by Vivian Arend
“All you have to do is volunteer.” That was what the incubus had told me. He’d made it sound so innocent, so appealing. If I’d agreed to fuck him, the needles would go away.
But then he would fuck me to death, just like Big Papa mentioned.
So I’d kept my mouth shut, prayed that someone would find me, and let them stick another needle in. That wasn’t the part that had scarred me, though. It had been when they ripped the needles out. That was what had eventually formed the ridges of bumpy white tissue along my neck and shoulder, leaving me permanently disfigured.
“Did you check the Ranch for your woman?” Big Papa asked, glancing at me as I stepped back again. Big Papa wasn’t stupid. He had to know they were asking for me. But he hadn’t given me away.
“Yeah. We thought we had her, but when Mac fucked her, she just about fell over dead. She was a half-succubus anyway. Wrong woman.” The incubus said it so casually, even though he had just confessed that one of his men had tried to kill Kelsie. “We didn’t sense her at the Ranch. Figure she’s gotta be hiding somewhere else.” Hiding right in plain sight.
“The folks who run Lobo Norte are out of town right now,” Big Papa said. “There’s a woman with them. You can see her when she comes back.”
The incubus smiled unpleasantly. “I think we will.”
I stood behind him with the tray, staring at the back of his leather jacket, thinking about plunging one of my kitchen knives between his shoulder blades.
Do it. Just do it, Ofelia. End him now.
Cooper was seated at Big Papa’s right hand, all his muscles tensed as he watched me. He’d intervene if I did something. I was certain of it.
“Okay. The rules of the cage match will change,” Big Papa said. “We’ll bite all the guys you want. That’s fine. But first, they gotta survive fights against my boys. Next fight, every single match is going to be against these guys.” He jerked his thumb at the other werewolves arrayed around him, including Old Yeller, Mad Dog…and Cooper. “We’ll keep each fight to five minutes. Fangs will kill everyone they can. Anyone who survives for that whole fight gets to be changed.”
The incubus drank another shot. “Sounds fair to me.” His eyes sliced over to me. I felt glare like hands gripping my shoulders. “That one of the Ranch girls?” I wasn’t even important enough for him to ask me personally. He was asking Big Papa.
Do it. Stab him.
My hand crept toward my boot.
The door opened, slamming against the wall. I jerked my fingers away.
Gloria and Johnny stepped in.
Relief flooded me, so powerful that my muscles liquefied instantly. I had to grab one of the nearby chairs to keep from falling over.
“What’s going on?” Gloria asked, eyes narrowed.
Big Papa shoved back his chair and stood. He was just as broad as she was, but much taller. “We’re having a meeting.”
She tossed her head back, meeting him glare for glare. “You’ve got a motel for that. My bar’s not open. Get out of here.”
“You talk to me like that, woman?” he asked.
“Yes. I do.” She lifted one fist. A canvas bag hung in her grip. “Get out of here. Now.”
Whatever was in the bag, it made Big Papa falter. His nostrils flared. The other werewolves reacted more strongly. They shied back, muttering among each other. The only one who remained quiet was Cooper.
The incubi stood, too. “Is this her, Papa?” Mac asked.
Before he could answer, Gloria snapped. “Out!”
To my amazement, the men left, filing past her one by one. Johnny rocked back on his heels looking smug. He’d always enjoyed their power over the biker gangs. He didn’t hesitate to show it. That arrogance was less dangerous on him—he wasn’t a woman, wasn’t a biker, wasn’t a threat or offensive. The Fangs and Needles barely looked at him on their way out.
Cooper was the last through the door. He looked at me over Gloria’s head, and there was the promise of pain in his eyes.
I was in trouble for putting myself in danger. Big trouble.
Then he, too, was gone.
Gloria kicked the door shut behind them and rounded on me. “You let them take over my bar. And you said you could take care of Lobo Norte on your own.”
My muscles hurt from relaxing after all that tension. My eyes stung. My cheeks burned.
