Chapter 25 Elijah
ELIJAH
For an organization full of supposedly hardened criminals, the members of the Low Country Kings Motorcycle Club with whom I’d had the pleasure of spending time had been exceptionally easy to break. Unfortunately, the two I’d pulled aside for a chat prior to this had very little useful to tell me.
I was hoping my conversation with the gentleman chained to the chair in front of me would be more fruitful.
I’d been away from campus for a few weeks already, and while the administration would’ve loved for me to stay away for an extended period, my beast and I needed to reconvene with our quad sooner rather than later.
We were a unit, always better together, and I missed those lovable assholes.
And I was ready to see my dove again. We had things to discuss.
“Hey,” I said, lightly slapping the biker on his stubbled cheek. His road name was Buzz, according to the ridiculous leather cut he wore over a faded flannel shirt. “Wakey, wakey.”
Milky blue eyes fluttered open. Buzz hadn’t been asleep, exactly, but rather in a bit of a daze.
According to lore propagated mostly by humans, a man who looked into the eyes of a basilisk would die a horrible death.
The reality was less macabre and, in my opinion, much more useful.
If I called the beast forward enough to let him look through my eyes, I was able to temporarily stun all but the most powerful shifters.
Buzz, who I deduced was a shifter of minor power because his defenses were weak and his pheromones tasted of rodent, hadn’t stood a chance.
“Where… where am I?” he asked, his voice a sleepy rasp. “And who the fuck are you?”
I sat down in the second metal chair, which I’d positioned a few feet in front of him. Deciding on a relaxed posture to begin, I crossed my legs and took a lazy sip of my cashew milk latte. It was lavender flavored, in honor of my dove’s sweet scent and George’s scales.
I did wish my python was by my side, but I was supremely glad he’d stayed behind at school to follow Avery around, given the situation they’d both had to handle for Clara.
“You, my friend, are in an abandoned warehouse in South Fulton, not far from the dilapidated bachelor pad your club calls its headquarters,” I said. “My name is Elijah. We met briefly in the parking lot of the liquor store you frequent on Thursday nights.”
It’d taken thirty seconds of conversation for Buzz to slip under, and I’d helped him into the back seat of my Bronco. A seven-minute drive later, and here we were.
He jerked on the silver-laced chains that bound his hands and feet to the chair.
They’d be blistering his skin by now, and in weaker shifters like Buzz, the silver would cut off his access to his animal.
“Do you have a death wish, man? My club will chop you into tiny pieces and bury you behind our compound.”
I rolled my eyes. “Please be serious, Buzz. Your club is a bunch of bored males with minor beasts pretending to be biker criminals. Your leaders are ordinary wolves who want to play at being alphas of a pack. Do I need to remind you what I am?”
I let the beast creep forward again, just enough to shift my eyes.
He reared back and sucked in a startled breath. “Shit. Fucking fuck.”
“Wonderful,” I said with a quick lick of my lips. His fear was certainly hearty, if a little sour. “We’re now on the same page.”
He glowered at me. “What do you want?”
“I want to tell you a story from about twenty years ago, and I’m hoping parts of it might jog your memories.” My backpack was on the floor by my feet, and I reached inside. I pulled out the item that had started me on this crusade a few short months ago.
Buzz’s eyes widened, a flash of recognition on his face before he wiped it all away to look surly again.
My pulse began to race. Finally.
“No, no, Buzz,” I purred, holding up the beautiful dagger so he could get a nice long look at it. “You don’t need to pretend. It’s gorgeous, right? Hard to forget a piece like this.”
The dagger was a double-edge steel blade, a bit dull after a few decades of moldering in the cesspit of the MC.
It’s hilt, though—that had remained stunning.
A light brown wood with intricate carvings of a flowering plant with wide, flat leaves and purple blossoms. The blossoms were inlaid with amethyst gems in a rich purple, while other blooms contained small black pearls that gave the appearance of dark, deadly berries.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Buzz said, swallowing roughly.
“I think you do. You see, Buzz, it was by sheer dumb luck that I happened into a bar last semester with my quadmate, Wyatt. It was in a nearby college town where we shifter students like to go to… blow off steam with humans, if you catch my drift.” I waggled my eyebrows at him, but he wasn’t amused.
