CHAPTER NINETEEN
MY MIND IS floating, just barely tethered. Like it’s on a long leash and I have to remember to tug the cord to reel it in, to keep up.
I’m being carried off the stage, suspended in strong arms. My head’s too heavy to lift.
It hangs over my abductor’s arm, and I watch the stage bounce away upside down.
His companion—tall, broad, athletic—paces ahead, hood up, face hidden.
I don’t know who they are—don’t know how to make sense of anything right now, the explosion, these men, any of it—and I strangely don’t care.
I’m disconnected, floating away from myself, and grateful for the release from worry and pain.
The men hustle me away from the noise and light of the airstrip, following the path that cuts through the brush back toward the hangar yard, and the cage. When I see it, I moan. Even in this state of disconnection I remember how cold I was last night; how thirsty. Not this again.
“Put her down,” says the man in front, turning slightly. “Here.” He points to the ground beside the chain-link fence of the cage.
It’s hard to see him from this angle, my head swaying, blood rushing behind my eyes. But the voice slices straight through me.
Damian.
It sounds so much like him. Same sharp edge. Same bossy certainty. And I ache with missing him.
I open my mouth, wanting to say his name, just to hear it out loud, but the man holding me kneels, lowering me carefully, and the ground tilts. Nausea rises and I squeeze my eyes shut, willing it to pass.
When I open them, the two figures are crouched in front of me. Beautiful, familiar faces. I would gasp if I could. They’re ghosts from the past.
I’m hallucinating, I realize.
“Stay awake, Max,” says the one who looks like Jake. He sounds like Jake. The memory brought to life makes my heart hurt.
“Where’s Wyatt?” says the one who looks like Damian. It’s hard to keep my eyes on them, the world slips and shudders, but every time I refocus they’re still there, looking the same.
Ghosts.
A hand wraps around my arm. A voice, tight and urgent.
“Max,” says the Damian one. “Where is Wyatt?”
Wyatt. Damian. Jake. Ryder. Names so loaded with emotion that it’s painful to think of them. Names with power, like spells.
Wyatt.
In the paint booth.
Adrenaline makes my heart palpitate, and I draw in a sharp breath, momentarily clearing my mind.
“Wyatt,” I gasp, panic flaring through the drugged haze. “Wyatt. He’s in the paint booth—”
“Where?” Damian’s voice sharpens. “Where is that, Max?”
“It’s in the hangar.” My voice comes out a whisper. Speaking is an exertion. “Hangar,” I manage to say again.
And then the world turns and sinks. Strong arms circle around me again, hoisting me up. Arms that feel so much like ones that once held me…back when I was alive.
I must be dead. We all are. That would explain the calm in my chest, the way everything feels like it’s been padded in cotton and contained in glass. Why they’re here.
We pass through the back doors of the hangar, propped wide open, gaping like the mouth of a giant metal beast crouched in the grass. Inside, it’s unusually quiet and empty.
The paint booth is tucked into the back corner—a boxy, metal structure built to contain the fumes and chemicals of spraying custom bikes. A narrow plexiglass window runs the length of one wall, fogged with years of paint mist. I try to point to it but I’m not sure if my arm moves.
“Wyatt,” I utter, my voice faltering halfway through.
The ghosts freeze and step back.
Outside the paint booth, Rocket is slumped in a folding chair, scrolling his phone, stationed on watch.
They tiptoe backwards and Jake lays me down gently against the wall, lifting a finger to his lips. Lips that have kissed every part of me. My heart cracks like old wood. I miss him. I miss all of them. But maybe this is what death gives you. One last moment with the people you loved most.
Damian crouches and presses something cold into my hand. I look down to see what it is, the world swimming.
A pistol. My fingers close around it, sluggish and clumsy.
“Stay here,” he whispers. “Don’t move.”
I watch them slip forward silently with a pervasive sense of calm.
Ghosts can’t be hurt.
Damian moves suddenly, quick and sure. His arm wraps around Rocket’s throat. A brief muted struggle before Rocket slumps limply, sliding off the chair to the ground.
Then Jake’s at the door, pulling the bolt back, and with a metallic groan, the booth swings open and they disappear inside.
I’m alone again. I knit my fingers around the gun I don’t know how to use, its solidity grounding.
It’s quiet in the hangar. The paint booth hums faintly from its ventilation system. The sounds from the airfield are indistinct and low at this distance. A muted cacophony. I wait, and wait, and soon the world darkens at the edges, pulling me under.
My mind separates and splinters, kaleidoscoping in a million directions, in infinite pieces. The dull rumble of the event on the airstrip becomes the pattering of the rain on Ryder’s roof on that last night we spent together. His dark brown eyes, molten in their intensity.
