"Demon. Hey, brother."

Demon clasped hands with his new partner. "Hey."

"Ready to ride?"

"Always." Demon turned and held out his hand to Hoosier. "Thank you, Prez. For everything."

Hoosier grabbed his hand and gave it a shake hard enough to make his body ache. "Good luck, brother."

Muse slid into the booth. "I'm guessing the redhead has our table?"

"What?" Demon looked up from the menu. He didn't even know why he checked the menu. They were at yet another location of a big chain of truck stops, and he got the Hot-n-Spicy Burger at every one.

"Pa.s.sed her up by the register when I came in. She's got the big googly eyes for you, brother. I figure she'd ice anybody got in her way between here and there."

Demon looked over and scanned for a redheaded waitress. Yep. Behind the counter, near the register, staring at him. When their eyes met, she grinned, blushed and turned away. She was cute, but no.

He looked back at his brother and shrugged. "I guess so. Didn't pay that much attention."

"Shame." Muse dumped a creamer into his coffee. "Got a ten-spot says she'd blow you in the john before we ride out." His grin was ironic. After six months on the road together, he knew Demon wouldn't take that bet.

Demon suppressed a shudder. "We're three hours out of Corpus Christi. I'll take my p.u.s.s.y on tap, thanks." P.O.T.s were all he'd touch-and not always even that. Some of the charters they'd worked at, or just rested their heads at, were rougher than others. He'd gotten to the point where he thought he could tell if the pa.s.sarounds were there because they wanted to be. Those girls, he'd spend some time with. In a couple of the clubhouses, though, the girls looked used up and jumpy. They had marks on them-bruising and tracks. He could barely stand to stay there and pretend to drink.

He'd known even before he'd started hanging around the L.A. clubhouse that the club as a whole was into some dark s.h.i.t. They had a fearsome reputation. Yet L.A. had been fairly mainstream outlaw, and they'd been working with the public, too. Demon had pulled his gun only twice since he'd had a kutte, Prospect or otherwise. Club life had been pretty calm. Now, though, he was getting an advanced education in how dark the club could get.

And how the Nomads were expected to be the darkest of all.

The redhead came over and took their order. When she left, lingering as she took the menu from Demon's hand, Muse chuckled. "d.a.m.n shame."

He rubbed his hands over his newly-cropped head and changed the subject. "You reach Carrie? She good?"

Muse had stayed out by the bikes to call his sister, who'd left a couple of messages. "Yeah. I just p.i.s.sed her off, but she's good. I'm gonna need a swing through L.A. again soon, though." He gave Demon a long look. "You think you're up for that?"

Demon was shaking his head before Muse had finished the question. He wasn't sure he'd ever go back to L.A., unless he was ordered there. It was only in the past month or so that he'd stopped waking up every night in a cold sweat, hard and afraid, feeling Faith under him and her mother behind him. "No. But it's cool. I'll call Zed and see if anybody's got a quick job somewhere. We can hook up again after."

"You know, you could take some time. We been riding hard more than six months now. You could sit your a.s.s in Vegas or something."

"I'm good. I'll call Zed. Just let me know when you want to take off."

"Okay, brother. Let's finish this job, and then I'll go." He squirted ketchup onto his fries. "This intel better be good. I want this motherf.u.c.ker. Sick to s.h.i.t of chasing him around."

The intel was good. Muse and Demon sat in a rental van at the back of a motel parking lot in Laredo, Texas, and watched their target, Ernie Jennings, pull bags of takeout from the back seat of mid-range Toyota sedan-also a rental.

"That's a lot of food for one guy," Demon observed. "He's skinny, too. You think he's got company?"

"f.u.c.k," Muse grumbled by way of response. "I want this f.u.c.ker, Deme. Four weeks we've been looking. He's always one step up. I don't give a f.u.c.k if he's got company. We'll just dig a bigger hole."

Muse had been dogged about this job, and Demon understood it. They were after a rat, a guy who'd given up information to enemies of the club's Billings, Montana charter. Muse was closer to that charter than to any other besides L.A., which had been his home base, just like Demon. The information in question had gotten three brothers killed.

Demon wanted the guy, too, but he didn't want to take innocents down. Before he'd gone Nomad, he'd killed one man: just before his fifteenth birthday, he'd beaten a man to death. In six months with Muse, he'd killed three more. Between the two of them, that tally more than doubled.

He liked it. Not his first killing; that one had been rage and a mania of years of bottled-up self-defense, and he barely remembered it. But what he'd done with Muse, killing in cold blood, meting out justice or vengeance, he liked that. It made him calm, it made his head quiet, made him feel more in control, and that scared him. Maybe there was a serial killer lurking inside him amongst his demons. Killing innocents was a line he couldn't cross.

