, overflowing in the ash tray, and there’s a tinge of whisky in the air as well. “Okay.” I cross my legs the same way I did for my interview at the bar. Professional. Calm.

  “I’ll get straight to the point, miss.” He lights a cigarette and then offers me one from the pack. When I shake my head, he tosses them onto the desk. “I’ve seen men go funny over bad women before. Silence is my best man, y’understand? So I can’t have him going all funny over a woman who don’t even want him at the end of it all.”

  “Excuse me,” I say, shaking my head in disbelief. “But it was not me who started things with him and, and frankly it doesn’t seem to me that it’s any of your business. I know you’re his boss in the club, but that doesn’t mean you have any right to go snooping around his private life.”

  He smirks with one half of his mouth, frowns with the other. “So you’ve got some fire in you,” he says, wiping his gray, sweaty hair from his eyes. “I just need to know that you’re not a gold-digger, a user, that sort, or that you’re not just on some crazy spree and in a couple of days you’ll wake up and decide you’re done with him. If that’s the case, better to tell him now, eh?”

  “I’m too tired and hungry to give a damn about any of that!” I snap. Internally, I tell myself to calm down; externally, I am sitting even straighter in the chair, as though trying to make myself as tall as the man opposite me. “Are we done?”

  Again, that odd smirk, but this time there’s something like pride in it. “Yeah, all right, we’re done. At least he didn’t choose some wet blanket. Go on. Get your food and get your sleep. You can take the room at the end of the hallway in the dorm wing. That ought to be free. As for food, there are sandwiches in the kitchen refrigerator, and soda.”

  “Thank you.”

  I leave the office and go straight to the kitchen, grab a turkey sub and a soda, and then head for the dorm wing. I’m almost through the door when I realize that Andy is standing right behind me, almost at my heels.

  “What are you doing?” I ask, spinning on him.

  “Oh.” He takes a step back, head tilted. “I thought we were going in here.”

  I suppress a crazy laugh. Kaeden is sort of right about Andy. Ever since we were kids, he’s always been the awkward, not-quite-comfortable-in-his-skin type.

  “I’m going in here,” I tell him. “I need to sleep.”

  “What should I do?” he asks, his voice rising higher and higher.

  I shrug. “Go and get some sleep as well? I’m sorry, Andy, but I’m really tired.”

  He wanders off down the hallway and I go into the bedroom. I get halfway through the turkey sub and just about drain the soda before I collapse face-first in bed. I wonder if I’ll be able to sleep with Jocelyn hovering at the edges of my mind, but not just Jocelyn as she is now; I see Goth Jocelyn, carefree toddler Jocelyn, wannabe cheerleader Jocelyn, Halloween Pagan Jocelyn, morning-after Jocelyn, and miniskirt Jocelyn. All of them accuse of me not caring as my eyelids get heavier and heavier. But no matter what, we’re all humans; that’s the one fact none of us can escape. And humans need sleep.

  I wake with a gruff man standing over me, prodding me in the belly. “Wake up!” he snarls. “Wake up, woman!” He’s wearing a leather and a big silver hoop in his ear. He grabs my by the arm and hauls me to my feet. Outside, cars backfire, tens of them: crack, crack, crack. Then, somewhere off to my left, glass shatters. Not cars… “Listen,” the man says, gripping my arm hard. “Behind the bar, through the kitchen. Turn off the big industrial refrigerator with the panel in the pantry. Get inside the refrigerator. Barricade it with whatever you find. Do you understand? Repeat it back to me, quickly.”

  I do as he says. He nods and lets me go, jogging from the room and taking a gun from a holster at his back at the same time. I run down the hallway, glass shattering everywhere now, bullets flying. As I cross the hallway from the dorm wing to the bar wing, a bullet whizzes right by my head and thuds into the wall a bare few inches from my head. Tiny pieces of plaster dart into my neck, pricking me. I ignore them and keep on.

  The bikers in the bar kneel down at the windows, their bullet fire so loud I can barely hear my own panting breath. They fire like madmen, only stopping to either reload or switch weapons. Dirk has four guns at his feet, which he switches with a speed I would not have expected from the old man. I run through into the kitchen to find Andy emerging from the pantry.

  “Did you turn it off?” I ask.

  “I think so!” he squeals.

  I open the big refrigerator to find it dark and cold, but not as cold as it ought to be; they have a refrigerator like this at the bar. I run inside and knock over one of the metal shelves, and then drag it toward the door. When I turn, Andy is standing at the door, on the outside.

  “Come on!” I snap.

  He looks at me like I’m the one being unreasonable. “You know I hate the dark!” he protests.

  Tires screech; the sound of the crash reaches us even in here.

  “Would you prefer a bullet? Fucking hell, Andy! Come on!”

  It turns out his fear of gunfire is worse than his fear of the dark. Soon he comes into the room and closes the door, and then helps me to move the shelf. He takes out his cell phone and turns on the flashlight, giving us enough light to move two more shelves in front of the door. Then we move to the very back of the room and crouch down, shivering in the cold: getting warm, but still cold.

  “Do you think they’ll kill us?” he whispers, a tremble in his voice.

