Chapter Eight
We’re Monsters Too
Ginger
My car looked the same.
My shop looked the same.
When I looked in the mirror, my reflection was as it had always been.
But everything was different now. Everything .
Last night was a blur. I barely had a memory of making it to bed, but I did remember how the mattress began to spin the moment I laid down. Then I couldn’t find the floor—something that normally would have made me snort with laughter. But after that, everything faded into fuzziness. All I remembered for sure was feeling warm and safe and… loved.
Loved?
Never. The very idea made me laugh, and not in a fun way. I didn’t know what love was, not even in a familial way, since Audrey had been the worst mother ever. There was no way I would have known what it felt like to be loved.
Funny thing, though. Love was exactly what it had felt like. Which was why I had assumed it had just been a dream. I doubt I would have even remembered someone being in bed with me if Tyr hadn’t mentioned the hickey he’d left on my neck.
Warmth flooded through me to pinpoint on that painless bruise where neck met shoulder, now safely covered in a white turtleneck. I’d needed both a handheld mirror and the bathroom mirror to see the hickey he’d put on me, and it was one heck of a sight—bright reddish purple against the whiteness of my redhead’s skin. I thought I’d dreamed about that love bite too, as well as a fever-hot body I’d thought was a wall lying on top me like I was his favorite brand of mattress.
But it had been real.
All of it.
Scarlet and orange leaves swirled by as I unlocked Vixen’s Den and turned on the OPEN sign. There were several facts I needed to face on this blustery October day. One, Tyr had obviously known I’d gone out with Roxie last night and tied one on. He’d been ready to help me deal with the spinnies, and the hangover care package he’d sent told me he knew what crappy shape I’d be in this morning. That meant only one thing.
Tyr was watching me.
I shivered and looked around the shop’s front room as if expecting to see spies lurking in the racks of bedazzled thongs or maybe behind the sequined pasties display. When I’d first moved out on my own, Tyr had assigned a security detail to me. It had been a young prospect, a bad idea if there ever was one, because young guys thought with their dicks. Older guys did too, but at least they had some experience in overruling that particular appendage. This prospect had zero experience in curbing his primal urges, so when he followed me to a movie theater downtown, I easily persuaded him to follow me into a bathroom for a little “fun.” In short order I’d talked him out of his clothes, claiming that it made me hot to watch men undress. Then I stole every last stitch and busted out of there as fast as I could, and I didn’t stop running until I was in Tyr’s office to dump the pile of clothing on his desk.
That had been the last of my security detail.
Or so I’d thought.
The second fact I needed to face was that Tyr had clearly waltzed into my loft like he owned the damn place. Of course, there was always the possibility I forgot to lock the door. After all, I couldn’t even remember how I got upstairs to my bed, so it was totally a possibility. But I doubted Tyr had come all the way out to my loft after midnight on the hope I’d somehow forgotten to lock my door. No. He’d had every confidence he could gain access to my place. That meant only one thing.
He had a way in.
Truth be told, there had been several times since I’d been living at the loft that I’d sensed someone had been in my house. Just a few weeks ago, a book I’d been reading had been left open on my nightstand, with the bookmark wedged in the wrong place. Another time the coffee table had been left slightly off from the heavy indentation it had made in the rug it sat on. More than once, closet doors had been left ajar when I hated that above all things, and always kept the closets firmly shut when not in use.
So many odd moments I had explained away as being too sleepy to remember what I’d done, or doors not latching fully, or having moved things around myself without my noticing. Now I saw these moments for what they were—big, blaring alarms of intruder alert.
My home, my sanctuary, was not my own.
For the life of me, I couldn’t understand why.
Tyr watched over Vixen’s Den. I knew that, but in my mind it was understandable. As the leader of the breakaway Gravediggers, it was standard operational procedure to make sure everything within his territory was locked down and under his control. Anything less would have made him appear weak, and weakness was one thing that could never be allowed in the Gravedigger world. So having a camera mounted on the security kiosk across the street aimed directly at the shop’s front door made sense. My shop was in his territory. It had to be under his protection.
But my loft was a good five miles away from the Gravedigger compound, well away from what could be considered Tyr’s territory. Since I grew up in his uncle’s home, maybe he thought of me as a Colgrave responsibility, but that didn’t really track. Tyr hated everything that had to do with his uncle Hades, including me, or so I’d thought. There was no logical explanation for Tyr to keep such a close eye on me unless…
Unless he liked to watch me.
The genie’s out of the bottle now.
That led me to the third and final fact that I could no longer ignore. Despite all evidence to the contrary, Tyr was hot for me. There. I made myself think it over and over again, trying to make it my new reality, when before all I knew was that he hated my guts for being the weapon Hades had once used to punish him.
Tyr wanted me.
Unless, of course, this was Tyr’s new tactic to muddy the waters for Hades.