You’re not something I know how to give up.
At the same time, my thoughts warping and splintering, I see the strength and fury of him running out the door after me, ready to launch himself at Silas.
I see the bullet burning through the air in slow motion, hitting shirt, skin, flesh, bone, stopping him in his tracks, blowing him back.
How we split in that moment, momentum sliced—me, one way, him, another.
Me, here, back to Billy and the hangar. And him to Valhalla, to the other side of this world. Death and hopefully something beyond.
He deserves something beyond.
Suddenly a flash of light pierces through my eyes, pulling my thoughts together into one single focal point. Damian is there in front of me, prying my eyelids open.
“Shit,” he mutters, his hand pressing my chin upward roughly. “Pupils pinned.”
Jake’s voice behind him. “We have to go.”
“We need naloxone.” Damian looks at me without looking at me, his eyes scanning mine for information. “There’s gotta be some in a med kit somewhere. These assholes get high enough they’d keep that shit close.”
“He’s pulling the van up,” Jake says.
I look up to see Jake stepping out of the shadows with someone on his arm. Half-carried, half-dragged. Bloody. Barely upright.
Wyatt.
His face is bruised, his clothes bloody, one eye closed and swollen. His gaze locks onto mine with something fierce and painful in it. He tries to step forward, to reach me, but his knees buckle, and Jake grips him tighter.
A burst of static crackles from the ground.
A radio on Rocket’s belt.
“Rocket, come in.” It’s Silas’s oily voice, distorted and fractured through the transmission. “Do you have eyes on Max?”
Rocket doesn’t move—but Damian does. He pulls the gun from my hand and pockets it, and then he leans forward, hands under my armpits to pull me up.
“Rocket, respond,” comes Silas’s voice. “Where the fuck is she?”
“Let’s move,” says Jake, breathless. He jerks his head toward the front of the trailer, hauling Wyatt forward a step.
Damian hauls me onto my feet and my knees buckle instantly. His arm locks around my waist, but my limbs aren’t limbs—they’re water. The lights smear and bloom and then my head drops forward.
I want to move, to help, to do something. But my body doesn’t respond. Everything’s syrup. My tongue is thick. My fingers won’t close.
“Shit,” Damian hisses. Desperation leaks through his voice.
He ducks, sliding one arm under my legs, the other around my back, and lifts me. It’s a relief to be carried. To feel his solid strength as the world tilts.
He breaks into an urgent stride. We catch up to Jake and Wyatt a few yards ahead—Wyatt slung over Jake’s shoulder, dead weight too, every step a visible effort.
Our broken procession moves through the cavernous space as fast as we can.
The front doors feel miles away, beyond the yawning stretch of the hangar—vast and shadowed, the ceiling lost in dark steel.
Pools of light bleed from the hanging fixtures, flickering over battered couches and cluttered workstations.
We pass the long bar—race day is the only time it’s ever empty—then the stripper pole, polished chrome catching a pulse of light. The pool tables blur past. The hangar is a ghost town, stripped of bodies but not of memory. The emptiness is eerie.
We reach the wooden stairs leading to the second-floor bedrooms and no treads creak, no heads peer down from the mezzanine.
We’re nearly to Billy’s office, its corrugated tin walls a flimsy shell for the biometric lock welded into the frame, when the low rumble of engines rolls in.
Jake glances back, tightening his grip on Wyatt, and frowns.
The roar gets louder. Headlights flash off the walls in front of us, moving erratically. Damian stops and turns.
Three motorcycles tear inside with Silas in the lead.
They veer around the couches and tables easily, then stop inches from us.
Silas kills the engine and swings a leg down. Dutch and Ray are behind him. Big, dumb, brutal.
Silas’s face is twisted with rage.
“You fucking thieves,” he snarls.
All three of them draw guns, matte black and complicated-looking, like weapons from a sci-fi movie.
Nobody moves. Silas raises his gun and smiles.
“Put the girl down,” he says, almost sweetly, “and hands where I can see them, please.”
Damian lowers me onto a nearby couch, gently, but quick. Then he raises his hands up carefully. Jake and Wyatt raise theirs, too. Wyatt winces. His arm is bleeding through the fabric of his shirt.
Silas steps closer, gun sweeping across them, savoring his power. His gaze lands on me.
I blink up at him. I think I’m blinking.
He whistles low.
“Jesus, sweetheart.” He tilts his head, mock-concerned. “We better get you to bed before you start foaming at the mouth.”
He laughs to himself. Dutch joins in with a low chuckle. Ray just watches, twitchy.