“Viper’s barricaded them into the room, and the men tell me they can hear him singing and chanting. They’re pretty sure he’s doing some kind of Cherokee ceremony or ritual, but they can’t understand the language. He told them he needs time alone with her, and made Bash promise to make sure he wasn’t disturbed by anyone except Bran.”
“Is Bran on the way?”
“His people are waking him. It’s a bright sunshiny day, but there’s apparently a way to get him here since we can get him out of his vehicle underground.”
“Tell me about the others. What do we know that isn’t on the spreadsheet?”
“Dozer left to go to Tiny at the hospital. I don’t think Sheila’s okay. Gen was hit in the leg but was ignoring it and helping Constance.”
If something happened to Constance or the baby, Gonzo would lose it. “Where’s Gonzo?”
“He was with her when she was hit. Angelica said there was a lot of blood. She went to the hospital with Gonzo — not for her own bullet wound, but because she said Constance and Gonzo needed her.”
“Duke’s at the hospital?”
She nodded. “Brain’s in the control room and he’s in charge here while Duke’s handling everything at the hospital.”
“You’ll call me if there’s any change? Even if the men just smell something off.”
Harmony nodded, and I told her I was glad she was okay before we disconnected.
I looked to Horse, then Nix. “I’m gonna text Brain that we need an exit strategy, and to call me when he can talk. I won’t be stupid about it, but I need to either kill the people who did this, or I need to get to Hailey — even if I can only be on the other side of the fucking door.”
It was nearly five minutes before Brain called, and he jumped straight into it when I answered. “Our perimeter people zeroed in on where the shots were fired from. The homeowners weren’t home, so they got the shooters out without being seen. They’re on the way to a safe house in North Carolina with them.”
“The Asheville people have them?”
“They were working that end of the perimeter.” He sighed. “They know to keep them alive until we get what we need from them, and then we’ll probably let you, Duke, Gonzo, and Tiny go to town on them.”
“How are Sheila and Constance? Is Gen still okay?”
He sighed again. “Gen’ll be fine, but Sheila died on the operating table. Constance was hit in a kidney. They got the baby out and he’s doing okay, but now they have to save the mom. Gonzo’s planning to get her out in the dead of night once they get her stabilized, so he can change her.”
“Every OKM member is dead.”
“Damned straight,” he agreed. “We’ll make the OKM a bad memory and a cautionary tale, but we have to be smart.”
“When will I know whether Hailey rises as a Lugat or is dead?” I knew Brain wouldn’t know, but I had to ask.
“Bran’s limo will stop and get you. They’ll pull into the back lot and get close to the door. I’m following them through the cellphone his guard used, and they’re still twenty minutes out. Lock your bike in the back room. More brothers are coming up from Atlanta, and they’ll swing by in a cage to collect Nix and Horse when they arrive.”
Harmony texted me every five minutes to let me know Viper was still chanting and there was no change. I hadn’t asked her to, but I was thankful for it because it’s possible she saved what little sanity I had left.
Bran was in a box in the limo, so there was no way for me to talk to him. One of his guards told me, “It’s lightproof, soundproof, bulletproof, shatterproof, drillproof, and fireproof. If we’re in a wreck, he’ll remain safe.”
“What can you tell me about Hailey’s possibilities?” The guard was a tiger, but I had to assume he knew stuff about his boss.
“If she was still hearing and smelling better than human, there’s perhaps a sixty to seventy percent chance she’ll rise. If she wasn’t, there isn’t much chance.”
“She still was last night. I’m not sure about today.”
I took a breath and asked my next pressing question. “If she rises, exactly how will she belong to Bran? And for how long? As her maker, what rights will he have?”
“Lugat aren’t magical. He’ll be responsible for her until she can pass the tests allowing her to be released into civilization, and she’ll owe him a life since he gave her another.”
“How will she pay… how does that work? How can you repay your life?”
He shrugged. “Who can say?”
