Shadow & Soul (The Night Horde SoCal Book 2) Read online

  “It’s not that, honey. You know I’d be happy to have you stay, and we have plenty of room. It’s just…oh, hell. Honey…things are complicated.”

  Whatever had happened to her mother—that was bad. Being back in the midst of all these family memories and feeling absolutely besieged by them all—that was worse. But having Bibi tell her no—that was unbearable.

  But she bore it. She swallowed and tried on a smile. “Hey, no. It’s cool. I’ll find a room. I saw a motel right by the ramp I took to get here.”

  Bibi was shaking her head. “Faith, listen. I’m not sayin’ no. But you need to know…Demon—Michael—is there. He’s stayin’ with us. Has been for a few months now.”

  All at once, all those thoughts that had been wanting to get thought, they all died. Faith’s brain was a ghost town. She stared stupidly at Bibi, only one word in her head, rolling through like a tumbleweed. Michael.

  Michael.

  Michael.

  Bibi picked up her hands and held them both. “He’s…he’s got a little boy, honey. Tucker. He’s two. Hooj and I are helpin’ ‘em out.”

  Michael. Had a child. Michael was at Bibi and Hoosier’s with a child. His child.

  Michael was the other injured party in the reason she hadn’t seen her parents since she was eighteen years old. More injured than he even knew.

  It had been even longer since she’d seen him. Since she was seventeen. And a half.

  “Faith?”

  She made an effort to pull herself together and put another smile on. “It’s been a long time, Bibi. If you’re okay with it, I am.”

  Bibi gave her a long, considering look. Then she sighed. “Okay, then. What the hell. We live in interestin’ times.” She hooked her arm around Faith’s and led her back out through the ER.

  Faith went along, lost in memory.

  memory

  Several of the men were standing near their bikes when Faith pulled into the lot at Cali Classics Custom Cycles. She saw her dad and Uncle Hoosier talking together at the heads of their bikes, their helmets in their hands. Looked to her like something was up.

  She honked, and all the men waved. As she parked, her father came up to the door and opened it. “Hey there, kitty cat. Did I know you were comin’ by?” He held out his hand, and she took it and happily let him close her up in a quick hug. He smelled like he always did, the scent she thought of as her daddy—leather, tobacco, and motor oil, a hint of British Sterling aftershave underneath.

  “Poppy called and said he had a box for me.” She looked over the hood of her car at the men waiting for her father. “You’re heading out.” It wasn’t a question, just an observation—it was obvious that he was. “Does Mom know?”

  “She’s out with Bibi. I left her a message.” He gave Faith a sheepish grin. “Guess you’ll have to tell her for me. I’ll be back tomorrow.”

  “Daddy!” That meant it would just be Faith and her mother at home tonight, and that was a terrible combination. Since Sera had gone off to college the year before, their mother had noticed Faith and decided she was really lacking in the daughter department. Without her father as a buffer, all Faith and her mother did was bicker and glare.

  But her father wasn’t paying her any attention. His eyes were focused on the hood of her car, the area between the two wide, black stripes down the center. “What the fuck, Faith Anne?”

  As was always her immediate reaction to censure, Faith got combative. As he leaned over for a closer look, she crossed her arms and set her heels. “It’s Sharpie. I’m gonna cover the whole thing.”

  Her dad turned and stared at her, his expression cycling from shock to anger to bemusement and back around. She thought there might have been a quick flash of pride in there somewhere, but maybe that was just wishful thinking. “Do you know how fucking long I worked on this damn thing?”

  She did. She’d watched him do a lot of it. Faith wasn’t much interested in mechanics, but she was deeply interested in shapes and patterns and the way things fit together, so she liked to watch her father, and all his brothers, work, even though she didn’t want to learn how to do what they did.

  This 1970 El Camino, white with black hood stripes, had been in the garage for about four years. She’d had no idea until she’d gotten up on her sixteenth birthday, five months ago, and found it on the driveway with a big orange bow, that he’d been restoring it for her.

  It was the best present ever in the whole world.

  A few weeks before, she’d cut school and driven out to San Pedro with her best friends, Bethany and Joelle. They’d been parked on a bluff, sitting on the hood, drinking from a bottle of peach brandy that Bethany had lifted from her grandma’s cupboard. Faith had been drawing with a Bic pen on Jo’s white Chucks. She’d looked down between their legs and had seen that white space between the black stripes, and it had been a beautiful, gleaming blank canvas.

  She’d had a couple of Sharpies in her backpack. So they’d all drawn in that white space. And then, later, Faith had gone back over it all, connecting and shaping the graffiti into art. Since then, she’d filled in the whole space. Now she was working on the rear end, too. No rhyme or reason. Just the next place she’d seen where art should be.

  Eventually, she’d get metallic Sharpies and fill the black stripes with gold and silver.

  Her father’s face finally settled on bemusement. “Fuck, kitty. That finish took weeks to get right.”

  Now that he wasn’t mad, she relaxed her battle stance. She grabbed the edges of his kutte and smiled up at him. “I know, Daddy. I love Dante so much.” She’d named her car Dante. She had no idea why, but he felt like a Dante to her. Also like a ‘he.’ “But this is how I make him mine and not yours. Please don’t be mad.”