Instead of answering, I burst into tears.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Gloria looked over the evidence of witchcraft in my trailer with a snort of disdain. She tossed my ritual knife aside, planted her hands on her hips, and said, “Really, Ofelia?”
I hadn’t had time to clean up my home before she dragged me back there, and I couldn’t make any excuses. I was done crying. I was done being a freaked out mess. I met her gaze with a fierce glare of my own. “Yes, really. There’s more to me than giving men boners. Get over it.”
Another snort. “Talk like that again and I’ll cut your tongue out with your paring knife.”
She probably meant it. I clenched my jaw instinctively.
“Ofelia saved Kelsie with this stuff,” Tatiana said. She had caught us on the way out of the bar and invited herself into my home. A week earlier, I would have protested letting one of the Ranch girls through my door. Now I was happy to see her and hear the news she had brought me. “She’d be dead if not for her.”
“You should probably stay out of it,” I muttered. Once Gloria was pissed about something, there was no slowing her down.
Gloria grabbed me by the chin. “I leave Lobo Norte for a week and a half, and look at you. Look at you! Hanging out in the whorehouse, casting magic, letting demons into my town, giving the bar to werewolves—”
“I didn’t give it to them!” I interrupted. “I can only do so much against Big Papa!”
She slapped me upside the head. Not hard, but it stung. “You’re not stripping on my bar again,” Gloria said. “You’re done.”
That hurt a lot more than the strike. “You can’t evict me.”
“I’m not evicting you. Are you too stupid to see that I’m trying to protect you?” she asked, exasperated.
I blinked. “Huh?”
“You know why Johnny never let you work at the Coyote Ranch?”
It took me a second to catch up with the change in subject. “Because he fucking hates me and doesn’t want me to have the money.”
“Because I told him what happened to you,” she said.
It was like a second slap. I glanced at Tatiana, but she was tinkering with my altar and pretending not to listen. “I asked you not to tell anyone. Especially Johnny.”
“I told him. Okay? He was gonna take you as one of his whores, so I told him, and he changed his mind. The Ranch girls are all volunteers. They’re happy to be there. Part-succubus, so they feed on fucking. Makes them feel good in all the ways. Johnny loves them, doesn’t want them hurt, and he didn’t want you hurt, neither.”
I stared at her, unable to process this shift in attitudes. The idea that Johnny might not hate me… No. It just didn’t jive. “I’m not a half-succubus,” I said slowly. “That’s why he wouldn’t take me, isn’t it? Not because he was trying to be nice to me.”
“Give him some credit. You’re not human. You’d have worked out fine.”
“What?”
“You’re not human,” Gloria said. “Don’t know what you are. Not a demon or angel. I can feel it.” She tapped her temple. “But you’re not human.”
“You’re not,” Tatiana agreed without looking over at me. She was digging her fingernail into the wax of one of my candles, drawing a line around its circumference. “I don’t think a normal witch would have been able to heal Kelsie, since she’s half-demon and all.”
I snatched the candle out of her hand and slammed it back into the ceramic mug. “You people are insane.”
“I didn’t want you fucking bikers or doing magic because you’re supposed to be hiding in Lobo Norte,” Gloria said. “You’re not hiding
if you’re broadcasting all over the place!” Her long-nailed hands fluttered through the air. “No wonder they sent the card to you.”
The card. She knew.
“Thanks for checking in with me, Tatiana,” I said tightly. “I’m glad to hear Kelsie’s okay.”
She stood up, wiping her hands off on her skinny jeans. “But it was just getting good.”
I wasn’t going to talk about The Devil where just anyone could hear. But when I opened my mouth to tell her off, Gloria stopped me by jerking The Devil card out of my waistband. I didn’t think it’d been sticking out. I had no idea how she’d known it was there. “I got one of those cards when I was your age. Not this one. It was the Ace of Pentacles. But I remember this.” Gloria tapped the back graphic with her fingernail. “Came with the same note, too.”
