Page 68 of Grave Games

I shook my head. “You’ve lost me.”

“There was this little pet store that opened up in a strip mall in Hades’s territory,” he said after a moment, his voice haunted and barely heard above the noise of Tyr’s idling bike. “It was run by a couple of hippy-dippy sisters who thought everyone was like them—sweet and kind and ready to protect all the helpless creatures of the world. Hades went to the grand opening of this shop and busted out the aquariums with a baseball bat, wrung the necks of all the birds, and took the puppies to be fed to his dogs that he keeps for dog fighting—his favorite sport, by the way. Then he left. He didn’t even shake them down for protection money, or anything. He just didn’t like that they existed, so he made sure they didn’t.”

“My God.” I swallowed hard and tried not to picture the torture of all those poor animals, but damn, it was hard. No wonder my brother had been so strung out on nerves he hadn’t even been recognizable to me. “Who could possibly want to follow someone like that?”

“People who’re just like him. The cruelty-lovers and the chaos agents. The psychopathic outcasts of civil society. The biker world’s always attracted that kind of personality, because they’re all a little anti-establishment at their core. But Hades is on a whole other level of anarchy. He wants to burn it all down, just for the fun of seeing the flames. That kind of crazy attracts those who are like-minded, and I think that’s why his people are so fanatically loyal to him. When they’re with Hades, they have permission to be their worst selves.”

Well, that sounded completely horrible. “I’d like to think that sort of person is few and far between.”

“That may be, but if they’re true believers of chaos, numbers don’t matter, Shiloh. Trust me, things like compassion and a basic sense of decency don’t weigh them down. They’re monsters in human skin, and they’ll happily kill anyone who threatens to put an end to their fucked-up kind of fun. Killingisfun for them, so wiping out as many people as possible is nothing more than playing a first-person shooter in their eyes. They even keep score, the sick bastards.”

That was so twisted I could barely wrap my mind around it. “How did you survive in that hell, Josh?”

“I became one of them.” The confession came out so quietly I had to strain to hear it. “I’ve… done things, Shiloh. Terrible things. It doesn’t matter that they made me do them. What matters is that I chose to do them to save my own fucking skin. How the hell do I atone for that? How the hell do I atone for choosing to become a monster?”

“I forgive you,” I said impulsively, and when I realized that what I’d said was true, I reached out and squeezed his hand. “If I can forgive you for everything that’s happened, maybe you should try forgiving yourself.”

His fingers squeezed mine before he let go. “I’ve been working on getting my head right ever since I got out of the Chicago Gravediggers, and Romeo has been helping me with that. In a lot of ways he’s got the same traits as most bikers—hates rules, limitations and fake-ass niceties of society, that kind of thing. But he gives a damn about people, you know? The reason he took me to see Mom and Dad was because he cares so much about you, and the polite way he treated them—well, Mom anyway, not so much Dad—told me he’s got a soul. Same with Tyr. You know what they say, like attracts like, and I think most of these guys are like—” He started to sweep a hand at the crowd around the bonfire before he froze. “Holy shit.”

“What?” Instantly on alert, I glanced around and saw nothing that would make my brother lose all color. “What is it, Josh?”

“One of Hades’s guys is here—oh,fuck.” Abruptly he turned his back on the bonfire, his eyes casting wildly about. “Jesus, Jesus, I think he saw me. I’m not sure, but I think he saw me. We need to get out of here, Shiloh.Now.”

“Stop.” It took all my strength not to freak out and look around for the bad guy, but the last thing I wanted to do was tip them off that we had spotted them. “Take a breath and don’t panic, okay? And whatever you do,do not run. Predators love it when you run, so don’t.” I’d learned that early on from Marvel, when he’d laugh as I tried to keep out of his reach—a hard thing to do in a locked room.

“What the fuck are we supposed to do then, wait like docile little lambs for him to come over here and slaughter us?”

Damn, his panic was getting to me. “Josh,think, okay?He’sthe one in enemy territory, not us. It would be insane for him to expose himself now by killing us in front of all these people. As long as we stay front and center, he can’t lift a finger against us.”

He stared at me like I was deranged. “So our plan is just tostand here?”

“Our plan is to tell someone like Tyr or Romeo or one of his officers that you’ve spotted the spy in their midst.”

“Shiloh, he’s wearing a lieutenant’s badge, I can see it from here. That means heisone of Tyr’s officers.”

Shit. Shit, shit, shit…

“Don’t you get it? All that sonofabitch has to do is yell out that I’m a threat, that I’m one of Hades’s men, and this crowd will go after me with fucking pitchforks.”

That part was probably true. The moment Tyr announced Arthur had died, even I had felt it—a terrible bloodlust and a need for vengeance. For a lot of these people it wouldn’t matter that their fury would be taken out on the wrong man. Just the suggestion from a Gravedigger lieutenant that Josh was one of Hades’s men would be enough for them to wipe Josh out of existence.

Not to mention the spy wouldn’t hesitate to deflect attention away from himself. If he even suspected Josh could blow his cover, he’d have no choice but to silence my brother forever.

But we still had the advantage, if we just kept our cool.

“Nice and casual, we’re going to make our way over to Tyr, and you’re going to tell him who it is.” I laced my hand with his, not at all surprised to find his fingers had gone ice cold. “Don’t look around, don’t make eye contact with anyone, okay? I’ll lead the way with a smile on my face to show how calm we are. Don’t worry, we’ve got this.”

“Shiloh… okay, yeah. We’ve got this.”

He tried to sound tough while his icy fingers gripped mine.

I’d taken only two steps in Tyr’s direction when dozens of bikes flooded in as one and started to rev loudly enough to make my ears bleed. I looked around, trying to see if Romeo was one of them, hoping he was closer to us than Tyr, but all I saw were unfamiliar faces. Hell, at this point I’d take Zee or even Ashtray to tell our story to—

BOOM.

Josh and I hit the deck, the asphalt beneath my hands and knees as cold as ice. For several seconds I thought a bomb had gone off before I realized someone had tossed a heavy-duty firework into the bonfire. The people gathered around the bonfire cried out, the acrid smell of gunpowder poisoned the air, and like a switch being thrown all hell broke loose in the Gravedigger compound.

“Who the fuck threw that?” I heard Tyr roar even as my brother unceremoniously hauled me to my feet and dragged me away from that chaotic knot of people, bikes and fire, and nearly got us run over by an incoming Harley. “Swear to Christ, I will fucking find you—”

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