  He stared down at her, his brown eyes crinkling, and she knew he’d get over it. Finally, he sighed. “Your mother is gonna have a stroke.”

  Faith scoffed. “I’ve been doing it for weeks. Nobody even noticed until now. She doesn’t pay me any attention unless school calls. She couldn’t care less what I do.”

  Her father shook his head. “That ain’t true, kitty cat. Your mother loves you. She wants you to do good is all.” Before Faith could give that statement the derision it deserved, he looked over Dante’s roof. “Gotta go, kitty. Sorry about tonight. Be good for your ol’ dad tonight, okay?”

  “Good is hard,” she pouted.

  He laughed and kissed her cheek. “Don’t I know it. Love you love you.”

  “Love you love you. Be safe.”

  He winked and trotted off. Faith watched as the men mounted their big Harleys and rode off the lot in a roaring rumble of black thunder.

  Then she turned and headed into the work bays, knowing she’d find Fat Jack back there.

  On her way in, she saw a guy she didn’t recognize rolling a Street Glide up to Diaz’s station. He was young and super cute, tall and lean, with shaggy, light blond hair. His coverall was folded down around his waist, and his plain white t-shirt was snug and showed off wonderful, muscular arms. And he was wearing a Prospect kutte—which was what she’d noticed first. Her dad hadn’t said anything about getting a new Prospect, but she’d been around home and the clubhouse a lot less since Dante had entered her life, so maybe she just wasn’t up on the news. If he was a Prospect, that made him at least twenty-one. But that was only five years older than she was. That was nothing.

  She sighed. Yeah, right. She was going to die a virgin. Unkissed and untried forever. Her father would see to that. And Uncle Hooj, and Poppy, and every other man in black leather.

  “Get your skinny ass over here, short stack.” Fat Jack had bellowed across the bays, and the cute blond Prospect, who’d just stood the Glide on its stand, turned, looking like he thought maybe it was him Jack had been calling. He saw Faith, and their eyes met for just half a second. Oh, damn. He was way more than just cute. But then his eyes cut away, and he went back to whatever shit job he’d been assigned.

  She sighed and s
auntered over to Fat Jack’s station. “Hey, Poppy. What you got for me?”

  The man who was, for all intents and purposes, her only grandfather, despite their lack of blood relation, gave her a quick hug and a kiss on the cheek. “A strong word first. You leave that boy alone. He’s got enough trouble without you making more.”

  Faith thought that was ridiculously unfair. She’d never caused any trouble for the guys in the club. She’d grown up with the members. She barely even noticed the hangarounds, and she didn’t think they’d ever had a Prospect that was worth a second look—certainly not since she’d been looking.

  “What? I just noticed he existed. No big.”

  “I’m old and fat, missy. I am not blind. If you’d been a Looney Tune, your eyes would have bugged out of your head about a mile. Don’t get no ideas. You are jailbait, and he needs a steady place to be. A home. So keep those new little titties to yourself.”

  Well, that was weird and kind of gross, having Fat Jack talk about her boobs like he’d noticed them. She knew she was pretty cute, and, though they’d been slow to make their appearance, she thought these newish boobs were not too shabby—not huge, but not teeny, either. But he was not somebody she wanted to notice them.

  Although it would be totally awesome if somebody somewhere that she did want to notice would notice. Not that that was ever going to happen. She was pretty sure her father had put the word out in the Greater L.A. Area that any man who even thought an impure thought about his baby girl would die a bloody death.

  She knew for sure that she was going to graduate high school without even holding hands with a guy. Her father had seen to that on the first day of ninth grade, when he’d taken her to school on the back of his Softail, and the entire fucking club had ridden in formation behind them. Then they’d all sat there on their damn bikes in their damn kuttes wearing their damn black sunglasses, with their damn inked arms crossed over their damn chests, and stared until the bell rang.

  Her father might as well have locked her in a steel box. No boy would even talk to her. They panicked if they got assigned to a group project with her. Even when a new boy came in, not knowing who she was, she’d get maybe one flirt, and then somebody would say something to him, and there she’d be again, alone in her force field of threatened biker aggression.

  They’d done nothing of the sort when Sera had started high school. But then, Sera had been a mathlete and in Model UN and on the student council and shit like that. She was hot, but not interested. And, anyway, Faith supposed she hadn’t attracted the kind of boys their father felt the need to guard against.

  Apparently, he was sure Faith would. It would be cool to know if he was right.

  While Fat Jack had his nose buried in a bike engine, Faith sneaked another look at the Prospect. Diaz was yelling at him, and his face was getting bright, bright red. Then he nodded and slunk off in the direction Diaz was pointing. Faith felt sorry for him. Prospects got treated like shit, that was the way of this world, but still she felt bad. He’d been blushing so hard.

  “What’s his name?”

  Fat Jack sighed heavily and plunked a wrench on his worktable. “Michael. For now, he’s just Michael.”

