Page 57 of Tater
Not hungry. Not wild. Just… awake.
“You ride toward danger again,”it murmured.
“I always do,” she said into the wind. “Difference is this time I picked it.”
The highway unfurled ahead, a ribbon of faded paint and cracked asphalt. Headlights cut through the dark, catching weeds, reflectors, the occasional roadkill. No traffic behind her, nothing in front but open sky and the faint orange bruise of a town far ahead.
She shifted her weight, letting the bike breathe a little. Tater’s voice followed her, a ghost under the roar: Bring it home, Ren.
Her hand twitched toward the pocket where the chain sat. She could feel it there—solid, familiar, a small weight that suddenly meant more than metal ever should.
She thought of all the ways it had moved: around her throat when she was young and stupid; in Shadow’s fist like a threat; in Tater’s hand like a prayer, he never said out loud. Now it was hers again. Just hers.
“We are not prey anymore,”the dragon purred.
“Damn right we’re not,” she muttered.
The sky above her was clear, full of stars too bright to belong to this kind of world. Every now and then a truck passed on the opposite side, a sheet of wind pushing against her bike. Most drivers didn’t look twice—just another woman on another Harley, heading nowhere good too late at night.
But one rig did slow.
She caught it in her peripheral—a long-haul with a white cab and a rust-stained trailer. It flashed its brights once, twice, then dipped them.
Ren’s jaw tightened. Old instinct said run. New instinct said look.
She rolled off the throttle just enough to give herself options and checked her mirrors. The rig slid past on the oncoming side, engine grumbling low. As it drew even, the driver leaned forward, one hand lifting off the wheel.
He tapped two fingers against his forehead and pointed down the road. Not at her. Not back the way she’d come. Ahead.
A warning.
The rig thundered by and was gone, taillights shrinking to fireflies in the dark.
Ren swallowed. “Sac’s people,” she guessed. Or maybe just one more man who knew when the road got wrong.
Either way, she listened.
She eased off the gas another notch, eyes scanning the dark carefully now. The stretch ahead looked the same—blacktop, scrub, a broken fence line—but the air had changed. Heavier. Still.
The dragon went tense.
“Something waits.”
“Yeah,” she said softly. “I feel it.”
A few miles later, she saw it.
At first it was just a glow on the horizon, low and dirty. Not town light, not the clean white of gas stations or the sodium-orange of rest stops. This was meaner, gutter-born—like someone had dropped a light on the side of the road and didn’t care who saw.
She rolled up on it, not downshifting yet. A turnout pulled off the highway, gravel scarred with fresh tire marks. Two bikes sat there, dark shapes against the glow of a single camp lantern perched on the hood of a beat-up pickup.
Leather. Chrome. Men.
No patches she could see yet.
She didn’t like it. That was one thing about road trouble never looked like trouble until you were inside its teeth.
Ren gave herself three choices in her head, as automatic as breathing:
