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

  He’d been given the name Demon while he was still a Prospect, before he and Faith had crossed the point of no return, but she’d never called him anything but Michael. Since he’d last seen her, the only people who really ever called him Michael were legal types—lawyers and caseworkers and cops. He’d grown to cringe when he heard it, because it always meant some bureaucrat had his fist deep up Demon’s ass.

  When she said it, though—that was home. Oh, fuck.

  Her hands moved, sliding softly down and around his waist, leaving his nerves thrumming in a path behind her touch.

  He needed to get away. His heart was pounding so hard his vision vibrated, and the thoughts in his head were shrieking and clamoring in an indecipherable mob. He’d been right—at her touch, everything was back. Ten years were just gone. He felt exactly as he had then—confused and sorry, in pain and in love.

  Losing fucking everything.

  Wrong. All of it was so fucking wrong. He needed to get clear.

  Instead, he grabbed her face in his hands and kissed her.

  She opened to him immediately, molding her body to his, clutching him close so that his erection was pressed tightly to her belly. She whimpered, and the sound surrounded his heart and squeezed. He groaned and wrapped his arms around her, lifting her off the floor—she was so light, so little, and she felt exactly as he remembered, exactly right. His tongue explored her mouth, finding it perfectly familiar. God. God.

  He tasted salt on their tongues.

  She was crying.

  So was he.

  He set her back on the floor and pushed her away, and then he did what he should have done before. He turned tail and ran.

  Without looking back, he went down the hall to Tucker’s room. Bibi was just walking out.

  She gave him a sharp look and then lifted her hand to his face and wiped his wet check. “Oh, baby,” she whispered. “Oh, darlin’.”

  Words had not yet returned to him, so he simply looked down at her.

  “He’s sleepin’, baby. You should get some sleep, too.” She slid her hand around to the back of his neck and pulled his head down. He didn’t fight her. She kissed his cheek. “I love you, Deme. Whatever happens, it’ll be okay. We’ll stick it out together.”

  He stood straight up. That wasn’t how it had worked out last time. But still he said nothing.

  With a reassuring pat on his bare arm, Bibi headed back toward the family room. Demon went into his son’s room and closed the door. Then he locked it. He locked the door to the bathroom, too.

  For a long time, he stood at the side of the crib, watching his son peacefully sleeping. He tried to make himself remember that peace he’d been feeling, watching an animated movie, snug under a blanket with his little boy. But all his mind wanted to remember was Faith. He shouldn’t have kissed her. That kiss felt like another point of no return. Why the fuck couldn’t he control himself better? Why the fuck was it always wrong urges that got the reins in their teeth? Why the fuck did he feel everything—everything—so fucking hard?

  After a while, feeling finally the sleepiness that matched his utter, desolate exhaustion, he sat on the floor and grabbed Tucker’s big stuffed dog. Using that as a pillow, he curled up at the side of the crib and tried to sleep, lost in the memory of the first time his lips had touched hers.

  memory

  Michael walked out into the hot sunshine of an L.A. spring afternoon. No, he was Demon now. He needed to learn to think of himself that way, though he wasn’t sure how he felt about it as a name. He guessed it sounded pretty badass, though it really came from being made fun of. Nobody but club needed to know that part, though.

  Could be worse—the other Prospect, who’d only been wearing a kutte for a few weeks, was already being called ‘Crapper,’ because he’d gotten trapped in a port-a-potty. That would be way worse.

  Demon was pretty sure that guy was going to wash out, though. He was a lot older, in his thirties, probably, and he bitched a lot about the work Prospects had to do. Demon knew to just shut up and do it, whatever it was.

  He’d dug a big grave in the woods a couple of nights ago and dumped three reeking, half-decomposed bodies into it. No idea who they’d been or why they’d gotten dead. He hadn’t asked. Hoosier had said dig, so he’d dug.

  He’d been prospecting for just over three months, and it had been the three best months of his fucking sad excuse for a life. For the first time in his whole life, he had a home—a place where he could really sleep at night, without being on guard for bad shit of one kind or another to go down on him. A place where, when he got up in the morning, people smiled and said ‘hey’ and fed him breakfast. Sure, he also had to bury bodies or unclog vile toilets or whatever job the patches could think up for him, but he could see that they liked him, too. He felt their affection for him. They let him in on the jokes.

  And when he’d gone mental on that asshole at the party a couple of weeks ago, they’d fixed it up for him and started calling him Demon, laughing at the way his face had gone fire-engine red.

  So yeah, Demon was an okay name.

  But right now, he was fucked. Hoosier was in a terror of a mood about something, and Demon knew he was looking for a reason to fuck somebody up. Now he was standing in the middle of the lot with a shopping list of parts for Hoosier’s pet restoration project. Big parts. Not just nuts and bolts. But the club van and the flatbed were both gone. Demon had only his little bobber. He had no idea how the fuck he was supposed to manage to bring these parts back from the salvage yard. Or why Hoosier was even trusting him with a job like this. It felt like it was preloaded for a fuckup.

