Chapter 2
Marta
“It seriously doesn’t bother you that I’ve been bonded to the Colts?
” I wrapped my arms around myself and followed Tita out her back door to the yard, where chickens clucked happily as they wandered the open space.
My family had lived in this house for decades, and over the years, Tita had turned it into a mini homestead.
She took great pride in growing her own herbs and flowers, and collecting eggs to do her own divination (and make omelettes).
She insisted magic started where you created, and she loved taking care of it all.
Goats and sheep bleated in the distance, and our donkey, Edward, hee-hawwed at our appearance.
Tita spread chicken feed on the ground and smiled as her avian pets gathered to eat.
“It’s the will of the ancestors,” she said. “You don’t have much choice in the matter.”
That didn’t make me feel any better. After the ceremony last night, most of the Harlots had come here so Tita could feed them and celebrate. The Colts declined and instead slithered off to whatever dirty, dingy rathole they’d come from.
“I know, but…doesn’t it make you mad? They were there when Mom and Dad died.
” I didn’t understand how she could be so calm about it.
I’d been boiling from the inside out since it happened, fueled further by this ridiculous connection to them.
I sensed their rage and indignation, and it stoked my internal inferno.
“Lots of things make me mad,” she said. “Foxes getting into the coop. Weeks without rain. Granddaughters who don’t always listen to their grandmothers.”
I rolled my eyes and groaned. “Abuelita, please.”
“It wasn’t their fault, and they couldn’t have stopped it. I’ve prayed about it, and the Virgin has guided me to forgive what can’t be changed.”
I sighed and rubbed the tension between my eyebrows. Praying had never gotten me anywhere. Why was it so easy for her?
“You’re smart, Marta, and more than capable of handling those two.” She turned to the coop and unlocked the hatch where the brooding hens kept their eggs, ignoring their squawks of protest. “You’re looking for someone to be angry with. God, the Colts, fate. Where does your anger get you?”
I bit back my indignation at her arguably valid point, choosing instead to stick to my guns. They’d been there. They could have stopped it. They didn’t.
“But isn’t it weird?” I walked closer to her, holding up the first hen so she could reach under it to check. “No Harlot has ever had two warriors. Why me? Why now?”
“These are questions I can’t answer.” After gathering her spoils from the first hen, she went to the second, checking each egg to see if it was fertile or edible. “But I bet if you prayed on it—”
“No,” I said. “God doesn’t want to hear from me. Neither does Mary, I can assure you.”
“Aww, my darling girl. The sweet Virgin still loves you, even if you are angry with Her.” Tita moved on to the next hen. “She will welcome you back anytime.”
That wasn’t the problem. How could I worship an all-knowing being who took my family from me at the tender age of ten? How could I give my time and energy to someone who made my life so tragic? God, the Virgin, all of them could rot in hell for all I cared.
“That is the nature of faith,” Tita said. “You still have to believe even when it’s tough, even when it hurts.”
I took a deep breath and let it out slowly, considering all that Tita had been through in her long life. She’d lost her husband, her only son, and most of her sisters, and still she remained steadfast in her devotion to predetermined destiny. Everything happened for a reason.
Bullshit.
“And you trust me to go out on the road with them? The Colts? You trust them to look after me, to protect me?”
She hummed and tucked another egg into her apron.
“When I was your age, I went on my first mission with my bonded warrior, a man I barely knew. He was new to the coven, barely battle-tested.” Tita turned to face me with a grin, her bright brown eyes hinting at something joyful and mischievous.
“We hunted down chaos and took out the demon they’d summoned, almost didn’t make it home.
But I put my trust in my coven, in my ancestors.
They’d picked the right match for me, and I’m sure the same can be said for you.
” She touched my cheek. “You’re late for Church. You should go.”
I checked my watch and swore under my breath. I had ten minutes to make the twenty-minute drive, or I’d miss my own freaking party.
“Damn,” I said, giving her a quick kiss on the cheek. “Love you, Tita.”
“Love you, too, mi hija.”
I tried not to ruminate on her advice while I rode my bike into town.
Why was it so easy for her to give her worries to God?
