You will be the reason we win the last battle. You will be the Whitney who lives to see everything crushed under my boot, just like your mama’s skull.
My stomach pitched, but I didn’t puke. Inside my chest, my heart pumped. Again. That swimmy feeling poured into my head. I had to get out of there. Hell, even going up in flames would be better than this. Might even be the only way to protect these dumbasses from me—take myself out of the game early.
“Tough?” Willow was standing right in front of me, head cocked so she could catch my eye. “Are you all right?”
I blinked a couple times, then nodded. I took a deep breath. That helped a little, opening and closing my lungs so that my heart wasn’t the only thing in my chest moving. The way the air rushed in, then whooshed back out seemed to remind my heart that it was supposed to be dead. It stopped beating, at least.
Dodge came up beside Will. I thought surely he would say something about how crazy it was that everybody seemed to think I was good for anything—much less starting a holy war—but all he did was give me a smile and say, “Going into the family business after all, huh?”
Where was Owen? If anybody would have the decency to blurt out what everybody was really thinking, it would be him. I looked over Dodge and Willow’s shoulders, but Owen wasn’t there.
Will saw me looking for her cousin. “Owen and Clara… I left Bitsy with them. They’re going to get out of town when it starts.”
Bitsy. I’d forgotten about Will’s little girl. Will had a fucking kid and here she was, ready to throw her life away.
No. No way in hell. I grabbed her arm, ready to shove Will out the front door. No way in hell was I getting somebody else’s mom killed.
“Let go!” Will snapped. Her orangish-red hair whipped around her head as she tried to jerk her arm out of my grip.
I let go and stabbed my finger at the door.
“No.” She set her feet. “Scout said this was a volunteer army. Well, guess what—I’m a volunteer. And I’m not leaving.”
Dodge stepped up beside her.
“Look, Tough, maybe you didn’t get to decide. Family’s like that, I know.” The words rumbled deep down in his chest. He was using his Keep It Between the Band voice, the one he used when he wasn’t joking, when he had to tell somebody they were the problem and they needed to get their act together or get out. “But me and Will do get a choice. We get to decide whether to keep rolling over for the angels and every other NP or help you show them that people won’t stand for this anymore.” He glanced at Will. “That way our kid doesn’t have to do the shit we’ve done to stay alive in this town.”
I must’ve looked like somebody’d slapped me because Will jumped in to explain.
“She’s not his,” Will said. “Not biologically.”
“But she’s like mine,” Dodge said. “I don’t want Bitsy to have to go through the same stuff her mom did.”
Willow smiled at him, then she shined that smile on me. “We’re in this. You’re not going to change my mind or throw me out, either. I’ll just keep coming back. Like a bad penny.” She laughed and punched my shoulder. “Or a Whitney.”
I shook my head again, hard, but she didn’t say anything else, I guess because she already knew she’d won.
I whipped my hat off and scratched my hand through my hair. What I really wanted to do was rip it out by the roots, but it probably wouldn’t grow back, so I settled for dragging my hat back on and heading for the back room.
Nobody else said anything to me. Nobody was going to stop this. Hell, they were lining up to join Scout’s army. Who knew what kind of bullshit she’d been feeding them about revenge or freedom or something else retarded like that. And they fucking loved it.
Damn, I needed a drink. A Whitney special—a shot, a longneck, and a shot at Rowdy’s. Some ‘shine by the bonfire in Dodge’s back pasture. A forty and some SoCo Hundred Proof up in my room as far the hell away from everybody as I could get. Anything to shut off my brain.
Scout was just coming down the steps when I got to them. I grabbed her arm and pulled her through the door marked Restroom.
Told you, that faulty wiring in my head said.
“Tough, what—”
I locked the door behind us.
“You need me, don’t you?” She put her arms around my neck and hooked one leg around mine. “Let me get these clothes off. The crow magic works best if—”
I grabbed her wrists and twisted them behind her back, then spun her around so she was pressed up against the bathroom’s painted cinder block wall. I might not be a good enough guy to stop myself from feeding off her, but at least I could make sure it didn’t happen naked anymore.
She half-laughed, half-purred and arched her back so she could grind her butt against my crotch.
“Kinky,” she said. She probably thought it was, too, porn-star piercings or not.
That made me want to suck-start a shotgun. Scout was just a kid who thought doing it standing up and from behind was kinky. She probably didn’t even know that there were people and NPs who wanted to be cut while they had sex or who needed to make you hate yourself or who did it in torture