  Michael. That was a good name. She hoped he wouldn’t do something to get saddled with some obnoxious road name. She knew how her father, who’d been born Alan, had ended up Blue, and it was gross. It had to do with a misapplied cock ring and an ER visit, and she would have given up a lot never to have overheard that drunken story.

  “Box is under the table.”

  Faith looked around to see Fat Jack giving her a sharply pointed look, one bushy white eyebrow high on his forehead. She grinned and pulled on his long beard. “Chill out, Poppy. Jeez. Let’s see what’s what.”

  She squatted down and dug through out an open carton that had once held motor oil. Inside was a treasure trove—all different kinds of old sprockets and chains and washers and who knew what-all, a lot of them rusty. “Oh wow! This is fantastic! Thank you, thank you!”

  She stood and hugged him, and he gave her one of his signature bear grapples, lifting her off the floor and leaning back a ways, so she was resting on his big belly. Then he set her down and clutched at his back. “I’m gettin’ too old for that, even with a little shit like you.” He nodded at the box. “Make me somethin’ cool.”

  “I will, Poppy. It’ll be the coolest.” Faith didn’t care a whit about making an engine run the way it was supposed to run. But she thought the parts that made it work were fascinating and beautiful. She saw other things in them than engines or brake assemblies or whatever. She saw people. Or trees. Or sunsets. Or just shapes, big and elaborate and weird. She would dump a box like this out on the garage floor at home and wait to see what it showed her.

  She had a soldering iron. Someday, she wanted to have a blow torch. A big industrial one.

  She squatted again and took hold of the box—but when she tried to lift it, she ended up dropping to a knee. It was way heavier than she’d expected.

  “Fuck! It’s heavy!”

  Fat Jack laughed. “It’s full of metal, goof.” He looked down at the box, and Faith saw him realize that he probably wouldn’t be able to lift it, either. He’d been big and strong once, but he was somewhere past seventy. He still did his miles and kept his VP patch, but he was, as he said all the time, ‘getting too old for this shit.’

  He sighed and then yelled, “PROSPECT! GET YER ASS OUT HERE!”

  The new Prospect—Michael, Faith reminded herself—came back out through the door that led to the clubhouse, moving at a hurried clip. “Yeah, Jack?”

  Oh, he had a nice voice. Soft and deep at the same time.

  “This here is Faith. She’s Blue’s little girl. Take this box and put it in her car. Then get your scrawny ass back here.

  Michael met Faith’s eyes again, and then cut away again just as quickly. Lifting the box like it was filled with bubbles instead of engine parts, he said, “Sure thing. Lead the way.”

  Fat Jack gave Faith another pointed look. She rolled her eyes and kissed his cheek, then headed toward Dante with Michael in tow. He hadn’t even bothered to look her over, so she honestly had no idea what powerful sorcery Jack thought she had that was going to get the guy in such trouble.

  “You can just put it in the back. Thanks.”

  Michael tucked the box in the corner of Dante’s bed, just behind the driver’s seat. “Nice ride.”

  “Thanks. My dad fixed it up for me.”

  “That’s Blue, huh?”

  “Yep. That’s him.”

  He nodded. “Okay. See ya.” Halfway through his turn toward the shop, he stopped. “What’s goin’ on there?” He pointed to the center of Dante’s hood.

  She shrugged, but he wasn’t looking at her to see it, so she said, “Just something I felt like doing. I figure I’ll do the whole thing like that eventually.”

  “It looks good. That’ll be rad. They have these metallic markers, too. You could do the stripes with those.”

  Faith looked hard at him. His left ear was pierced—just a thick ring through the lobe, with a hematite ball at the connection point. “Yeah. That’s what I was thinking.”

  He turned and finally really looked at her. His eyes were a crazy-intense kind of blue. Her mother loved these dumb romance novels, the bodice-ripper kind, where the women were all virgins with heaving, alabaster breasts wedged into miles of heavy brocade, and the men were all pirates or highwaymen who were really nobles in disguise, the rebellious second sons of dukes and earls or whatever—Faith knew this because she’d read just about all of them in middle school, sneaking them from the box under her parents’ bed and devouring them in the corner behind her own bed as if they were the best and sickest kind of porn. To her twelve-year-old eyes, that was exactly what they’d been.

  Before she got boobs, she got hormones, and she’d had a few fantasies about being one of those heaving-breasted virgins getting accosted by dashing highwaymen.

&nb
sp; All the heroes and heroines in those books had gemstones for eyes—jade and emerald, aquamarine and amethyst. Even at twelve, she’d thought that was a dumb way to describe eyes. She’d never seen a single pair of real eyes that looked remotely like emeralds, and she was pretty sure real eyes the actual color of amethyst were a physical impossibility.

  Her own eyes were a weird combination of brown, blue, and green that her mother called ‘hazel.’ The closest they’d come to a gemstone would be like a slimy, algae-covered rock on the beach.

  But Michael’s eyes—they were exactly the color of lapis lazuli. Exactly. That was her story, and she was sticking to it.

  He smiled. And Faith had no idea what kind of mystical power she might have over anybody, but at that moment, she herself was completely ensorcelled.