I had to leave the limo before Bran’s guards would open the box, so I was already downstairs listening to the strange chanting through the door when Bran entered.
Jiggy — one of our Atlanta brothers — knocked on the door and told Viper, “Bran and Ghost are here.”
The chanting went on another ten seconds before it stopped, and we heard him releasing the barricades.
I gasped when I saw Viper – he looked like a skeleton with skin, and his eyes were sunk into his head. “I need food and water,” he told Harmony, “but she needs ceremony. Her spirit’s still here, but I fear it will leave if I don’t keep calling to it.” He looked to me. “If you want to come in, you’ll have to chant and dance with me.” He looked to Bran. “We need you to tell us if she’ll rise as a vampire, or whether I should continue trying to work snake magic.”
Jiggy stepped into the room. “I’ve heard you chanting from the other side of the door. I know the tune and I’ll do it with you. Ghost can stand guard outside until he learns it and can relieve one of us.”
* * *
Three hours later we had seven people circling her and chanting. Bran had checked on her and gone home. He said the Lugat blood was active, but if we could override it with snake magic, she might have a better chance at turning snake.
She wasn’t breathing and her heart wasn’t beating, but her body wasn’t acting like a corpse. She didn’t smell dead, and she wasn’t cool to the touch. If anything, she was feverish.
My brothers learned the chant, and we had seven people chanting around her for three days, nonstop. They took hour-long shifts. Viper and I took an hour break every once in a while, and neither of us left her side. People brought us food and coffee, and we napped on the floor at the edge of the room. The farthest away we got was the bathroom ten yards down the hall.
Bran was present the third night, and as the sun dipped over the horizon, he had us take her above ground. We put her in the back of an SUV and drove her across the street, and we stretched her out in the wooded area in the compound.
It was full dark by then, and when nothing happened I slit my wrist and let my blood fall into her mouth. Bran had coached me in how to let her drink from my arm if she awoke as a vampire, and I figured maybe giving her some blood now might help.
I wasn’t prepared for her eyes to open and for her to spring to life at that moment. She got past me, but she didn’t get past Viper.
As his arms wrapped around her, her eyes flashed, and she shrank and transformed until she was on the ground as a rattlesnake.
Everyone stepped back, someone handed Viper the snake-catcher bag, and he easily scooped her into it and folded it over on itself as he said. “Let’s get her back to the kill room.”
It was decided Bran and Viper were the only ones who needed to be in the room with her as a snake. I didn’t like it, but I understood. She hadn’t recognized me when she’d been in human form — what were the chances she’d know me when she was a snake? I couldn’t help her through this.
Chapter 14
Ghost
Viper moved in with Bran so they could work with Hailey. She was having to learn to deal with a new vampire’s bloodlust while learning to control the snake. I drove up on the mountain and let her drink from me at least once a day, but Bran supplemented human blood in bags for her when I wasn’t around to feed her.
The first time I stepped into her cage and the lock clicked behind me, I had to go out and above ground. The onl
y way to spend time with her was in her cage, though, so I fought the claustrophobia and went back.
She didn’t know me, but when she was feeding from my arm, at least I could be food to her. She was nothing more than a crazed, wild animal going for sustenance, and it was all I could do to wait until I’d driven off Bran’s property before I burst into tears the first time. I’d held it together until then, but my grief was too much for any one person to handle. I’d had her for such a short time, she couldn’t be lost. She just couldn’t.
Hailey’s body might be alive, but Hailey wasn’t in there. Bran assured me she was, but she’d have to fight for control. He’d also admitted not everyone is strong enough to fight past the bloodlust and remember themselves.
She shifted to snake during mid-bite once, and I took a heavy dose of rattlesnake poison. I shifted to wolf as soon as they got me out of the room, but damn, the poison had hurt.
I kept going back, though. I wanted her to smell like me. I wanted her to want me. If feeding her and being her sustenance was the only connection I could have, I’d take it.