How could she forgive Him for taking so many people from her?
And why wasn’t she more worried about the Colts?
I was. I fretted about it all night and most of the day, and by the time I got to the clubhouse, my hands were shaking with nerves.
I parked my bike next to Bridge’s and got off, ignoring the sinking dread in my stomach when I saw Atlas’s 1964 Pontiac GTO sitting in the parking lot. They were already here. Of course they were.
The clubhouse had been in the coven for over a century.
It was an old Victorian-style mansion gifted to us by one of the Vanderbilts in the late 1800s.
She had been a witch, too, and died without any close heirs.
Instead of it going to her estate, she’d left it to her witch sisters in her will, and it had been with us ever since.
The outside was painted in bright whites and eggshell, but with the gothic archways and pointed turrets, it looked far too fancy to house a motorcycle club.
It had forty-six bedrooms, fifty bathrooms, a bowling alley in the basement, and an Olympic-sized swimming pool.
At its height, it housed a staff of over two hundred people, but those days were long gone.
Now, the Harlots used their magic to clean and upkeep the place.
These grounds were sacred, warded by the blood of countless ancestors before it. As far as magical places went in the US, nowhere was more energetically potent or sanctified.
Hustling up the stairs, I opened the heavy wooden door to the foyer and glanced around at the warriors milling about.
The clinking of pool balls echoed from the parlor off to the left, and the sounds of mingled conversation came from the gathering room to the right.
I took a moment to admire the ornately painted ceiling depicting the founding members of our coven holding hands in a circle before I walked to the room next to the parlor, pushed the wooden entrance open, and stepped into the meeting room.
“Church is in session,” Circe said, banging her thick metal rings on the circular table in the middle.
Whew. Just made it.
“Sisters,” Lilith said, rising to her feet. “Thank you all for joining me tonight. We’ve got a lot to cover, so let’s get started. Lorelei, how are we looking on finances?”
The Harlots’ treasurer reported on our most recent trade deal with the Steel Roses MC in Madison County, Virginia.
We’d started running guns for them in exchange for access to the DC ports.
Next, she gave an overview of the most recent mission to help the Royal Bastards MC out in Helena, Montana. They’d returned the favor times ten.
“Their recent merger with Vanderbilt Holdings has been good for them,” our road captain, Hekate, joked.
Hekate had long black hair and deep olive skin.
She’d gotten her road name because she was a devotee of the ancient Greek Goddess and claimed to trace her heritage back to that same source.
Hekate knew these roads better than anyone else in the club.
The rest of the sisters laughed.
“Gullveig,” Lilith said, glancing to our sergeant at arms. “What’s up on the network?”
Gullveig had gotten her name from the Norse legend about a woman who burned three times on a fire and still lived.
She had long blond hair and a bright, pale complexion, making her look like a Viking shield maiden come to life.
In addition to being our sarge, she could manipulate fire with her bare hands, something that most witches spent years learning.
She took a deep breath and rustled some papers in front of her.
“The Bloody Femmes were seen riding out of our territory late last night.”
Murmurs and gasps of surprise echoed around me.
The Asheville Harlots controlled most of North Carolina, into South Carolina, and Southern Virginia.
Even if we were stationed out of a small town in the Appalachian Mountains, we were responsible for keeping those bitches from sticking their noses anywhere near us.
The Bloody Femmes Motorcycle Club was the enemy of the Harlots and had been responsible for more chaos and destruction than most first-world countries.
They were magic practitioners, but calling them witches would do a disservice to all who lived in harmony with the earth and drew their power from the Great Mother.
The Femmes wielded their power with reckless abandon, using it to summon demons and compel monsters.
I doubted any of them were human anymore, and if they were, they’d long ago lost their souls to the dark magic in their veins.
Not that I believed in light or dark magic—there was only chaos and order, action and consequence.
All magic could be light or dark, depending on how you used it.
The earth, after all, needed both day and night to survive.
But the more a witch dealt out harm, the more tainted their soul became, twisting and perverting until the thing that made them human no longer existed.
The Bloody Femmes had been running rampant up and down the East Coast for decades, well before the Harlots were incorporated.