That didn’t make sense, though. Yes, Tyr was a masterful tactician, and I wouldn’t put it past him to set me up as a soft target for Hades to attack, only to be there to crush his uncle once and for all. But in order to do that, Tyr would have to be public about starting a relationship with me—making me look like I was all-important to him, and that I was his only weakness.
Yet Tyr was doing none of that.
In fact, the very last thing Tyr wanted was for us to be public about the sudden and highly baffling change in our ever-evolving relationship. How had he put it? Let the world think we hated each other. For crying out loud, Tyr actually wanted people to think we hated each other. That certainly didn’t seem like a man who was eager to use me as bait.
But this sudden change in Tyr’s attitude toward me… I couldn’t understand it. Where had it come from? Was it real?
Did I even want it to be real?
One thing was certain. I couldn’t stand there dithering about it. The answers were out there—specifically, right across the street in an office inside Ride Or Die Choppers. What’s more, the man clearly expected me to have questions that only he could answer, because he’d invited me to come over and see him about them. So if that was what he wanted…
“Hey.” Looking bleary-eyed despite the fact that it was almost one in the afternoon, Roxie crept gingerly in through the door and closed it behind her like it was made of the finest crystal. Clearly, someone still had trouble with loud noises. “I’m sorry I was so short with you earlier this morning, Ginger. Yeah, I was hungover, but so were you and there you were still managing to be civil while I was a total bitch—”
“Roxie, no. Don’t worry about it.” Shrugging my coat back on, I crossed to where she was and gave her a gentle hug. “It was a super-early call and I was in the same boat. I’m feeling much better now, though, thanks to that awesome hangover care package I got.”
“Oh, right. The package.” With her fine brows pulling together, Roxie hung her coat up near the door and ventured around the counter to log in to the register. “What was the story behind that?”
“I… really can’t say.” At the last second caution overrode the need to share, mainly because I knew just how awful Hades and his tactics could get. On the off-chance he ever got a hold of my friend, he’d soon find out she knew absolutely nothing that could boomerang back to Tyr. In fact, the less Roxie knew, the safer she would be. “The dark sunglasses and the box of Alka Seltzer were a huge hit with me.”
“Oh my God.” Roxie stared at me with big eyes. “Are you telling me you got something delivered to you by someone you don’t know… and you ingested some of it anyway?”
“All that lovely tamper-resistant packaging was good enough for me.”
“Yeah, but there are still ways around that sort of thing. What if it was that Hades stepdaddy asshole you’ve told me so much about? What if he’d decided to poison you?”
Oy . “It wasn’t Hades.”
“You don’t know that.”
Yes, I did. “Roxie, I took it at eight this morning and I’m feeling great. See?” I did a little pirouette to give her the full view. “This is me, rocking my post-hangover look, totally not poisoned and feeling like a world-beater.”
“Well…okay. So who sent it?” Still looking doubtful, Roxie crossed her arms. “Who even knew you went out drinking with me last night? Was it Misty?”
“No.”
“You say that like you know. Oh! Because you do know,” she gasped with a clap of her hands, only to groan and put a hand to her brow. “You do know who sent you that care package, don’t you? That’s why you felt it was safe enough to take the Alka Seltzer. So who did it? Who sent it to you?”
“Like I said, I can’t really talk about it, and I’m certainly not going to spend another second worrying about it.” I made a beeline for the door just as it opened and a trio of college-aged women came in on a wave of happy chatter. “I have to go across the street, but I’ll be back.” With a quick wave, I headed out before Roxie could say another word. Work was important, of course. But at the moment I had other fish to fry.
The wind rolling off Lake Michigan held the first true breath of the coming winter, and with a grateful sigh I at last ducked inside the warm and welcoming showroom of Ride Or Die Choppers. A familiar face messing around with some boxes drew my attention, and I changed course to head for her.
“Shiloh! Girlie, it’s been forever.” I flung my arms around Shiloh Valentine, Romeo’s stunning, pocket-sized goddess of a wife and Ride Or Die’s frightfully efficient office manager. With golden brown curls halfway down her back, grass-green eyes and an adorable baby bump rounding out the overall look, Shiloh had come into the Gravedigger world and instantly owned it like the queen she was. “Why don’t you ever pop into Vixen’s Den?”
“Because seeing all those sexy outfits right now would just make me feel like a beached whale.” Laughing and clearly delighted with her “whale” status, she smoothed an absent hand over her bump. “Did you come over to help us with the Halloween decorating?”
“Us?”
As if on cue, Misty, Mabel, and Mabel’s man Ashtray exited Misty’s office. While Misty was the latest iteration of the proverbial blonde bombshell, Mabel was definitely last generation’s model, and she was still working it for all her glorious fifty-something worth. She cut quite the figure in skinny jeans, fringed boots, a leather cut that told the world she was Ashtray’s property, and impossibly platinum hair piled high on her head. Generally she played mother hen to all the Gravediggers’ biker babes, and it was up to her if a woman made it or not in this highly cloistered and exclusive world.
