The road was old and badly maintained. In some places it was rubble caked to dry earth, in others it was more like sand. Kellan felt all of it beneath the wheels of his bike as he tore around curve and into the next. The sun slid behind the mountains, and the air went cold against his face. This was the kind of ride that would usually bring him some kind of comfort. The feel of being a part of the world, separated by nothing but leather and denim, but not today. Toady all he could do was feel the way his heart was pounding in his ears, and the way his jeans clung to the tacky wound on his hip.
All he could think about was Emma.
Emma, with her blonde hair that she never bothered to do anything with. Emma with her blue eyes that could go from happy to thoughtful in the span of a thought. Images of her pale hands on his chest and her tears on her cheeks tore at him.
Kellan twisted his wrist and felt the bike shift beneath him. The familiar rumble of the engine against his legs was the only comfort he could find, and only because it was bringing him closer to her. Trees whipped by at a hundred and twenty miles an hour, eighty when they were turning, and it still wasn’t fast enough. It was dangerous, but Kellan couldn’t bring himself to care. He just had to get to Emma.
They had made a quick stop at Rudy’s place to leave Rocco with Hannah, to pick up more weapons and to put together a lie for the cops about where they had been when the attack on the clubhouse went down. Then they had left civilization behind to make use of a long forgotten road.
He followed the pale back of Phantom, who no longer wore a prospect’s patch. He held a hand out, nearly the color of the moon in the sky, and all three of them brought their bikes to a halt. He could hear the fading echo of their engines through the valley.
“What’s wrong?” Kellan demanded.
Phantom pointed. Kellan followed the line of his hand and then cursed. The road was gone, washed out with the recent rain. A ribbon of a river slithered over the rocks and into the trees. It wasn’t particularly wide, but just wide enough to keep them from being able to cross it on their bikes. Kellan cursed again.
“We’ll have to walk.” Rudy clapped a hand on Kellan’s shoulder. He dismounted and tucked the bike into the dark line of trees, not bothering to cover it up. It wasn’t likely that anyone was going to come up this way, and even if they did, it wasn’t likely that they’d steal a bunch of bikes. Kellan didn’t care if they did. He’d give up every bike he’d ever built if it meant getting to Emma in time.
In time? In time for what? What if she was already dead?
“What’s the plan, president?” Rudy asked after the bikes were abandoned. He distributed a bag of weapons to each of them. They were easily thirty pounds each, maybe more. Kellan barely felt it.
“We get Emma,” he responded. “We kill Gabriel and his freak brother and we get Emma.”
The three of them tromped carefully across the murky ground. Their boots slid across damp mud and slick silt. The smell of wet animal and pine wafted up around them. They had to go slow, slower than Kellan wanted to. Their boots weren’t made for walking on muddy ground.
“How?” Phantom wanted to know.
Kellan felt an unexpected shot of anger rock through his body. He took another step and nearly fell. “We kill them, we take her.”
Rudy gripped his elbow. Kellan tried to jerk out of it. He stumbled and both men went cascading into the muck. It didn’t smell like clean mud, like the kind you might find at a playground or even in a backyard. This was the kind of mud that mixed old road with dying trees. It was the scent of a trees death, and maybe an animal, too, and Kellan went face first into it.
The anger became fire and he swung. His fist connected with Rudy’s face. Rudy swung back and got him in Kellan’s injured hip. Then they stopped swinging. Their bodies wrestled against one another. Twigs and dirt caked in their hair and on their skin.
Kellan knew he was in trouble. Rudy was a bigger man, stronger, and had grown up with a father who liked wrestling. A father, Kellan knew, that Rudy had lost to raining bullets and angry men. The man had reach, skill, and anger on his side. But Kellan had Emma.
“Get off me!” Kellan was saying. “Just get off me!”
Rudy howled, wordless and angry. His face was all twisted up with emotions Kellan didn’t know the man had in him. Rudy could be serious, but rarely angry. This was angry. This was the monster of a good man pushed past anger and well into wrath. Kellan didn’t care. It was all his fault.
Rudy slammed him into the ground, and the air whooshed out of his lungs. Kellan reached out with one hand and wrapped it around the prominent lump in Rudy’s throat. He was squeezing hard enough to make the other man cough, but neither of them gave in. Rudy slammed him again and again, until all Kellan could feel was deep sharp pain thrumming through his back.
“It’s your fault!” Kellan shouted when he punched his free fist into Rudy’s side, aiming for the kidney. He must have hit or, or at least got close, because the bigger man jerked on top of him.
The crack-boom of a gun going off cause the two men to freeze. They both jerked their heads towards the sound. There Phantom stood with the big 12 gauge that Vinny had used at the bar, the barrel of it smoking in the cool night air. He pumped it again.
“Stop.” The single word was low and carefully enunciated.
“Man, what the hell are you doing?” Kellan demanded.
“We don’t have the time.” Phantom leveled the gun at the two of them. “Get up. Now,” he added when they hesitated.
Rudy and Kellan held up their hands. Rudy stood up first, and then offered a slick, muddy hand to Kellan.
“Emma needs us.”
“She wouldn’t need us if not for him,” Kellan spat. He hadn’t even known he was angry about it until he words were coming out of his mouth.
“What the hell are you talking about?” Rudy demanded. “Gabriel took her. Not me.”
“Where was she, Rudy?” Kellan demanded. “Why wasn’t she at my place?”