  Maybe he could rent a U-Haul? No way. He was tapped out. Plus, he didn’t think they would rent to a twenty-one-year-old, even if he’d had the scratch.

  So he just stood there, the cheerful sun beating down on his head. The gorgeous day was mocking him.

  “You get stuck on a wad of gum or something?”

  He knew the voice coming up behind him, and he got a hit of adrenaline. Faith—Blue’s daughter. He thought about her way too fucking much, and no matter how hard he tried to avoid her, he kept finding himself crossing paths with her. She was sweet and sarcastic, and so pretty—long, dark hair; big, beautiful eyes in a color that seemed different every time he saw them. She was small and slim, with pretty little tits…FUCK. Fucking stop it!

  She was a patch’s daughter. She was the fucking SAA’s daughter. She was sixteen years old. He was trapped between needing to stay the fuck away and needing to be nice to her. And wanting her a crazy amount of want.

  He’d never really wanted anybody before. Sex was not a thing he’d thought much about until recently. In fact, it was a thing he’d tried not to think about. Usually when he thought about it, he didn’t think happy thoughts.

  He’d gone into the system when he was two years old, and he’d never had a private-home placement for more than a few weeks. By the time he was seven, he had such a long list of letters attached to his file no family would come near him.

  ODD—Oppositional Defiant Disorder. ADHD—Attention Deficit-Hyperactivity Disorder. OCD—Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. BPD—Borderline Personality Disorder. Bi-polar Disorder. Chronic Depression. He’d been diagnosed at some point with all of those things. He had no idea if he actually had them all—or if he even had any of them.

  But nobody wanted a kid like that.

  He hadn’t known that at the time, of course. He’d found all that out when he’d aged out and seen his file. At the time, he’d just been a kid nobody wanted. So he’d grown up in group homes. And juvie—a few years there, too.

  Not much difference between one or the other, frankly. In both places, he’d fought for his life on a pretty regular basis. In both places, somebody bigger and stronger had always held him down in one way or another. Until he’d gotten big and strong enough to resist and to win.

  So sex wasn’t something he was all that keen on. Once he was on his own, he’d avoided it all.
>
  But then he’d found the club. By the time he’d applied to prospect, he understood that there were things about that life he was going to need to get right with. He didn’t want to start out that way in the clubhouse, around people he knew. So he’d saved up and bought himself a whole night with a hooker.

  She was pretty nice and really patient. He thought of that as the night he lost his virginity, whether that was true or not. Just about four months ago.

  Since then, he’d gotten comfortable with the girls in the clubhouse. He even thought maybe he was getting decent at it, and usually he had only good thoughts now. As a Prospect, he got the leftovers, but that was okay with him. He was just trying to get used to all this without anybody knowing that was what he was trying to do.

  Faith, Blue’s youngest daughter, was the first girl he’d ever really wanted. And it was wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong. Like head-on-a-pike wrong.

  “Michael? Are you in there?” She still called him Michael. She was already the only one who still did. He didn’t correct her. He liked it.

  “Yeah, sorry. What’s up?” He strove to keep his voice nonchalant. “Shouldn’t you be in school?”

  “Minimum day.” She walked around to face him. She was dressed like she usually was—jeans, brown engineer boots, and a snug t-shirt that didn’t quite reach the low waistband on her jeans. So unfair. He willed his cock to behave. It ignored him. “Why are you standing in the middle of the lot? You look like your download froze.”

  He smiled, and she smiled right back, her eyes dancing with light and color. “Sorry. Just trying to work something out.”

  “What’s the troub, bub?” She slid her hands into her front pockets, which pulled her jeans down even farther. Demon looked up and out over the lot, to La Cienega Boulevard.

  Knowing he should blow her off and send her on her way, he said, “Hooj gave me a list for salvage, but the van’s out. Flatbed, too.”

  Faith actually bounced. “Pik-A-Part? I love that place! We can take Dante!”

  That was a terrible idea. There should have been brakes squealing in his head. Better to face Hoosier’s wrath when he found out he had to wait until the van got back than to go with Blue’s little girl off the compound lot and all the way to the Valley.

  Demon knew that to be true. But the switch people had that made them stop before they did something stupid—his didn’t work. He had the switch that told him it was stupid, and the switch that told him he should stop, but the switch that would stop him was badly broken. Sometimes, it was like his own life was playing out on a screen, and he was just sitting there, powerless, watching with his fingers splayed over his eyes.

  “That’d be great—if you don’t need to be anywhere.”

  “I’m a free agent. And Pik-A-Part is better than fucking Disneyland. Let’s do it!” She threw her keys at him, and he caught them. They headed off together toward Dante.

  She hadn’t done much more to her car with markers—just, as far as he could tell, the side mirrors and the full rear bumper. She’d told him that she did it when the mood struck her, when she saw whatever belonged wherever it belonged. She’d had a few people sign it, he’d noticed, and then she’d drawn around the signatures to incorporate them into whatever it was she was making.