"What if it's a woman?"

Muse laughed. "You don't run out and buy takeout for a wh.o.r.e, brother. He's not married, and he's been running solo all this time, so I don't see it being a girlfriend, either. It's probably a contact. Laredo is a border town. Must be seven, eight major transport companies right here on the Rio Grande, most of 'em dirty. My money's on him sitting in there waiting for a contact to bring him papers and a seat in the back of a truck. We get him now, or he crosses the border and is out of our reach."

"If that's true, couldn't K.T. call Sam, ask for the Perros to handle it?" This was a Billings job. Demon thought it made sense for the Billings President to call the President of the mother charter, who had a close relationship with the leader of the cartel most of the club worked with, and seek help on the Mexico side.

Muse shook his head. "This is not a job you subcontract, Deme. This is club payback. I want him. He's not walking out of that room again." He pulled out his gun and checked the magazine, then screwed a suppressor into the barrel. "We'll give him a few minutes, see if he gets company. But we go either way."

"Okay, Muse. We go."

It wasn't a woman. Or a contact. It was a boy.

A small, scared boy about ten years old, wearing nothing but a pair of Fruit of the Looms. He had dark, sticky traces of duct tape on his wrists and ankles, and a rectangle of patchy red skin over his mouth. Jennings must have bound and gagged him so he could go out and run his errands.

Those were details Demon thought about later. In the moment, he barely thought at all. He saw the boy, sitting at the little table in the corner with cartons of Chinese food spread out in front of him. He saw Jennings, also in nothing but his underwear, showing the concave chest and pallid paunch that skinny men sometimes got when their dissolute lives reached the fifty-year mark. Demon saw all that, and he didn't even bother to think.

When Muse managed to pull him off of Jennings and throw him against a wall, Demon saw the boy, curled up tightly on the chair he'd been on, staring at Demon as though he were, in fact, a demon. It was him the boy was most afraid of.

He scrambled to his feet and tried to get out. He had to get out. But Muse flung himself between Demon and the door. "I need your help here, brother. You can't run. You have to chill."

But he couldn't. He couldn't look at that boy. He couldn't be in this room. Grabbing Muse by the shirt, he tried to pull him away from the door. But Muse was bigger and stronger than he was. Demon had been trying to bulk up, but he was still fairly lean. Muse grabbed his shoulders. "Chill, brother, chill! Take a breath."

Demon shook his head. He couldn't breathe.

"Yes. You're gonna get us both locked up. Texas prison's no fun. Trust me on that. Take a f.u.c.king breath."

He tried, but his entire body was on lockdown.

"Try this. Listen to your heartbeat. I bet it's loud. You hear it?"

Demon couldn't answer, but Muse went on anyway.

"Count, but slow. Try to make your heartbeat match. One...two...three...four...five..."

By Muse's count of five, Demon could think. He was agitated but back driving his body again. He relaxed, and then Muse did, too.

Before Muse let go, he asked, "We good?"

"Yeah. I'm here."

"Good. We got us a mess to handle."

"We can't-not a kid. Please."

"No, brother. Not a kid. Do me a favor. Wash yourself up and go get the van, back it up close. I'll fix it with the boy. We'll get him home."

Much later that night, Demon sat at the bar in the Corpus Christi clubhouse. He was achy from killing a man with his bare hands and then digging his grave in rock-solid Texas dirt, and he was on edge, waiting for Muse to want to talk about what had gone down.

When Muse came out from the back and sent off, with a swat on her a.s.s, the girl he'd taken back there, Demon felt sure he'd come over and want to talk. And he did come over.

"Cuervo. Silver," he barked at the Prospect behind the bar as he sat next to Demon. "You're not partaking, Deme? Meat's pretty fresh here."

"Nah." He could not have been less interested, not after the night they'd had. His own mouth betrayed him, and he started the conversation himself. "What was that kid doing there?" He knew the boy had been stolen from the street, but it didn't make sense. "Why would he take a kid like that when he was on the run?"

"We'd know if I'd had a chance to grill him first. We'd know other s.h.i.t, too. Important s.h.i.t."

"Sorry."

Muse shrugged. "Can't be undone. No use getting tangled up in it. I called Gizmo. He said there was some perv s.h.i.t on Jenning's hard drive, but he didn't know about more than that. My bet is the stress got to him, and he was looking to ease it."

"If that kid decides not to go with the story you gave him, he'll take us both down."

"Yep. But like you said, we weren't gonna kill a kid. We saved him, Deme. Gave him back to his mom. We're heroes to them. They won't sell us out."