Fine. “And one of the human students in the bar that night had a few too many shots of whiskey. He had this lovely dagger out, right on the bar top, and was bragging about how he stole it from his brother.”
Yes, it was a unique and memorable dagger. So much so that the bystanders who witnessed the five seconds it took my mother’s assailant to kill her were able to describe the murder weapon in great detail.
“So?” Buzz grunted.
“So.” I gave him an indulgent smile. “Do you think it could be a coincidence that this dagger matched the exact description of the one used to slit my mother’s throat in the middle of a crowded farmers market almost twenty years ago?”
Buzz swallowed again, and he was starting to sweat now, despite the chilly draft in the warehouse.
“Right, me either,” I said, pointing at him. “So, Wyatt and I had a private chat with this human. He was resistant at first, but we convinced him to disclose the whereabouts of his brother with some gentle encouragement.”
Wyatt had beaten the shit out of him, actually, while I played the good cop. It was certainly better him than me because I’d been a bit blindsided by the sudden appearance of the dagger. Any attempt at controlled violence on my part would’ve undoubtedly resulted in poor drunk Dave becoming a meal.
“And then,” I went on, “a few weeks ago, I was finally able to finagle some alone time with said brother. And guess what he told me?”
Buzz stared at the floor, his jaw tense.
“Yes, you’ve no doubt guessed correctly.
He won this one-of-a-kind, likely priceless dagger off a member of the Low Country Kings in a poker game last summer.
So, that’s why I’ve come calling. I spoke with a few of your…
brothers? Partners in crime? Anyway, they fingered you as the most prolific gambler, and you look to be in your late thirties, which makes you just old enough to perhaps have been around when someone used this dagger to murder my mother.
” I leaned forward and let the beast peer through my eyes again.
“Let me repeat that one more time, in case you’re not grasping the gravity of the situation.
This dagger was used, likely by someone in your club, to murder my mother. ”
He trembled, the terror radiating from him an utter feast. “Okay, okay! Yes, I lost the dagger in the poker game. But I don’t know anything about your mother! I swear.”
“Think harder, Buzz,” I growled. “Where did you get the dagger?”
“I stole it from the chapter safe a few months back. I’ve been, uh… a bit low on funds for my weekly poker games.”
“And you just happened to stumble upon this dagger when you were raiding the safe?”
He hesitated. “Yes.”
I lunged from my chair and wrapped a hand around his throat. The basilisk rose, my vision narrowing and my fangs elongating. Scales rippled up my arm before fading away.
Easy. We can’t find out what he knows if he’s dead.
“Try again,” I hissed.
“Okay! Shit, okay!” He shook in my hold, and he began to babble.
“I recognized it. I’d forgotten about it, but yeah, like you said, it’s pretty unique, and way back when I was a prospect, I remembered seeing the Prez with it one afternoon.
Most of the club was out on a road trip, so it was just me and Johnny Weasel hanging around the clubhouse, being the cleaning bitches.
The Prez and the VP at the time stayed behind too.
They’d been taking some jobs from these rich fucking Primes because we needed the money, but they didn’t tell anyone what they were doing.
It was real secretive shit. They’d come back to the club wearing street clothes, which usually meant they were on one of those jobs.
They were stressed out, arguing with each other about something, but then I never saw them with the dagger again.
So I guess it’s been in the safe all these years. They quit taking the jobs after that.”
I released him and sat back down in my chair.
I blew out a breath and crossed my ankle over my knee again, taking a slow sip of my latte as the beast retreated.
“And where are that President and VP now? They can’t be the current holders of those titles, as those gentlemen aren’t much older than you are. ”
“Dead,” he croaked. “They both died in a crash about six months later.”
That was the least surprising thing he’d said in the past five minutes. “And do you happen to know who the rich Primes were that they were working for? Ever see them? Get a name or a face?”
He shook his head. “No. Like I said, they were real secretive about it all. It was weird at first because this club doesn’t fuck with Primes, but then everyone got over it because for about a year there, the chapter had some real cash.”
“And do you happen to recall the date you last saw the Prez and VP with the dagger? Was it sometime around September 30th, 2004?”
“Uh… yeah, maybe? I patched in back in the spring of ’05, right after the Prez and VP died. So I guess it could’ve been around then.”