Meanwhile, the MC was reeling as we tried to regroup. Little Dominic was delivered by emergency C-section the night of the shooting, and was healthy in all respects. The bullet had missed him entirely, though it’d taken out one of Constance’s kidneys and they’d nearly lost her. Gonzo had enlisted Abbott’s help in getting her out of the hospital and rearranging the memories of the doctors and nurses so no one freaked when she was released to be transferred to another facility. Gonzo spent months in Georgia with his wife in a cage in the basement learning to control her wolf, and his son upstairs in a makeshift nursery. Gonzo eventually hired a nanny for the twins, but they stayed with Duke and Gen during those first weeks so they didn’t miss school. Several of the Atlanta ol’ladies took turns at the cabin with Gonzo to help with the baby and Constance. Only wolves could be there, or Harmony and Gen would’ve gone.
Tiny had wanted to bite Sheila instead of putting her into the ambulance, but she’d told him she wanted to go to the hospital. They’d been together forever, and Tiny was starting to worry about Sheila dying long before him. He’d wanted to turn her several months earlier, but she’d refused. She didn’t want to be a wolf. So, she’d gone to the hospital to get fixed up instead of letting her husband turn her into a wolf, and she’d died.
Six of the Asheville brothers had chanted with me around Hailey while the Chattanooga and Atlanta brothers went to Sheila’s funeral. Gonzo and I were the only two local brothers who missed it, but we knew Tiny would understand.
The police wanted to question everyone associated with the MC, and that included Hailey. Brain hacked into the UTC records and made it look as if she withdrew from all classes a few hours before the shooting. She’d been in class that day, so I told them she’d had a problem in a class and had told me she needed to go to the woods for a while, and she’d see me when she thought she could deal with people again. I pointed out she’s Cherokee and goes to the woods to resolve personal problems. I told them I assumed she’d go to the Cherokee reservation, but she hadn’t driven her car so I wasn’t sure where she’d gone.
They didn’t believe me, but with her withdrawing from classes before the shooting, they said they’d give her a few days to turn up. I told them a few weeks was more likely, because if she were only going to be gone a couple of days, she’d have stayed in school.
Viper rescheduled his tattoo appointments the first week, but couldn’t do it again the next. He was afraid to bring his family in to help with Hailey, because he wasn’t certain they’d let her live once they realized she was some kind of vampire/snake hybrid.
We were all concerned about what would happen if the Concilio found out, but Bran wasn’t telling them, and neither were any of my brothers.
The Asheville chapter got one of the Strigorii vampires they’re friendly with to go through the men’s heads who’d shot us. The gang war and every attack had been an OKM decision, and they’d gone against Jiminy’s orders by attacking us as they had.
It took us a week and a half to plan it, but in one night we took out every OKM member. There were no bodies, no gunshots, and no clues. We captured every one of them without bloodshed, put them on a chartered plane first thing the next morning, and fed them to some pigs in lower Alabama a few hours later. We took off from a private airport and landed on the pig farm. There are no records of the flight. We shaved their heads and pubes, and incinerated the hair with the clothes and shoes.
The men disappeared without a trace, and the cops weren’t terribly interested in investigating. Their wives and girlfriends tried to pin it on us, but with no evidence of foul play, the brass didn’t allocate resources to find them. Our attorney suggested the OKM may have decided to leave town to avoid repercussions from the gang war they started and couldn’t finish, and the media ran with it.
Taking a life is a big deal, and I once said if it ever became just another dead guy then I’d know I’d gone over the edge. I consider myself a mostly good guy, and yet I felt no remorse for killing these men. They hurt and killed people we loved. They were our enemies, and we wiped them out. If they didn’t want their kids growing up without them, they shouldn’t have bled the RTMC. Killing these men didn’t bring my Hailey back to me, but it helped guarantee people would think twice before doing something like this against us again.