“Hey there, stranger.” Mabel lit up before tackling me in a huge hug. My bones were still groaning when she backed far enough away to beam at me. “Been waiting on you to send us our invitation to your Halloween birthday bash, but so far we’ve got nothing. Have you forgotten us?”
“Mabel, nobody could ever forget you and Ashtray.” I bent to give her man Ashtray a quick hug in his wheelchair, happy to see he looked bright and chipper despite having been shot in the back last January by Hades’s cowardly son, Marvel. “No one’s gotten an invitation because I’m not throwing a party this year.”
“Girlfriend, I’m not sure that’s even allowed.” Misty stepped up for her own hug, all the while giving me a reproachful look. “Your birthday also happens to be our friendiversary.”
I blinked. “Friendiversary? Is that a thing?”
“Of course it is! Hallmark makes cards for it and everything.”
“Oh, well, if Hallmark makes cards for it…”
Misty rolled her spectacularly made-up eyes. “I first met you at your birthday party when Lasso and I were dating. That was two kids and one mortgage ago, and in all that time you’ve never missed throwing a birthday bash. What gives?”
“I’ll bet it’s that fucking asshole Hades.” Ashtray’s whole face wrinkled, like he’d just taken a big swig of sour milk. “It’s because of the war, isn’t it, Ginge? I tell you what, that cocksucker ruins everything.”
“Guys, it’s not that deep, and for once Hades has nothing to do with ruining my fun. I’m just not feeling it this year, because twenty-nine is a scary number, and I’m not looking forward to the last year I have before I hit the big three-oh.”
“Seriously?” Mabel stared at me while Shiloh looked up from untangling orange and black garland to gape at me. “You’re not throwing the best costume party of the year… because you’re feeling old?”
“Not feeling old, Mabel. I am old. Too old to party like I’ve got my whole life ahead of me, because that’s not really the case anymore.” Then, when I heard how self-pitying that sounded, I waved a dismissive hand. “Don’t worry about it, okay? It’s no big deal. I’ll probably go twice as big for my birthday next year. But with Hades and his psycho wolves howling at the door, it’s probably for the best I’m giving it a skip this year.”
“See? I knew it was Hades and not that other bullshit about getting old.” In true Ashtray form, the big biker skipped over all the things that didn’t have to do with his personal opinion, and shrugged his beefy shoulders. “I don’t know why you women don’t listen to me more often. I know what the fuck I’m talking about, and damned if I’m not always right. Honestly, it’s a burden.”
“That’s my man,” Mabel said proudly, giving his hand a quick squeeze. “You tell Ginger how wrong she is, baby.”
“Ginger, you’re wrong,” Ashtray parroted dutifully, and even as I bit my lip to keep from grinning, I saw Shiloh hide her gentle laugh by turning toward the decoration boxes. “Now is the time to go full throttle—drink harder, fuck harder, brawl harder and live harder than ever before. Hades ain’t the boss of us. He has fuck-all influence on every last person standing on Gravedigger ground, and we prove that shit to him and his dumbass crew of flesh-eating mutants by living as large as we can.”
“Flesh-eating mutants? Ew, Ash.” Shiloh paused in pulling out a giant-sized Grim Reaper whose cloak seemed to be about as big as a parachute. “Now there’s a phrase that’ll turn a preggo lady’s stomach.”
“Thing is, it’s true.” Mabel’s smoky voice dropped to a stage whisper, and we all moved in closer, not wanting to miss a single delicious drop of tea. “Hades has a psycho guy on his crew—all his teeth have been sharpened to points so he can eat the faces off of his victims.”
“I’m so gonna barf,” Shiloh said faintly, and she did look pale, poor girl. “But I wouldn’t put too much stock in that, Mabel. It almost sounds like an urban legend.”
“No, it’s real, Shy girl. Guy goes by the name of Pirahna,” Ashtray whispered, tapping the side of his nose. “Though you didn’t hear that from me. That’s club business.”
Good grief, Ash . “I remember Pirahna,” I said after a moment. “Weird dude, and that’s putting it politely. He’d been one of those boot-licking, shit-sucking types of prospects that never would have made it in Odin’s Chicago Gravediggers. But the moment Hades took over, this Pirahna guy got patched in and called up to be one of Hades’s lieutenants. Really liked to hang around me and my little friends as we’d walk home from school. Middle school, to be precise.”
Misty sent me a cringing look. “Oh, no. Really?”
“Yep. I’ll never forget the time Pirahna offered me twenty bucks to jump rope in my pleated-skirt school uniform without any panties on. I was twelve.”