  He really did think it was cool. Like something he’d do, if he had a talent like that—to just see something and then do it, to follow the impulse. That generally meant trouble for him. But Faith had talent, so her impulses became art.

  His just became trash.

  ~oOo~

  Pik-A-Part was a junkyard that let people scavenge at their own risk. You went through, driving anywhere you could get your vehicle through, and just dug into the junk. There was a vague kind of organization—Fords in one general direction, Chevys in another, bikes sort of on the side, and so on—but for the most part, you just scavenged, doing what you had to do to get the part you wanted. Sometimes, you had to dig under rickety piles of rusty metal; sometimes you had to climb on top of those piles. Sometimes the part you wanted was sitting right there on the ground like it had been set out special, just for you.

  When you had what you wanted, you went back up to the front, where a Quonset hut served as office and shop, and you dickered your way to a price for your loot. The club had an account, so all Demon, wearing his kutte, would have to say was that the stuff he’d gotten was for Hoosier, and it would go out for cost.

  He’d gotten everything Hoosier wanted—or he was pretty sure. Some of the parts were a little rough, but they were original stock parts, which was what Hooj was after. Everything was in Dante’s bed. Now, though, Demon was busy having a heart attack because Faith was climbing through the carcass of an old Plymouth Fury, which was perched on top of a stack of old carcasses. Even with all the climbing and moving around she’d been doing, nothing had moved, so it seemed pretty stable. Still, though, if she got hurt—or worse—on his watch, well, he’d be better off crawling into one of the rusty hulls waiting for the crusher and just waiting right along with it.

  She’d been running around the place for a couple of hours, acting like every pile of junk was the best thrill ride ever. She had herself a bizarre mishmash of crap she was going to put on the same account—she’d said she did that all the time, and Demon hoped that was true. He knew what she intended it for. She made things out of junk. Like sculptures, or something. Blue, Hoosier, and Fat Jack all had stuff she’d made sitting or hanging around their stations.

  It was pretty cool. He didn’t really see what she saw in the junk or in the sculptures she made out of it, but it was cool the way she saw things in a way he couldn’t. And it was cooler the way she made what was there become what she saw.

  He looked up at the mountain of junk she was on and tried to ignore her pretty ass. She was half lying in the Fury, reaching for something. She looked like somebody who was about to die in a horror movie. One of those Final Destination things. The thought made him woozy.

  He knew if he nagged at her to be careful again, she’d do something crazy on purpose. The last time he’d said anything, she’d literally hung upside down by her knees off a length of rebar that was jutting out of a pile. He’d had to lean against Dante for a few minutes after that.

  “Faith, come on. I gotta get back. Hooj is gonna have my hide.” That was true—they’d been here for hours.

  She looked down at him, under her arm. “You are such a pill. Okay, okay. There’s a shifter knob up here. I can’t get it loose. Gimme a couple more minutes to try.” She grunted with the effort. “Fuck!” She kicked hard in frustration, and that time, Demon was damn sure something shook.

  “Faith!”

  “One…more…Hah! Got it! Got it! Look—shiny!” She turned to show him, holding the black knob—nothing special, just a plastic ball—back and out to him. Then she squealed. “Ow! Fuck, ow!”

  All the blood in Demon’s body fell to his feet and then charged up in a rush to his head. “Faith?”

  “My hair—I’m caught in something. Fuck! Ow, ow, ow!” She dropped the shifter knob and it bounced and rolled down the pile like the catalyst in a Rube Goldberg machine.

  Rube Goldberg…Final Destination…Demon was going to fucking puke.

  “Don’t move! Fucking freeze! I’m coming!” Not registering that he was about twice her size and probably only going to make everything worse, he headed up Junk Mountain. He moved quickly but as carefully as he knew how and managed to get himself into the Fury with her, half-lying face to face with her. She’d stayed quiet and still, doing as he’d said.

  Her ponytail was wound around part of the rusted-out remnants of the drivetrain. He got his arms around her head and worked the strands loose as gently as he could. Her hair felt like silk.

  She smelled like dirt and rust and oil. Also flowers of some kind.

  She was a kid. A kid, a kid, a kid. A kid. Blue’s kid.

  When her hair was free, she sighed happily and then giggled. “You just rescued me. I feel
like Rapunzel.”

  “Who’s that?”

  “Rapunzel? The fairy tale princess with the long, long hair? She was locked in a tower and the prince climbed her hair to rescue her? ‘Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down your hair’?”

  He just stared at her, not knowing what she was talking about but not caring. Her eyes were so pretty. Today, they were mostly blue, he thought.

  “You don’t know Rapunzel?”

  He shrugged, and her eyes got sad. He didn’t like that at all. He didn’t want her sad for him. That was pity, and he didn’t need her pity because he didn’t know a stupid fairy tale princess. Life was not a stupid fairy tale, and if she thought it was, she was just as stupid as Rapun-whoever. “You go down first. I’ll follow. Be careful.”