Page 1 of Tequila Damnation (The Voodoo Bastards MC #5)

CHAPTER ONE

V elina…

I stared up at the formidable cinderblock building behind its chain-link fence with its strapping to hide the parking lot beyond. It was filled with graffiti on the outside, and it wasn’t all bad. Meaning, some of it was actually artistic, featuring what had to be the Loa of the Vodoun practice… although likely colonized and bastardized for the use here. Which wasn’t it ironic? I mean, these guys did call themselves the Voodoo Bastards …

I was here against my better judgment when my half-brother, Garnett Whitcomb, had suddenly ceased his communications with me.

It’d been a hard and bitter pill to swallow. He’d told me things – things he wasn’t supposed to about these men, and I’d worried about him. He was younger than my siblings and me. While I wasn’t the oldest, I wasn’t the baby either, at least not out of the four of us who’d grown up in our house.

I had three siblings by the same mother – my older brother, one older sister, and one younger sister – and while my dad had, ah, stepped out on our mom all around the country, we’d sort of been his primary family.

I’d found Garnett by accident and a few other half-siblings scattered to the four winds. I’d done one of those online, spit-in-a-tube and mail-it-in tests, and all of a sudden found out about my extended, er… nuclear… family?

Dammit, I didn’t know what you were supposed to call it. I really didn’t.

A shit show came to mind.

Anywho, Garnett had come up as one of them, and while the rest of my half-siblings hadn’t wanted anything to do with dear old dad and had shut me out, Garnett had been different. He wanted so desperately to have some kind of family that he and I had kept in touch.

It’d been hard telling him about our father and what he’d been like. I’d had a complicated relationship with our dad.

He was away for long lengths of time as an over-the-road trucker, but when he was home? Well, I’d firmly been a daddy’s girl, doing everything my effeminate and very gay older brother had absolutely zero interest in doing.

My dad had been stubborn on that, and he and Rafe didn’t always get along. While Rafe had wanted to play dolls with Ophelia and Valencia – our two other sisters – I had wanted to learn all the things that my dad had been pretty uninterested in teaching me because I lacked the right equipment between my legs. Things like how to fish, how to hunt, how to fix shit around the house, and change my own oil… you know, boy shit.

As I’d gotten older, though, my dad had started calling me the “son he always wanted,” which was certainly a dig at Rafe and had alienated us quite a bit.

I had some regrets about that now, but damn, Rafe was such a drama queen about it.

While our dad relented and had taught me some things, it wasn’t really what I’d wanted our relationship to be like.

He’d said he had regrets about that. About not embracing the fact he had a child who was so enamored with him – tomboy that I was , as a kid. In the end, I’d been the only one of his progeny left to hold his hand in the hospital as the pancreatic cancer had taken him.

I’d been the one to hear his deathbed confessions about all the women and both knowing and not knowing that he had other kids out there.

I’d been the one he’d asked, his dying wish, to let them all know he was gone and he was sorry.

I’d taken on the duty, ever the dutiful daughter, and boy, did it lob a grenade in with the rest of the family.

I was the black sheep, alright. Pretty much shunned and ostracized by my other siblings. I found that Garnett had been desperate for family as much as I’d been mourning the loss of mine – even if I did feel as though I’d never really fit in with them.

I leaned against my car parked on the opposite side of the street from the Voodoo Bastards hangout, with my arms crossed below my breasts, and sighed.

I had no idea what waited for me through the maw of the open gate, but I felt like I owed it to both my dad and Garnett to find out why the hell the texts and emails had just stopped.

I pushed off from the car as a trickle of sweat made its way down my spine beneath the olive-drab, ribbed tank top I wore to try and beat some of this summer heat.

Fat chance of that happening.

I was prepared for hot, but it was the muggy humidity that overwhelmed me and made me feel like I walked through soup. I was regretting the boot-cut jeans and hiking boots and wished I’d gone less tomboy and more girly – or at least that I’d done shorts instead. Honestly, I didn’t know if walking into a biker’s den in a skirt wouldn’t be asking for trouble I wasn’t prepared for.

Sure, while Garnett had nothing but high praise for these men, I didn’t really understand it. Some of the shit they’d put him through to be part of their little club had been downright disgusting.

I’d learned all about their particular brand of hazing rituals, and I couldn’t say I liked a bit of what I’d heard. But Garnett? He’d sounded so proud of his accomplishments in becoming one of them, and I guess, in some ways, it was like any other fraternity or brotherhood.

You had to do a lot of stupid shit to get into a frat, too.

Of course, there was no way Garnett would know. College was so far outside of the reach of his socioeconomic status that it wasn’t even funny.

It’d been out of mine and my siblings, too – without grants, scholarships, and a shit ton of student loans.

Only two out of the five of us had opted for a college education, and both of us had gone two very different ways about it.

Ophelia had gotten a shit ton of academic scholarships and whatnot, and had almost gotten an entire free ride. Mom and the other sibs were so proud of her.

Meanwhile, I’d taken out a shit ton of student loans. I didn’t honestly have the grades and extracurriculars on my high school transcript to get the notice that Ophelia had. Of course, while I was some type of nerd, I wasn’t that hardcore of a nerd. I actually enjoyed having friends, free time, and being a kid while I’d had the chance.

Boy, did that come back to bite me.

I was in the good ol’ American debt trap after graduating, and while I had a small one-bedroom house, a beat-up almost fifteen-year-old car with high miles, and a steady and semi-decent income – if I ever had a hope and a prayer of paying off my student loans before I died – no, I didn’t make enough money. Not even close.

I’d had to tap my savings by quite a bit just to get out here to find Garnett, and I hated that I’d had to do it this way.

The drive from California hadn’t been great, but it hadn’t been awful. It certainly had sucked that my air conditioning had crapped out halfway across the Texas panhandle, and I was running two by seventy A/C now. Meaning, two windows down driving seventy down the highway.

With the oppressive wet and heavy atmosphere of New Orleans in the summertime pressing all around me, I kept a big stainless-steel bottle of water on hand and had been trying to keep hydrated like crazy.

I glanced back at it, sitting on my passenger seat, and wondered if I should keep it with me when I finally plucked up the courage to go inside.

I sighed and wondered what the fuck my problem was and why I lingered out here on the sun-scorched blacktop.

I stared at the black, purple, gold, and green painted building with its larger-than-life painted Baron Samedi bursting from Louisiana's signature gold fleur-de-lis, and I decided that yeah, okay, I was nervous. I mean, I was here, and I wanted answers. About the only thing I feared was that somehow, some way, Garnett wouldn’t want to see me, wouldn’t want to talk to me anymore… and that?

Well, there was only one way to find out if I would be abandoned for good by literally everyone … and that was to pluck up my courage and go inside.