  “I don’t know,” I answer honestly. “I think … their leader—he’s a man called Reaper—I think he was going to kill me before.”

  Andy swallows audibly. “I know I shouldn’t have taken her to them. But … I don’t know, Fiona. I was so scared, you know? I was just so scared and I didn’t know what else to do. So I—”

  “So you betrayed her!” I growl, sick and tired of his moaning. “Listen, Andy, I’m doing my best to help you and stay calm, but you need to stop with all this whining. I can’t take it, okay?”

  He falls into surly silence and I do the same, resting my head on the cool metal wall and staring through the darkness at the faint outline of the barricades. The sounds are muffled in here, but still very real. The gunfire continues for a time and then gets less and less frequent until nobody’s shooting at all. My throat gets tight and everything in me wants to panic, but somehow I manage to keep myself calm. I grip my knees hard and tell myself I’m someplace else: back on the date with Kaeden, talking about my silly novel, with him pretending to be interested.

  Then the knock comes, so heavy that it makes the barricade shelves tremble.

  “Hello?” he c
alls, sounding pleased with himself. I would know that voice if I heard it ten years down the line. I don’t think I’ll ever forget it. I grit my teeth to stop them from chattering. “Hello? Is anybody in there? Don’t make me huff and puff, sweet Fiona, eh? Otherwise there’ll be hell to pay. Do you want to pay hell, girl? Do you really think you’re up to that?”

  “Is that h-him?”

  “Be quiet,” I hiss.

  It’s like I can feel Andy’s fear as he spills it out next to me, sobbing quietly and rocking back and forth.

  “I know you’re in there,” Reaper goes on. “I don’t think this is a very smart plan. I have to be honest here. What do you think is going to happen? Just walk it through, Fiona, think about it. Do you imagine we’ll just let you stay in there until—what? Until some miraculous escape? No, no, girl. It’s extremely simple. Let me explain. What is going to happen next is I’ll have one of my men turn the refrigerator to its coldest setting until you’re begging me to come out. But I won’t let you out at first, because I need to teach you a lesson. I’ll wait until the cold does some serious damage. What do you think?”

  “We’ll die,” Andy sobs. “We’ll die, Fiona!”

  I dart my hand out, clamping it over his mouth. “Shut up!”

  “There is another choice, though,” Reaper goes on. “You can choose to come out here peacefully within the next five minutes and I promise I won’t kill you. I’ll put you away with the other prisoners, all those big scary bikers who thought they could mess with the Nine Circles. The dumb fucks.” A harsh laugh, followed by a chorus of laughter. There must be twenty men out there. “But if you’re not out here in five …”

  “What do we do?” Andy moans, shoving my hand away. “We can’t just stay in here, can we? This is crazy! We’re going to die! Fiona, we’ll die if we stay in here!”

  I sigh, standing up. “We’ll probably die anyway.”

  “What are you doing?”

  I grab the closest barricade and start moving it. “Like you said, we can’t stay in here. Help me move this, will you?”

  When I open the door, Reaper is standing there with a wide smile on his face, his jacket pulled up around his chin, giving him a weird winter-like look, as though he’s cold. He gestures at us with his big silver pistol. “Put them with the others,” he commands.

  Immediately, men swarm on us. They grab my arms and roughly drag me into the bar, where two men lie dead at the windows, covered in shattered bloody glass. The rest are tied up in a circle in the middle of the room, men standing guard on all sides. Dirk has a gunshot through his arm, which he nurses absentmindedly. He offers me a grimace, and I offer one in return.

  I drop down, focusing all my energy on keeping myself calm, on not allowing that unbridled panic to stampede through me. I don’t know how successful I am.

  17

  Kaeden

  “I was sorry to hear about Shotgun,” Clint says, handing me the rifle. He’s an older fella, but not as old as Dirk. We’ve only spoken a few times but I know him better than I know the others. He’s tall and wears his graying hair in a Viking braid down his back. When he talks, the light catches the silver tooth at the back of his mouth. “He was a good man.”

  “Yeah, he was.” I shoulder the rifle and nod at the bikes, where the other men are waiting. “But talking about it isn’t going to bring him back to life.”

  “No.” Clint sighs. “It never does.”

  “Let’s ride, boys!” I call out to the men as I climb onto my bike.

  They mount up and we ride out to the bar where he was keeping Fiona. The fellas must think I’m crazy for thinking that Reaper would use the same exact location where he lost so many of his men, but I know how fucked-up men like Reaper think. As the club’s main hitter for years now, I’ve had time to learn just how strange the crazy minds of sadists can get. And this is one thing I’ve learned above all others: they need control. He got embarrassed at the bar, so now he needs to redeem himself at the bar.

  We stop down the street a ways, me and Clint taking the lead. I order the other fellas to surround the building from the other sides, blocking them in.

  “Reckon they’re expecting us?” Clint says, laughing darkly.

  “Maybe not,” I reply, with a grim laugh of my own. “Maybe we’ll walk on in there, get the girl, and ride home playing fucking summer songs about happiness and shit. It’ll be the easiest, quickest job we’ve ever done.”