“What note?”
She pulled a folded piece of paper out of her pocket. It was limp from sweat, the ink blurred. She’d obviously been sitting on it for the entire drive. I unfolded it carefully.
It was a poem written in looping cursive. “The wheel of life turns / and the Forbidden yearn / for a world that no longer exists. / Solve the card and you’ll find / you can leave this behind / and join the rest of us in the mists.”
Dumb fucking poem.
“ I could have written this in middle school,” I said.
“And it hasn’t changed in twenty years,” Gloria said. She didn’t sound like she found it as amusing as I did. “Except for this.”
She turned the page over. My name had been written on the back, and someone had added a note in different handwriting: “Can’t wait to meet you. N.K.F.”
The sight of my name in the exact same calligraphy that had been on the outside of the tarot card’s envelope made my stomach flip. “You found this in the mail? You hid this from me?” Each word came out a little louder until I was almost shouting. Dangerous thing to do to Gloria. I was already aching in anticipation of her slap.
Tatiana’s mouth opened wide in surprise. “Oh! That’s a tarot card, isn’t it? Wait here, I have something to show you. Three minutes. Don’t go anywhere.” She darted out my door, leaving it hanging open.
Painful silence stretched between Gloria and me.
I’d never quite trusted her. It was hard to trust anyone in Lobo Norte. But I did trust that she’d be honest with me. She’d never stolen my tips. She always told me when the gangs were going to roll into town. She’d taught me everything I knew about stripping and bartending.
Yet I was stunned she would have kept mail from me with my name on it, much less that she knew what it was.
“Yeah, I hid The Devil from you,” Gloria finally said. “I cut it up with scissors and scattered the pieces on the wind. You got sold for drugs when you were a kid, tortured by the Needles, ended up in Lobo Norte. The Ace of Pentacles ruined my life. You don’t have a life to ruin. I thought it’d kill you.”
“But the card came back,” I said.
“I guess they always come back. I had to try.”
They always come back. She said it with so much confidence, and she hadn’t seen me try to throw out and burn the card. She really had seen this before.
“What did you mean when you said that the Ace of Pentacles ruined your life?” I asked.
“You’re supposed to solve the cards, right? That’s what the poem says. I’ve got no fucking idea what that means, but I don’t think it was an accident that the card showed up a week before my family bankrupted, my dad burned down the house for insurance fraud, and he got sent to jail. I went to foster care over that.” Gloria poked me in the chest. “It was the fucking card. I didn’t solve it, and I got fucked. Pentacles mean money, you know.”
I didn’t know. “Do you still have your card?”
“It disappeared. I didn’t solve it, so the card left. Best as I can figure it.”
The way she said it was like she thought the cards had a mind of their own. Maybe they did. “And what does The Devil mean?”
“Figure it out. Solve it on your own.” She cupped my cheek in her hand. “Seems like you don’t have much of a choice anymore, do you?”
Tatiana’s footsteps banged up my stairs. “Got it!” She jumped into my single-wide holding a book. She was shaking enough from her sprint across Lobo Norte that I couldn’t see the cover, so I took it from her. The cover said “Tarot for the Solitary Practitioner.”
“Are you kidding me?” I asked. “Are you going to tell me you got a card, too?”
“I have a whole deck,” Tatiana said. “Not the same one, though. I bought it at Borders before coming here to work. I’m Wiccan. I kinda dabble in divination for fun.”
I barely heard her. I flipped through the book. It was a cheap thing printed on crappy paper with flimsy glue binding, but it only took a second for me to find The Devil. Number fifteen. Seemed like he really should have been thirteen, considering the way my luck had been going.
Gloria pulled the book out of my hand and read aloud. “The Devil’s in the major arcana. That means it’s a big card, a big deal.”
“Of course I know that,” I lied.
