Page 47 of A Witchy Spell Ride
I shoved clothes into a bag without care: jeans, black dress, two shirts, a hoodie. Toothbrush. Tarot deck. The tin with the red-thread bottle. Two knives. The old brass key that didn’t open anything anymore but felt like luck in my palm.
Ghost checked the windows again. The bathroom locked. Closet clear. He scanned the air vent, the smoke alarm, the curtain rod, like a man who knew cameras had gotten small and intentions smaller. At the door he paused, crouched, and set another hair across the latch: a ghost thread you only saw if you knew to look.
Reaper called back as I zipped the bag.
“Tell me,” Ghost said into the phone, then listened while Reaper told him who was where, who had eyes, who’d be at the curb in three minutes. I caught fragments: Bones on the alley, Cross on forensics, Vex doing a hard sweep of my block like he had bones to break and needed volunteers.
“Yeah,” Ghost said. “We’re coming down now.”
He slid the photo into an evidence sleeve Briar had left in her chaos tote. He tucked the envelope in another. Then he looked at me.
“You ready?”
“No,” I said. “But go anyway.”
He managed a half-smile. “That’s my line.”
We left through the back. Ghost before me. The hallway felt narrower than yesterday. The chalk line on the hinge we’d made was pristine. The hair from last night, new, brittle, lay undisturbed across the latch. Which meant whoever left the envelope had done it after Ghost put me on the couch and before dawn, using a different path. The idea sat like a stone in my throat.
At the bottom of the stairs, the heat slapped my cheeks. The Quarter breathed its secret breath: damp, sweet, metallic. A car idled one block over. Reaper’s. Another idled farther, Cross’s. A third idled where I couldn’t place it and that was comforting in its own way because it meant Ghost had more eyes than he’d told me.
Briar stepped out of Reaper’s passenger side like a glitter bomb with fangs. “Don’t say I told you so,” she told me. “But. I told you so.”
I wanted to laugh. I wanted to cry. I did neither. “You have coffee?”
She produced a cup like a magician. “Black. I spit in Reaper’s so you’re safe.”
Reaper got out of the driver’s seat. He didn’t come near me. He didn’t need to. His gaze traced my face, my hands, the bag. He saw too much and said exactly enough. “You ride with Ghost.”
“Like hell she does,” Briar muttered, but without heat. She flanked me and pressed her shoulder against mine like we were about to take a punch at the same time. “You, okay?”
“No.”
“Good,” she said. “Honesty is healthy.”
Ghost opened the passenger door of his bike, then stopped, corrected, and opened the truck door instead, a low, battered thing with a dashboard rosary someone had left years ago. “You’re not getting on the bike,” he said to me. “Not today.”
“I wasn’t going to argue.”
“Damn,” he said, “I was looking forward to winning one.”
The drive to the clubhouse was short and long at the same time. Short in miles, long in the way silence stretches when you’re trying not to break. Ghost kept one hand on the wheel and one on the console, close enough to touch mine without touchingit. Reaper followed two cars back. Cross peeled off to harass a traffic camera into compliance. Briar texted me memes from the other car even though I could see her through the windshield, her face tilted, eyes scanning, mouth chewing a straw like it had wronged her.
We took side streets. Avoided stoplights that held us in place too long. I watched the mirrors like a novice and the sidewalks like a pro. We passed a man twirling a sign for po’boys and a woman walking three little dogs with bows in their hair, and I wanted to be the kind of person who only had to worry about leash tangles and sauce stains.
We pulled into the compound. The gate yawned open like a mouth. The clubhouse loomed like it always did, bruised wood, battered windows, a building shaped by men and storms and stubbornness. I used to love it in the way you love a dangerous church. Today it felt like a refuge disguised as a threat.
Inside, everything was already different. Quiet. Men who were usually laughter and noise became angles and intent. Bones stood at the far door with his crowbar held casual but not idle. Vex leaned on the bar with a glass he didn’t drink, eyes pinned to the front like he could hold it shut by will alone. Cross arrived a minute after us, hair mussed, shirt too neat, tablet under his arm like a sword.
Reaper put me in the small office off the main room, a space with a couch, a battered desk, a window that looked out over the lot. Ghost did a sweep, then a second. Vex ducked in, kissed my temple without making a big deal about it, and ducked out again.
“New rules,” Reaper said, voice level like he was reading a grocery list. “Door stays open unless you need it shut. You don’tgo anywhere without Briar or Ghost. You don’t answer unknown numbers. Cross is scrubbing your phone. Ghost and Bones are rotating the perimeter. Vex is on the door. I am—”
“An overbearing tyrant,” Briar supplied, flopping into the rolling chair and turning it with one foot.
Reaper ignored her. “I am not leaving this building unless I have to.”
It should have made me feel trapped. It didn’t. It made me feel… held. And I hated how much I liked it.