  “Yeah, that’ll be the fucking day.”

  But as we get closer to the bar, we don’t find any men in waiting, don’t find any bikers hidden among the few pedestrians, homeless, and hookers who wander around this part of town. There is only the yawning Texan silence, and the obliterating Texan sunlight. I wipe sweat from my eyes as the bar comes into view, expecting a gunman on the roof. But there’s nothing. I shake my head, annoyed with myself.

  “Maybe I’m not the therapist I thought I was, eh?”

  “Worth a look,” Clint counters. “We’re here now.”

  “Let’s make it quick. We need to be on the move if I’m wrong.” And it looks like I am, I don’t say.

  We move in on the bar like hunting dogs, ready to give chase, or blood, at any moment. But the closer we get, the more certain I am that nobody is in there. Even if they were being silent, I’d know. I’m not even sure how exactly I would know, except that years of outlawing have taught me that my killer’s senses’d be ringing like crazy right now if we were about to exchange gunfire. I go to the front door, nod to Clint, and then kick it down. It falls flat, revealing a completely empty bar: everything stripped as though ready for demolition, the counters bare, the walls bare, the floor bare. Only dust and debris remain … and Fiona’s friend, tied to a chair in the middle of the room, with a fucking bow in her hair.

  Shouldering my rifle, I take a step into the room. “Are there any traps in here, sweetheart, that you know about?”

  The terrified woman, a dirty rag stuffed in her mouth, shakes her head.

  “All right then.”

  I go across the room and take the rag from her mouth. She inhales as though coming up for air, and then Clint walks around her and unties her hands. She immediately snatches the bow from her hair and tosses it across the room. “Ah!” she cries.

  “This is really fucking weird,” Clint mutters.

  “Yeah,” I say. “Wrapped up like a gift. It’s like he wanted us to …”

  Clint and I meet eyes and I know he’s just had the same revelation that I did.

  “We need to get back to the club,” I tell him. “Right fucking now.”

  “Yeah, damn right.”

  “You.” I point to the youngest in our group, a man who was, until recently, a pledge. He’s about twenty with a scraggly beard clinging to his pale cheeks. “Take the girl. Keep her safe. All right? Take her down to the safehouse near the lake. Or go back to her place with her, if that’s what she wants. I don’t think the Nine Circles gives a shit about her.”

  “You were right about the bar at least,” Clint says as we jog back to the bikes.

  “Yippee for me,” I growl.

  I jump onto the bike and lead the fellas back toward the clubhouse, darting through the traffic, touching my knee down to the concrete on more’n one corner. I don’t give a damn about traffic safety right now, which is why I run about five red lights. I just keep seeing Shotgun with that hole in his head, and then Fiona with a similar hole in hers: a small red pinprick that’ll end her life. I should’ve known he was making some sort of play, the same way he did when he shot me. Fucking hell, I’m starting to get tired of this prick always being one step ahead. If he’s hurt Fiona … I feel my world crumble to ashes in my head, blowing away in the wind. Odd how a world can change so much, so fast, but there it is.

  We stop on the far side of the road, in the pitiful collection of trees we call a forest. Right away I know that something’s wrong; there’s a man on the roof with a big scoped rifle, but he’s not a man I recogn
ize. I ask Clint if he knows him. Clint peers through his scope and then shakes his head. “Got a Nine Circles leather on, Silence.”

  “Motherfucker.”

  “So it was a trap,” Ralphie says, the blood-red tattoo under his eye shifting as he scratches at his acne-covered cheek. “Fuck, fuck, fuck. Now they’ve got our fucking clubhouse. These bastards. These fucking bastards. We ought to burn that place to the ground.”

  “And burn down our president?” I snap. “Our men? Keep your head, man.”

  “You think they’re still alive?” he snaps in return. “Silence, be smart. This was Reaper’s plan all along. The warehouses, shooting you, taking your girl, all to lead him right here. He’s played us every step of the way.”

  “Yeah.” I sigh. “Maybe he has, all right? Maybe you’ve got the truth of it. But the fuck do you want me to do, eh? Take a chance that you’re right and maybe kill our own men? Maybe kill my girl? No goddamn way.”

  “He’s right,” Clint mutters.

  “Then what the hell do we do?” Ralphie demands.

  Clint shrugs. “We come up with a plan.”

  “So that’s our plan, to come up with a—”

  Reaper’s voice sounds like a rushing bull coming over the loudspeaker until he adjusts it. Then it’s like the voice of God. He swaggers onto the roof with Fiona at his side, dragging her by her arm. I turn toward them, my blood colder than a quick death. “Hello, gentlemen!” he roars. “That isn’t much of a forest, I have to say, but then again, what can I expect in this piece of shit state?”

  “He better shut his fucking mouth about Texas,” Clint snarls. “Or I’ll shut it for him.”

  I pat him on the arm. “I agree,” I tell him. “But …” I tilt my head; what can we do?

  “Here’s the deal. Surrender yourself or this pink-haired slut gets a slug in the back of the head. I might rough her up a bit first, though! Have some fun with her! You have one minute!”