Page 7 of Thunder Road

“How much did you hear?”

“Pretty much all of it.”

Simon shook his head. “I wish I knew what they conjured. It was a fairly powerful entity. This is why casting magic when you don’t know what you’re doing is a bad thing.”

“Think it’ll give him what he wants?”

“No way to know.” Simon shrugged. “Depends on how much it enjoys jerking mortals around.”

Simon cleansed the energies around his work table again and said another blessing, just in case. Pete ducked into the break room and returned with a chocolate bar and a cup of coffee.

“Eat. Drink. You need it after that.” Pete pushed the items into his hands. “I’ll smudge and replace the protections.”

Now that the séance was over, Simon felt drained, tired enough he thought he might fall asleep in his chair. After channeling spirits for years, he wasn’t surprised, recognizing the cost of connecting to the other side. Food, drink, and sleep would replace what he had spent.

Fortunately, the rest of the afternoon passed quietly. Simon went into his office to work on bookkeeping while Pete handled the few customers who wandered in.

Just before sunset, as they were closing for the night, Vic called.

“Hey, I’m going to be late for dinner. All the uniforms got called out to an accident, and I said I’d help cover until some of them came back.”

“What happened?” A cold premonition slithered through Simon’s bones.

“Don’t know the details, but a guy on a Harley hit a car, and from what the witnesses are saying, he just disappeared,” Vic recounted. “They can’t all be drunk.”

Simon managed a sad smile. “Older guy, biker leathers?”

Vic hesitated. “Yeah. How did you know?”

“It’s a long story. I just did a séance for him. Seems like someone was listening. You can look for the body all you want, but you’re not going to find it.”

2

VIC

“Want to run that by me again?” Vic did his best not to go into what Simon called cop mode over the phone. “We’ve got his bike, but no body. Where the hell did he go?”

“Short answer—something like the fay took him to pay this year’s tribute for a deal made forty years ago to avert a gang war,” Simon replied.

Vic was quiet for a moment, reminding himself that Simon was his husband and not a random witness. “I don’t understand.”

Simon sighed. “Check your records. A member of the bike club, the Low Rangers, has gone missing every year for forty years. None of them were ever found. I can have Pete send you the research he did before I conducted the séance. Carter Edwards is now the most recent addition.”

Vic knew Edwards’s name from the motorcycle registration, and he guessed the club membership from the stickers on what was left of the bike. Simon got it right on both counts.

“When did you see Edwards?”

“I squeezed him in for my first appointment. He was here for about an hour, and then he left.”

Vic pinched the bridge of his nose. “And Edwards was dead—or gone—by noon.”

“Fuck,” Simon muttered.

Ross gave him a questioning look, overhearing Vic’s side of the conversation, and Vic mouthed, “later.”

“Yeah. No blood, no body, no squishy bits. Like no one had been riding the bike, except witnesses all described the same man from moments before the crash.”

“How is that going over?”

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