"Okay." Demon finished his beer and waved the empty at the Prospect. "Cuervo this time." Tonight, he wanted to get drunk.

"You want to tell me what that was tonight, brother?"

Demon had known the question would come. He'd f.u.c.king invited it. But he shook his head.

"Fair enough." Muse swallowed down his tequila and tapped the gla.s.s on the bar for a refill.

CHAPTER ELEVEN.

"PA! PA! PA! NO! PA! PAAAAA!"

"Tuck, c'mon, honey. Pa's not here. I got ya. Shhh. Shhhhh."

"NO! PA!"

Faith got up from the sofa, where she must have finally fallen asleep, and went down the hall, following the sound of Tucker's wails and screams. She stopped in the open doorway of his room and saw Bibi struggling to hold the hysterical toddler.

"Can I help? Is he hurt?"

At her voice, Tucker looked over. Whatever he saw when he saw her, it wasn't what he'd wanted to see, and he increased his struggles. Obviously frazzled, Bibi snapped, "I got it, Faith. Just go!" Tucker screamed, responding to the edge in her voice.

Chastened, Faith turned and went back down the hall. She stopped in the kitchen for a gla.s.s of water, then went back to sit on the sectional in the family room and continue her vigil. Tucker wasn't the only one who wanted his pa to be home.

She heard the bath running in the bathroom between Tucker's room and Michael's. She'd spent the previous night in that room with Michael, feeling happy and loved. But now she was alone, waiting and worried.

It had been hours since Peaches had brought her back to Hoosier and Bibi's. Bibi had been there for her, sitting with her, ready to talk, but Faith hadn't been able to talk much at all, other than to try to describe what she seen, how she felt. Sense was beyond her.

There was just too f.u.c.king much going on-her mother, her life, Michael, his son, his past, her past, their past, everything they'd lost, everything they might be able to have, everything getting in the way. The past crashing into the present and maybe leaving nothing but wreckage.

What that woman had said-it was true. Some of it was true, enough to make Michael so upset. When he was a kid, she'd said. He'd been abused, then. She'd had no idea. She'd known he'd grown up in foster care, and that his life had been hard, but she'd never had details, and it had never really occurred to her to wonder. She'd had, she supposed, a middle-cla.s.s teenager's idea of what foster care meant. She'd thought he'd grown up poor and unloved, and that was heartbreaking enough.

But it was more. Sitting in Hoosier and Bibi's family room, the images and sounds of the scene in the clubhouse careening in her brain, she understood that she should have known, that the things about Michael she'd thought seemed unusual were signs of his torment. But then, before, she hadn't had the experience to see it.

She had been a kid, though she'd always insisted that that wasn't true.

Tonight, she'd seen deeper into him than she ever had before, and the sight made her heart sore. It scared and confused her, too. She'd known he could be violent. It was one of the things her father had shouted at her, that Michael-Demon-was a 'psycho.' She'd never really seen evidence of it herself until tonight, though. She could still hear the crunch of bone, the wet sound of blood spattering, and the way the crunch and spatter softened into something else after a while.

The way the men in the Hall had stood back for a long time and just let him hit that woman.

The way she'd laughed.

His b.l.o.o.d.y face racked with regret, and the swirling miasma of rage, guilt, and fear in his eyes when he'd seen Faith watching.

The way he'd run. The way he always ran.

Possibly worse than any of that-Faith was jealous. She hated it, but it was there. That woman, that sick, cruel, pathetic woman, had had a child with Michael. Tucker, and through him Michael, would always be hers in a way Faith couldn't touch.

She hated that it was true, and she hated the way it hurt.

Bibi came out of the bathroom, holding a much calmer Tucker in her arms. When she took him into the kitchen, Faith got up and went there, too.

With his head on Bibi's shoulder, Tucker eyed Faith, but not with fear or suspicion. Just interest. Whatever had made him so upset, the storm had pa.s.sed.

"Hey, buddy."

He held out a small, green rubber frog.

"Is that for me?" She reached out to take it, but he pulled his hand back. A little smile lifted the corners of his mouth, though.

Faith laughed gently. "You're a little stinker."

"A stinker who needs more sleep. Let's get your milk, Tuck." Bibi looked at Faith. "He gets night terrors. There's a routine to settle him back down-a bath, some warm milk, and a story. Deme lets him watch television instead of a story sometimes."

It sounded like Bibi was giving Faith instructions for future need, and that abraded her sore heart. After tonight, she felt like the little bit of new foundation she had started to build in Madrone might just have been broken apart.

And that jealousy was there. She hated that woman-for what she'd done to Michael, for what she must have done to this helpless little boy, for the way that she could claim them both despite it all. She wished Michael had killed her.