“Jesus fucking Christ, now he has to die.” Looking so furious I half-expected him to leap out of his wheelchair, Ashtray’s barrel chest heaved like a bellows. “You have to tell Tyr about that, honey. It’ll light a fire under everyone if they know what Pirahna really is.”
“It happened a long time ago, Ash. I screamed and got myself out of that situation, so no worries.” Though I couldn’t help but wonder how many other little girls hadn’t been so lucky.
“At this juncture I’ve got to say it seems kind of silly, putting up plastic monsters for Halloween.” Shiloh frowned at the oversized Grim Reaper in her hands. “The scary truth is, we’ve got real boogeymen lurking all around us, and they’re ready, willing and able to destroy as many Gravedigger lives as they can.”
“Because that’s what real monsters do,” Misty added, hugging herself as if suddenly freezing. “They hide in human skin, and when you least expect it— bam . You’re toast.”
Okay, I had to turn this doom-and-gloom bus around, fast. “Yeah, there are monsters all around us, but so what? We’re monsters too, and that’s why we’re going to go balls-to-the-walls on decorating for Halloween, and we’re going to use all the monsters we can dig up, because we are scarier than all of Hades’s boogeymen combined.”
“And you’re going to rethink that no birthday party idea?” Mabel added, eyes brightening.
“Mabel, it’s less than two weeks away.”
“Who cares? We’ll help pull it all together. It’ll be great.”
Oh, what the hell. “Okay, I’ll rethink that no birthday party idea. But first I do need to clear something up with Tyr. Is he in?”
“’Fraid not, honey.” Misty shook her brilliant blonde head. “He tore out of here shortly after opening and hasn’t been back.”
Shortly after opening . That meant shortly after our conversation. Ugh, typical. Stupid Tyr invited me to come see him, only to pull a disappearing act five seconds later. Swear to God, that man was about as reliable as a leaky rowboat in the middle of the ocean.
“Well then, let me just text Roxie to let her know she’s got the shop for this afternoon while we get the Halloween spirit kicked off right.” And I waited for Tyr to make an appearance.
With so many helping hands, it took only a couple hours to get the cavernous showroom looking festive. The most time-consuming part was messing around with the synthetic cobwebs, stretching it out so that it looked like actual webs instead of pillow stuffing. At long last, the scene looked appropriately scary in the two display windows out front, which already displayed a Ghost Rider themed bike, along with a chrome-covered chopper whose body seriously resembled the creatures in the Alien movies.
The black and orange garlands edged all the walls, and every door got covered in either bloody handprint decals or yellow caution tape. After digging through the decoration boxes and finding a stuffed leg with a fussy-looking loafer attached, Ashtray insisted it had to go somewhere. Since putting it on the floor created a tripping-slash-lawsuit hazard, we finally decided to have it peeking out of one of the display saddlebags. Every time Ashtray looked at it, he got the case of the giggles, and that got the rest of us going.
All that was left was the oversized Grim Reaper with its oceans of black gauzy fabric, a decoration that was clearly meant to hang from an either very tall ceiling or tree. Ride Or Die clearly had the ceiling for it, so Misty sent off a quick text to her husband Lasso, hard at work in the fabrication shop out back. Within minutes Lasso had a large, freestanding ladder in the showroom. He then gave us all a quick lecture on safety—and wrenched a promise from his wife that she wouldn’t be going up because she was “terminally clumsy”—before hurrying back to the shop where he had a piece of material “in the oven,” whatever that meant. Since neither Shiloh nor Ashtray could manage a ladder in their conditions and clearly Misty would be a disaster going up, I volunteered to put the decoration we were now calling “Grimmy” where he belonged.
After digging through the detritus of the decoration boxes, Mabel found a roll of fishing line and immediately made a bunch of loops on Grimmy’s main body and black gauze train. Misty snagged a box of heavy-duty paperclips from her office to be used as hooks, and after a brief discussion on placement and how to affix the hooks onto the acoustical tile framework overhead, we moved the ladder to where Grimmy would go—fifteen feet or so from the main entrance, directly over the wide center aisle cutting through the heart of the showroom.
It was going to look epic.
Mabel and Misty secured the ladder at the base while I kicked off my high-heeled boots, since even I recognized that tall ladders and sexy high heels didn’t mix. Getting Grimmy up the ladder took some doing. First I tried hauling him up by myself but nearly died when my sock-covered feet got tangled up in the black gauzy train. Then Shiloh neatly twisted the train into a manageable snake of fabric and held it out of my way while I carried Grimmy’s lightweight plastic body up with ease.
Clearly, that old saying was true—teamwork made the dream work.
Finally I perched on top of the ladder. Okay, so far, so good. Taking care not to look down, I reached into my pocket for some paperclips already bent into sturdy hooks, threaded the fishing line loops through the makeshift hooks, then carefully reached up to the ceiling tile framework. Almost there…
Success!
“What the hell are you doing?”