Page 29

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

S aint…

“That’s fucked up,” Jessie-Lou said, taking a pull off her beer. We were back at the club, the couches from the front back here in the back bay, and sat down around the firepit which we had going. It was cozy, and Velina was drying out. I had her boots and socks off, her feet in my lap, rubbing them as she talked about her night.

“I know, right?” she said. “I can’t imagine working that hard to pull yourself out of an active addiction, to get yourself right and put yourself through shaking your naked ass in front of strangers night after night with a goal in mind, only to have the dude that supposedly loves you try and tear it all down because he wants an adventure in getting his dick wet.”

She rolled her eyes and some of us laughed at her phrasing, but definitely none of us were laughing at Singer’s situation.

“For real,” Chainsaw agreed.

For once, we were all here. Every brother and ol’ lady alike. We were keeping it low-key around here, and no one else was fuckin’ invited. Some day, we might get back to partying and having outsiders hang with us or whatever – but now? No. No fuckin’ way. We didn’t trust anyone who was outside the club, and with good reason.

It’d been entirely too easy to get Velina close to the Brethren – and that’d been one of our biggest arguments when it came down to it when Ruth was in charge. The more people you had hangin’ around and the faster you added to the club, the more likely you were inviting a fat rat into the fuckin’ pantry.

Ain’t none of us wanted to go down on the kinds of charges we were racking up, but he just wouldn’t fuckin’ listen.

“So, how’d you get yourself out of hanging with those losers tonight?” LaCroix asked, and it was a good question.

“Oh, trust me, Carver wasn’t fuckin’ happy. But ain’t nobody down to go down on a woman who’s confessed that she sharted and was on her way home to clean herself up.”

“You did what?” Bennie demanded, but all of us were too busy falling out laughing, including Velina, who was giggling too hard for her to reiterate what she’d just said. Not that she needed to – we all heard it, loud and clear.

“That shit’s too stupid to make up,” Corliss said from Hex’s lap.

“I was banking on that,” Velina said.

“Well, well fuckin’ played,” Hex crowed, saluting her with his beer.

“That’s wild,” Sandy said, taking a drink from where she sat at Bennie’s feet on the area rug that we’d thrown down back here over the concrete.

Bennie had been arguing with her off and on over the last half an hour. He kept trying to get her up off the floor, and I had to admit, it did not look comfortable, but she kept insisting she was fine.

He started in again, and it was Velina who rolled her eyes and called out to Sandrine, “Oh for fuck’s sake, will you just let the man love and take care of you?”

Sandy stopped, whatever she was going to say dying on her lips, and looked from Velina to Bennie. Without another word of protest, she got up off the ground and curled up in the battered recliner with her man. Both of them were small enough they fit in the damn thing, which had been built for a man of considerable bulk.

It used to be Ruth’s makeshift throne around here.

Somebody’d dredged it out of the back corner of the garage somewhere when we’d been scrounging for extra seating to accommodate everyone back here comfortably.

I was impressed at how Velina was getting along with everyone, despite only really having spent time with me, Hex, LaCroix, and out of the women, just Alina to this point. Alina had clearly liked her and put in a good word with Cor, Jessie-Lou, and Sandrine.

They were all working together to open a witchy-themed gift shop down in the Quarter, an unexpected opportunity arising from Sandy’s boss wanting to retire. They were trying to take over her space, where a witchy-vibed shop already resided and was closed down, making the transition and the space their own. They’d been working on it pretty steady with the help of some of the brothers in their spare time surrounding us, still trying to get the permits and shit to make the distillery dream a reality.

That was on the verge of happening, too. All our plans were right there within reach, on the cusp of being a reality when here we all were, hunkered down in the thick cinderblock walls of our fuckin’ clubhouse like fuckin’ refugees, while the Bayou Fucksticks were out there running amok in our city like they owned it.

Let ‘em think so. We were coming, and we had every intention of bringing hell with us before we finalized anything.

We didn’t want to give these assholes any hard targets, so it was all a part of the fucking plan at this point.

We were just biding our time. No need to rush anything. Rushing is how you got caught. Rushing is how you made mistakes… like we’d rushed to get the hell out of Dodge after dispatching Ruth.

Biggest mistake we’d ever made to date as far as I was concerned, but killing him ain’t come easy to any of us.

“You good?” I murmured to Velina during a lull in conversation and storytelling while people emptied bladders and got refills on their drinks and shit.

“Yeah, just tired. It’s been a hell of a week with everything going on. Not just the dipshits, either, but the news and the crazy shit going on in the Quarter. It’s been just crazy high stress staying on high alert like all the time, you know?”