I didn’t take pleasure in killing the men who died by my hand that day. I didn’t even torture them — though I can’t say the same about Tiny. I hope causing the men he killed so much pain helped him heal, but I’m not sure it did.
For my part, though, I gained no satisfaction in watching the life leave their bodies. I’ll do whatever it takes to protect those I care about. Killing people is hard work — physically, mentally, and emotionally. When it was over, I was relieved the job was done with no unforeseen problems.
Chapter 15
Hailey
I don’t remember anything from the first months. I know I was shackled in a basement cell with no windows, and I know I was always hungry.
Hungry isn’t the right word. It’s as if every cell in my body was on fire, and the only way to quench the fire was with blood.
I fed on wolf blood and human blood, and I remember I liked the wolf blood so much more. I wanted more than blood, but I didn’t know it was possible to ask. There were no thoughts — I felt something and I reacted to the stimulus. That was it. I didn’t know my name. I didn’t even know I was a being. I just knew I needed to quench the hunger.
My first true memory is of the wolf standing on two legs outside my cell playing music. I didn’t know what it was at the time — I didn’t know the word for music, but it triggered something in me. It soothed the beast, when the beast didn’t know it needed soothing.
Dare remembered my love for Rachmaninov, and he played all my favorite pieces. He says I sat at the front of the cage and listened, and it was the first hope he had that I was still me. When he’d played everything he’d brought and I still seemed to want more, he played Wish You Were Here. He said he’d remembered me playing it the first night I’d tested my hand, and he’d been playing it since I was gone, wishing I were back. Fitting, since it’s what I’d played when he and his dad had moved out.
Within forty-eight hours of hearing the music, I was myself for short, lucid moments. Bran started only feeding me when I was lucid, and playing out-of-tune violin and guitar music when I spent too long as the beast. It was basic positive and negative reinforcement, but it brought me out of the bloodlust in record time.
Bran also recorded seven people doing the snake magic chant, had speakers installed all around me, and played it when I was having trouble controlling the snake.
Eventually, Dare became a permanent resident of Bran’s house and rarely went home. He bit five of Bran’s human flock, and worked them through the process of gaining control of their wolves. Apparently, he and Bran agreed a one-to-five ratio was fair under the circumsta
nces. Also, this let Dare take care of them while he was spending so much time at Bran’s house anyway, and it meant when I was finally in control enough to go home with him, I no longer owed Bran anything because Dare had already paid my debt.
But it was Viper who most helped me find my way back to human during this stage. His voice, his gentle touch — I saw him as comfort. Eventually, I saw Dare as comfort, too, but at first I could only see him as food.
Viper was never afraid of me. When I was crazy with bloodlust, Bran and Dare were careful with me. They held me where they wanted me, how they wanted me. But Viper sat outside the cage, just outside my reach for days — his soothing voice telling me I’d be okay, reminding me of my name, and telling me how many people were worried about me.
When the bloodlust quieted enough, I found myself battling the snake for dominance, he sat in my cage with me, and hummed, chanted, and talked me through it.
I was naked those first months, but I changed back and forth from snake to human enough, they didn’t have to worry about cleaning me. They hosed my cell down, but not me.
Bran was my jailer. He decided when I ate, and when I could wander around downstairs for short periods before I had to go back to my cell. He’s the one who decreed when I could have a mattress, and then later, a pillow.
Chapter 16
Ghost
I missed my brothers, but everyone knew this was the way things had to be, for now. I still taught classes at the gun store on the weekends, but I wasn’t scheduled to work during the week.
There was nothing quite like riding out with them on a full moon night though. Bash was leading us tonight, and Gonzo, Tiny, and I were just behind him. Gonzo had finally been able to take Constance home, but only because all the neighbors are wolves, or at least know about wolves. She was in a cage in their basement if two wolves weren’t actively watching her. I was impressed with her control after four months, but she’d had great incentive — she’d wanted to hold her baby while he was still an infant.
Ghost: The Rolling Thunder Motorcycle Club, Book 8 Page 11