Page 11 of Ghost’s Awakening

My hands tightened on the bars.

Irish turned the corner and rode past us first. I followed. Blade fell in behind.

The warehouse shrank in my mirrors. The road opened dark and straight and the engine climbed as I rolled the throttle on and let the night take us. Cold air, clean, tasting of sage. Vegas lay across the basin below, a long smear of light with black on every side.

His arms tightened. The grip had changed. Not practical anymore, not panic either. Something else.

I leaned into a curve and he leaned with me, no hesitation in it, his body just going where mine went.

And somewhere low in me, in the place that had been coming loose since two dark eyes found me across a room where nobody's supposed to find me, something settled. Something as scary as the sound of those bolts sealing the warehouse doors tight.

For the first time since I could remember, the noise in my head had nothing to say.

3

STATIC

CALEB

Iwas shirtless on the back of a stranger's motorcycle doing ninety through the desert, and somehow this was the safest I'd felt all night. I didn't know where we were going. I didn't know who I was holding onto.

I only knew two things. My brother was in a hospital bed twenty miles behind me, and the man I feared had put him there had just said his name out loud.

The wind tore across my bare chest and arms, cold enough to make my teeth ache. October in the desert, the temperature dropping into the forties this far out the second the sun quit. My skin was still damp from the fight and whatever the hell had happened in that warehouse, and the wind turned the damp to a skin of ice that settled over every bruise and cut, until my whole torso went numb. Small mercy. Numb was better than the pain that waited underneath the wounds.

Ghost rode fast. Controlled, but fast, the bike leaned through curves I felt low in my gut, the engine climbing every time he cracked the throttle open on a straight. The two riders boxing us in, one ahead, one behind, held the pace like they could do it asleep, three Harleys carving through black desert. There were no signs. Nothing but asphalt and open dark and the last glow of that warehouse shrinking in the mirrors.

They rode like the rules were something that happened to other people. Speed limits, lane lines, a stop sign that came and went without any of them touching the brakes. I pressed my cheek harder into Ghost's back to keep the wind out of my eyes, and his shirt was warm where my face sat against it, and under the cotton I could feel the muscle of his back shift every time he leaned us through a turn.

I lost track of how long we rode. Twenty minutes. Maybe less. Time had gone soft somewhere out on that road, the adrenaline flattening everything into one long smear of cold and engine rumble.

Then Ghost dropped a gear, the growl faded away, and something rose up out of the desert ahead of us.

Not what I'd pictured. I'd had a bar in my head. Bikes out front, a neon sign, what a movie shows you when somebody says clubhouse.

This was a fortress.

Concrete walls. Cameras bolted along them at intervals, little red lights holding steady in the dark. A gate that rolled back on a motorized track as we came up on it, heavy steel, built to close off a prison yard. Past it, low buildings ringed around a bigger central one, the whole lot washed white by flood lamps, a bright island dropped in the middle of nothing. I counted six cameras on the gate alone as we rolled through.

I'd fought in illegal pits and closed down kitchens where the walk to my car in the dark felt like a gamble. I knew what it looked like when people were trying to keep trouble out. But this was something else. This place was built by men who expected trouble to come find them, and had decided down to the last camera to be ready when it did.

The three bikes slid into a row of dozens more, chrome throwing back the floodlight, two of them throwing back purple and red where the rest threw back black. Ghost killed the engine, and the quiet that dropped after it was louder than the road had been. My ears rang. The desert pressed in from every direction, huge and still.

I swung off first. My legs had gone stiff, and my bare feet hit gravel that bit cold into my soles. I stepped back and turned, and Ghost was still throwing his leg over the bike.

The sodium yellow of the warehouse's fighting pit was gone, and in the hard white light his eyes were something else. Ice-blue, so pale they'd gone nearly clear, set in a face younger than the corridor had let me believe. Barely enough stubble to shadow his jaw. His black shirt pulled tight across his shoulders, and I could see the shape of him now, lean and cut, muscle laid over a frame that had started out boyish and gotten hammered in the gym into something that could back up the way he moved. And he moved with no noise in it, every motion smooth and quiet, like he'd spent years teaching his body to take up less room than it had any right to.

He was young. Maybe my age, possibly less. But the gap between that face and the way he carried himself scrambled something in me. He carried himself like he'd been to war, and he'd fought at the warehouse like it too. The way he swept one of the thugs who had me pinned, and let the man's own weight drive his face into the floor…

And then there was the face. A kid who'd walked out the door and forgotten to shave.

Ghost turned and caught me looking. My eyes were somewhere around his collarbone when his sight landed on mine, and I looked away fast, toward the groan of the central building's doors.

Heavy steel, dragging open on a track, the sound ripping through the quiet. Two men came out shoulder to shoulder.

My body went tight before my head caught up, old fighting instinct firing on its own. Twenty years of watching men walk toward me across a mat. Stance, weight… the story a set of shoulders tells about what's coming.

The one on the left filled his black shirt like the fabric had done something unforgivable to deserve the punishing stretch. Tall, thick through the shoulders and chest, veiny arms that looked like they could bend a car door shut. Gray ran through his close-cropped hair and the stubble on his face. Mid-forties, maybe. Or younger, carrying experiences that didn't match the number. His face sat calm, but the calm rode on top of something that missed nothing, taking the whole scene apart without ever once looking like he was in a hurry.