“Says here that The Devil means you’ve gotten yourself chained to a problem, and you’ve got to free yourself to escape.” Gloria laughed mirthlessly. “Well, that was easy. Card solved. Now you can live your life without fear of dying.”
I was pretty sure it wasn’t that simple, and I could tell she thought the same. She started flipping through it—probably to look for the Ace of Pentacles. I took the book back from her before she could lose my page.
The description was barely three sentences long. It really was what Gloria had said. The two people were chained to The Devil by choice.
“But I’m not here by choice,” I said. “I don’t understand.”
My head was spinning with all the information I’d gotten that day. Gloria had gotten one of these magical cards before. Johnny didn’t hate me. The Needles wanted me back for reasons I didn’t understand. It might have been because I wasn’t human—although nobody knew what I was.
I wasn’t even on the stripper pole and it felt like the whole world was upside down.
Gloria checked the time. “Better see if Johnny’s done with the generator. Gonna open the bar for a cage match tonight.”
“You’re doing the match? The one where Big Papa plans on turning all the survivors into werewolves?” I went to the window and looked outside. The gangs were still camped across the road, surrounding The Lodge. They looked restless. Ready to fight again. There must have been more than a hundred of them. “We can’t let them make that many werewolves.”
“How you planning on stopping them?” Gloria asked. She didn’t give me a chance to respond. “Tonight’s the new moon. I’d be surprised if there were more than a handful of survivors.”
At my confused look, Tatiana explained, “Werewolves change on both the full and the new moon.” I didn’t bother asking how she knew. It seemed like everyone knew more than I did these days.
Cooper was going to change again tonight. I remembered how he had looked two weeks earlier, wracked with the pain of the transformation, and I felt sick for him.
They were going to go into the cage like that. It would be a bloodbath.
I didn’t want Cooper in it.
“I’ll come help you get ready, Gloria,” I said. I needed to be close so that I could stop him before he got in that cage.
But Gloria shot me a hard look. “I told you, no more stripping. The demons will figure out who you are if they haven’t already. Stay here.” She hesitated by the door, then fished around in her purse and pulled out a box the size of her hand. She shoved it at me. “Just in case.”
And then she was gone. Tatiana was about two steps behind her.
“Can I keep this?” I asked, lifting the book on tarot cards. It wasn’t much, but it was better than nothing.
Tatiana gave a long-suffering sigh. “Guess so. You did save Kelsie’s life. I get it back if you die, thoug
h.”
She left before I could think of a response.
I hope I don’t die, either.
Shutting the door behind them, I opened the box Gloria had given me. They were shotgun shells. Confused, I tilted the box to read the side. It said “double-aught silver buckshot,” and I remembered how Big Papa had cringed away from her bag. That explained everything. A smile spread over my lips as I set the box of shells next to Bo Peep.
Then I smoothed out the crumpled poem and read it again. The Forbidden yearn for a world that no longer exists… What were the Forbidden? And the mists? What was that supposed to mean?
The note to me had been signed with initials: “N.K.F.” This asshole would have answers. I just needed to find her.
But first, I had to survive the night.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Cooper didn’t come to see me before the fight. I’d been hoping he would, yet I was alone as the sun dropped toward the horizon and the bar filled with the ruckus of carousing bikers.
I paced in my living room. My whole body was jittering with the shocks of the week.
The Devil. Peyton. Not human. The Forbidden. Silver buckshot.
And Gloria thought that I’d stay inside tonight. Cooper had thought he could make me stay, too.
I didn’t need to be protected…did I?
Maybe I did. I trusted Cooper and Gloria, and both of them had independently come to the same decision. I needed to let them help me. It was insanity to do otherwise.
Plus, I was scared shitless of the idea of facing the Needles again. All of the earlier bravado had drained out of me, leaving me scared and trembling in my chaps.
The knocking at my door made me jump.
Cooper.
I threw open the door without even thinking to look through the peephole. Stupid me—the man standing on my steps, bathed in the crimson light of desert sunset, wasn’t my werewolf.