Rudy didn’t answer for a minute. All Kellan could see was deep cherry red creeping up his neck beneath the patchwork layer of drying mud that caked everything. His hands clenched and unclenched and Kellan knew that he was thinking about swinging.
“Go ahead,” he snapped.
“I didn’t know she’d run off,” Rudy snarled.
“I thought you knew her. I thought you two were all big and close and everything because she spent so much time with your family. I mean, hey, I guess it’s not your fault. It’s not like she’s ever run away from things before…oh wait, that’s exactly what she does.” Kellan snapped back. He stepped up, jerking his chin towards the sky so he could look Rudy in the face rather than the neck. “She runs when she can’t take it anymore.”
“You didn’t have to do what I said.”
Kellan couldn’t argue that. “You’re right, I didn’t, and that makes this my fault, too. I was stupid enough to think you knew her better than I did. I mean hell, I’ve only really talked with her for what, a month? Maybe six weeks? I don’t even know.”
Rudy dragged a dirty hand over the cleanest part of his jeans, and then down his face, ridding it of a large portion of the muck. It sloughed towards the ground with a wet plop and the three of them stood there in the following silence.
“Do you love her?”
Kellan sighed. “I don’t—”
“Man, don’t fuck with me right now, do you love her? You are about to go charging up a mountain in the near dead of night with nothing but a load of guns and three men to use them. Those don’t seem like the actions of a man who isn’t in love.”
He wasn’t wrong, Kellan realized. “Yeah, I guess I do.”
“Then let’s figure out how we are going to do this, because it isn’t going to help Emma at all to have us charge up there and then die.”
Phantom knelt in the wet dirt and drew out an impressive map. For the next thirty minutes the three of them put together a plan of attack. Kellan used his bandana to wipe the worst of the mud off of his own face and redistributed the weapons so the man who carried them had the ones that worked best for him, and the plan.
“How long of a walk do you think we have?” Kellan asked. The evening had become nighttime, and it was only going to get darker. It would be a small factor in their favor when they got to Gabriel’s little mountainside estate.
Phantom glanced over his shoulder, towards a path that only he could see. “Three hours, maybe four.”
“Nine,” Kellan said. “By the time we get there Emma will have been in that house for nine hours.”
Rudy stood up. “If he had wanted to kill her, he would have left her in the house to watch it burn. She’s alive, and she probably will be for a while. All we have to do is hurry.”
“And stop punching each other in the face,” Kellan offered.
“And stop punching each other in the face.” Rudy nodded once. “Though, to be fair, you throw a terrible right hook.”
“Whatever.” Kellan followed after him. “You have a thick face.”
The small band of men fell into step with one another as they made it up the mountain. It was a grueling hike. Kellan’s leg was already hurt and his shoulder was aching beneath the bandages, adding the thirty some-odd pounds of weapons on top of that, a steep incline and pure unadulterated exhaustion and it was going to be four hours of hell.
He tried not to think about how many more steps, how many more minutes he would be out here. He turned his thoughts to Emma.
He’d send her to school when the fall came around. She could go and learn about all the animals in the world and how to make them feel better. She wouldn’t have to work while she studied, he’d make sure of it. If he could manage it, he would make sure she had her own place up there, too, so she wouldn’t have to worry about her roommates messing with her stuff or distracting her. Maybe he could get her a pet to keep her company. Not Rocco, that mutt would get into everything, but maybe something small like a gerbil or something. Did she like gerbils? He couldn’t imagine Emma not liking an animal that was plunked down in front of her.
His thoughts slid back to the conversations they had shared between bouts of fornication. She had always liked to talk while they were resting.
“I want to have one of everything,” she’d said, her creamy thighs still straddling him. His hands had danced up the sides of her body, still craving the weight of her breasts in his palms.
“Everything?” he had asked her. “Like, what? Half of Noah’s Arc?”
Her laugh had been so bright, so alive and brilliant. Her nose had crinkled and her breasts bounced in his hands. “I guess so.”
“I dunno.” His hands had worked across the tips of her nipples, making her hips rock in response. “A whale is gonna take up a lot of space. I’d hate to clean that tank.”
She had rolled then, flopping languidly to one side and looking at him. It was that moment that he realized just how beautiful she was. Not just hot, she had been hot since she was sixteen and started to fill out, but really beautiful. It was the kind of beauty a picture didn’t capture, but the kind that came when your heart was so big that other people couldn’t help but care.
“Okay, fine, realistically, I’d like to have a small zoo. A dog, a cat, a bird, a snake.”
“You like snakes?”
She nodded. “I like animals.”
“You don’t mind feeding them those tiny little mice?”
She had fixed him with an amused smirk. “I work in a vet clinic. I have fed feeder-mice to big ol’ snakes before.”
He had rolled on top of her, hungrily crushing her sleek body to his. “That’s hot.”
Another bright laugh. “I am not going into the psychology of that.”
His lips curled into a smile as he hiked up the side of the mountain. He hadn’t been lying when he told Rudy he loved her. It wasn’t just how good she felt when he was sliding into her, or the moans she could whimper, or the way her pretty mouth could curse, he loved her.
And Gabriel had her. Who knew what he or his creepy little brother were doing. Kellan remembered the way Michael had watched her when they had crashed the wedding. It had not been a good look. It had been the same sick look his dad had given the cougar.
Kellan’s feet couldn’t carry him fast enough.