“Yeah, I get that,” I said, grinning.

“Sorry,” she said, blushing.

“For what?” I asked.

“I get the feeling I just sounded like a civilian or whatever right there.”

I laughed. “Citizen, and yeah, a little.”

“It’s not so different at the end of the day,” Jessie-Lou said. “Bein’ a woman or bein’ in this life. Either way, you’re always lookin’ over your shoulder and wonderin’ what’s next.”

Velina was staring into the fire, sort of vacantly, but she was listening. Jessie-Lou had pretty much been born into the life. Her daddy was an outlaw – out poaching to make ends meet some years and rogue fishin’ out in the Gulf. Her people didn’t have much love for the government – just a bunch of rules and regulations that made an already tough life even harder if you asked them.

“She’s right,” I conceded when Velina looked to me and raised a brow.

“Yee haw, fuck the law,” Collier said and gave Jessie-Lou’s knee a double squeeze from the camp chair beside hers.

“Sometimes I wonder what it’s like bein’ so blissfully unaware, you know? How people can go to work with the same job and not two or three, an’ make enough to live off of comfortably. Y’know?”

“We’ll get there, baby,” Collier said. “I promise.”

“Oh, I know,” she said with a little half-smile.

“Just gotta work for it, they say,” Velina said. “Has a lot to do with luck, too, and the station you were born into.”

“There’s more ‘n one world out there,” I said with a heavy sigh.

“I didn’t use to think so, but coming down here has definitely opened my eyes,” she said.

“New Orleans is the kind of city that’ll do that for you,” Hex declared, coming back into the conversation and dropping back into his seat. Cor slid into his lap and sighed.

“She either opens up her arms and welcomes you wholeheartedly, or she chews you up and spits you right the fuck out – that’s for sure,” Jessie-Lou declared, saluting Hex with her drink.

“Depends on the kind of person you are,” I said, knowing exactly what they were talkin’ about as one of the lifelong, born-and-raised residents of the city herself. No offense to Jessie-Lou, she was as Cajun through and through – Acadian to the bitter last, but she was Louisiana born – not city born like I was. There was a difference.

“You come to this city and have a deep vibe like you’ve been here before, or that you belong, she welcomes you,” I explained to Velina’s questioning look. “You one of the people who come here, and the vibe of the city scares you or gives you the creeps – you might as well just leave. She ain’t ever gonna love you. You aren’t her people.”

“I don’t know exactly which category I belong in,” Velina said truthfully.

“How’s that?” Jessie-Lou asked.

“Like, don’t get me wrong, this is a cool city, and I get it. I feel like I belong here on a good day, but at the same time, it just has a different vibe from day to night, man. Like I don’t even know.”

We all sort of waited her out while she gathered her thoughts on the subject.

“Like, you go into the Quarter during the day, it’s fine, it’s a tourist trap – whatever. It’s all well and good, but you can fucking feel the change as the sun starts to set. It’s not like the vibe just instantly shifts. It's like this slow and creeping thing that comes up out of the sewers or oozes out of the alleyways, and the vibe at night is totally different to the one during the day. I hate being out during the shift. Like out at daylight, fine. Out at night? Also, fine. During the in-between times? No, thank you.”

“Oh, see, now me? I love the shift,” Sandrine said. “That’s when you see and feel things. It’s especially wild around Halloween.”

“What do you mean?” Velina asked.

“I’ve seen people walking down the street at the shift, and like, the rest of the people don’t even realize they’re doing it. They just sort of part like the Red Sea and make way for them. Like these are perfectly ordinary looking people, but they give off some kind of an aura or whatever that makes people move.”

“Yeah, those people ain’t alive no more,” Jessie-Lou said, laughing.

“What, like they’re ghosts?” Velina asked, but she wasn’t laughing. She was genuinely curious.

“Ghosts, vampires, maybe. Roux Garou. Hard to tell. They just ain’t real or alive anymore. This city, she holds onto things. Like echoes from the past. Just how she is.”

We all sat with that for a moment, and ain’t none of us could argue.

“You need anything?” I asked Velina after a little while.

“Honestly, I think bed. Can I stay at your place?” she asked.

“Fuck yeah. Anybody got a cage willing to give us a ride?” I asked.

“Yeah, the weather’s shit for riding,” Chainsaw said, and we all looked out the big open bay door which we kept open for the smoke to escape.

It was still coming down out there like it would never end.

“Right on,” I said.