Page 10 of Brother In Arms

Not that that was anything unusual to any of my brothers. That’s why this lifestyle fit us the best. I swung a leg over my bike and dropped onto the seat, digging through my keys absently before I found the one to start it. I half-assed put my bandana on my head without tying it off and fired her up. I finished tying off the red bandana behind my head, pinning down the errant corner and crammed my helmet on over it, doing up the chinstrap while I listened to my baby chug reassuringly beneath me.

She could be a cranky bitch when she was cold, but she always fired true. I could probably stand to give her a tune up in the next few weeks, but I don’t know, sometimes that wasn’t so much a necessity as much as it was I liked working on her.

I patted the glossy black skin, veined with blue lightning on her tank and didn’t care what anyone thought about me treating my iron horse like she was a real one. She’d gotten me through more than one high speed chase and had never left me on the side of the road, always giving me ample warning that something was going and needed attention. She was a special kind of ride, and even though she was getting way up there in miles, I wasn’t even close to ready to trade her in.

I rode back to the club and ran into my twin comin’ out the front door, headed for his cage. No Maren in sight, which probably meant she was at Soul Fuel learning her new trade. I still worried about my twin brother. I’d been there, with women lookin’ at me for financial stability, but fuck if they weren’t in it for an actual relationship. No, they’d been getting their dick of choice on the side the fuckin’ ticks. I didn’t want Nox to go through the same kind of hurt that I had on that front. He was better than me, and deserved far better than that as a result.

I got off my bike and wandered in my brother’s direction, the sudden quiet from the cease of my baby’s engine filled only by the ticking of her cooling engine and the rustle of the leaves in the slight breeze. I loved those sounds, meant I hadn’t gone deaf.

Nox stopped and waited for me to come up to him, his scowl tellin’ me plainly he knew I had somethin’ on my mind. I did, too, and I needed to get it off my chest. I didn’t trust anyone else to spill my guts to than my biological brother, even if all we shared was the same mother and the same womb. We were a scientific anomaly to the nth degree that way. Something like a one in a billion chance. We’d faced every odd since the same way; together.

“What’s eating you?” he asked when I got within earshot.

“Got time for a beer with your dumbass twin?” I asked.

“Oh, Lord. What’d you do this time?” he asked.

“Do you have time for a beer or not?”

“Yeah! Yeah, I got time.”

We went in through the barroom which was thankfully vacant and picked up a couple beers each. I led my brother through the club and out the back door to the expanse of grass rising up into a plateau of some kind. When this was a juvie, I guess this used to be a running track around a raised ball field of some kind. The track had been paved over making a loop of a driveway to get out to the outbuilding that housed my room and the huge, three bay shop building that now housed Dani’s jeweler’s studio and my woodshop.

The bay between them we’d managed to clean out of the random stored crap in it and it now stored a bunch of my completed furniture. It’d helped me save on a rented storage locker and I was damn grateful Dragon had let me have so much space to do my thing. He hadn’t wanted anything for it, either but it hadn’t stopped me.

Nox and I dragged ourselves up to the top of the little rise and to my completed project up here. I’d built the club an outdoor fire pit. A raised circle of bricks instead of the old fifty-five gallon drum they’d been using. Around it, I’d erected a round pergola framework of timber and then I’d gotten really down and dirty.

I’d built six hanging benches and had affixed them to the framework with solid, industrial, weather proofed chain. When we had a full house, it still hadn’t been quite enough seating, so I’d built some sturdy lawn furniture to sit closer to the fire with some tables between ‘em to hold drinks and dead soldiers.

I led my brother to a couple of the chairs now, and we each dropped into one. It didn’t look like much, but there was an odd rectangle framework on one side of the pergola with wood neatly stacked underneath and to either side. There were some hook and eyes driven into the top of the rectangle and we had a nice LED TV tucked into one of the empty club rooms that we hung from it and could watch the game from. That’d been Data’s idea, and with his technical know-how, if there wasn’t rain in the forecast, we typically had it hooked up out here except when no one was home, like now.

Nox used one of the bottle openers I’d installed under the overhang of the arm in front of the lawn chair and cracked his beer. I did likewise and took a long drink.

“Looks like I got that job workin’ Dray’s cousin’s horse farm.”

Nox nodded slowly and let that sink in, “You need anything…”

“Shit, I’ll call the right people, but it won’t be you,” I said taking a pull from my own beer. He looked pissed at that and I laughed.

“You’re as good as a daddy now,” I raised a hand to stop him from getting really pissed, and added, “I meant to Sage, I wasn’t trying to take a shot there.”

“Better not be, fucker. I’d have to kick your ass again.”

“You might still wanna when I tell you this next bit.”

“What’d you do now?” he asked and I could just see his heart sink. I had that effect on my twin sometimes, and every time I did, I felt guilty about it.

“To be fair, I didn’t know I was doin’ it at the time…”

“Rush…”

“I’m serious!”

“Rush…”

“Alright!” I laughed, he hated it when I kept him in suspense when it was likely to be bad news and I couldn’t say I blamed him.

“What’d you do now, you fucker?” he asked and I finished off my first beer and cracked my second. I needed a bit of the liquid courage.

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