Page 6 of Tater
CHAPTER 3
Blood on the Pavement
The first thing he saw was the chain.
It was lying in front of the door like she’d meant for him to trip over it. The gold was dull, still warm from her skin. Tater didn’t have to touch it to know what it meant.
She was gone.
The clubhouse was dead quiet except for the rain starting outside and Eagle muttered somewhere down the hall. The air still smelled like her — smoke and whiskey and that faint metallic scent that came with the fire under her skin.
Tater bent down, picked up the chain, and closed his hand around it. His knuckles went white.
Behind him Eagle said, “She gone?”
Tater didn’t answer.
He came closer anyway. “Told you she was running hot. You pushed her too hard?—”
He turned. “Don’t finish that fuckin’ sentence.”
He shut up. Good. Tater didn’t need words right then. He needed motion. He needed the road.
The bike fired on the first try, that familiar growl cutting through the rain. Tater shoved the throttle harder than heshould’ve and peeled out of the lot, back tire spitting mud. The rest of the Bastards could catch up when they got their gear, he wasn’t waiting.
The road bled with water and shadows. Tater’s headlight caught the silver threads of rain, nothing else. Her scent clung to the storm — hot metal, ozone, the kind of heat that didn’t belong in this weather. The dragon always left a trail.
Half a mile out, He saw the skid marks.
They cut across the road like black scars, ending in churned mud and broken branches. He killed the engine and listened. Nothing. No engines. No voices. Just the hiss of water on cooling metal somewhere up ahead.
Tater drew the gun from his hip and followed the smell.
The trees opened into a clearing and the world turned hell.
Her bike was down, frame twisted, front wheel was gone. The ground was scorched in a wide arc, trees blackened. Bodies everywhere — Hades Hellhounds leather curled and smoking. Some still moved, most didn’t. The air was thick with the stink of burnt flesh and blood.
In the middle of it, on her knees, was Ren.
She wasn’t moving.
For half a second, He thought she was gone. Then the fire under her skin flickered — a faint pulse of gold through the rain. Alive. Barely.
“Ren!” he was already running. He dropped beside her, tried not to touch the worst of the blood. Her eyes fluttered, glassy.
“Went for a ride,” she whispered.
“Yeah.” His throat burned. “You picked one hell of a route.”
Tater radioed Eagle, voice steady because it had to be. “Found her. Need the truck, med kit, everything.”
He didn’t ask questions, just said, “On our way.”
Tater sat with her until the headlights cut through the trees ten minutes later. The rain hadn’t stopped; it washed streaks ofsoot down her face. She was half-conscious, mumbling things he couldn’t make out. Maybe the dragon, maybe her. Hard to tell.
When the truck doors slammed and the boys came running, He finally looked around again.
Every one of the dead Hades Hellhounds had their patches burned clean off. The heat had done that. Fire precise enough to erase the symbol, not the skin.
