Chapter 9
They came with fire.
Sam had called it two hours ago. She'd been watching her ledger—the pattern of Iron Kings scouts running the highway at dusk, the way they slowed at the Basin Star and then accelerated north, timing the response, counting heads.
She'd looked at Blizzard across the counter and said "Tonight" the way another woman might have said "Rain's coming," and then she'd gone to work.
The regulars were gone. She'd sent them south to the truck stop past Sparks with a story about a water main repair, and every one of them had gone because Sam asked and Sam had never lied to them.
Carl was at the compound with Slick watching over him.
The lot sat empty and dark except for the Wrecker bikes parked behind the office and the extinguishers and water cans Sam had staged at every third door.
The killing lane was set. The same funnel she'd built before, trucks replaced with the Wreckers' own vehicles angled across the lot, funneling the approach into a single corridor between the office and the north fence.
Six bikes tore off the highway and hit the gravel.
The lead rider was compact and fast, weaving through the funnel before it could close on him, and in the strobe of the neon Blizzard caught a flash of burn-scarred forearms and a grin that was all teeth and no humor. Cutter Vane. Boyer's example-maker, come to write a message in fire.
Behind him, five Iron Kings spread across the lot like a fist opening. Two of them had bottles in their hands—glass, stuffed with rags, already lit. The flames guttered orange in the desert wind.
The first bottle arced through the air and hit the door of unit three.
The wood went up like paper. Dry timber and old varnish and desert air feeding it, a wall of orange climbing the frame and licking at the roof overhang within seconds. The second bottle hit unit four beside it and the fire jumped the gap like it was running.
"Go!" Blizzard shouted, and the Wreckers broke from cover.
Bustout came out of the shadow by the north fence like a freight train, catching the nearest Iron King off his bike with a clothesline that dropped the man flat.
Viper materialized from the dark behind the office with a calm that was scarier than the fire, intercepting two riders trying to circle the building.
The prospect tackled a bottle-thrower off his machine and the Molotov smashed on the gravel between them, a splash of fire that scattered both of them before the kid pinned the man and started hitting.
Blizzard went for Cutter.
The enforcer had already abandoned his bike and was running for the office with a third bottle in his hand, the rag burning, his burned forearms catching the firelight like something out of a nightmare.
He wanted the office. He wanted the heart of the place—the counter where Sam stood, the ledger, the light that said the Basin Star was still standing.
Sam stepped out of the office door with an extinguisher in each hand.
She threw one to Blizzard—a hard, accurate throw, the red cylinder spinning through the smoky air—and turned toward the burning units without hesitation.
She hit unit three's doorframe with a blast of white chemical spray and drove the fire back from the roof overhang, then swept the stream across to unit four's door, knocking the flames off the frame and buying the wall behind it time to not catch.
She moved between the two fires with a flat, unhurried focus, one unit and then the other, starving them of the seconds they needed to eat through to the structure.
Blizzard caught the extinguisher and didn't use it. He dropped it and closed the distance to Cutter Vane in four strides.
Cutter saw him coming and threw the lit Molotov.
Blizzard ducked and the bottle sailed past his head and shattered against the office wall.
Glass and fire sprayed across the concrete and Blizzard felt the heat flash across his neck and didn't care.
He hit Cutter low, driving his shoulder into the enforcer's midsection, and both of them went down in the gravel.
Cutter was fast. Faster than Dutch, faster than anyone Blizzard had fought in a parking lot at midnight.
A knife appeared in his hand—thin, filed, catching the neon and firelight—and it slashed across Blizzard's forearm before he could get a hand on the wrist. Pain bit hot and sharp and he grabbed Cutter's knife hand and twisted, and the blade skittered away into the dark.
Cutter headbutted him. Stars burst across Blizzard's vision and he tasted blood and Cutter scrambled out from under him, fast as a snake, getting his feet under him and lunging for the office door.
For Sam.
Something erupted inside Blizzard that went past adrenaline into something older and hotter and infinitely more dangerous.
He caught Cutter by the back of his cut and hauled him backward off his feet.
The enforcer hit the gravel on his back and Blizzard was on him, fists working—a right to the jaw, a left to the ribs, another right that cracked against Cutter's cheekbone and split the skin.
Cutter got a boot up into Blizzard's stomach and kicked him back. Both of them scrambled upright. They circled in the gravel between the office and the burned-out ice machine, the fire from the units throwing jumping shadows across the lot, the neon strobing pink through the smoke.
Cutter charged. Blizzard sidestepped and caught him with an elbow to the back of the head that drove him face-first into the ice machine.
The rusted steel crumpled under the impact and Cutter bounced off it and staggered, blood running from his hairline.
Blizzard grabbed him by the cut and slammed him into the machine again. And again.
The third time, Cutter's legs gave out.
He slid down the face of the ice machine and sat in the gravel with his back against the rusted steel and his eyes going unfocused.
His mouth moved. No sound came out. Blood ran from his nose and his hairline and the corner of his filed-thin smile, and the firelight danced across his face and the burn scars on his forearms.
Blizzard stood over him, breathing like a bellows, blood running from his own slashed forearm and his split lip and somewhere above his ear he couldn't feel yet.
Cutter's eyes found his and held for one second—the flat recognition of a man who understood he'd lost—and then they went glassy and distant and the enforcer's chest hitched once and stopped.
Behind Blizzard, Sam was killing the fire on the office wall.
The chemical spray hissed white against the concrete and the flames died back, starved and beaten, and she swept the extinguisher across the last of it without wasting a motion.
Units three and four were smoking but contained—the walls blackened, the doors gone, the frames charred but standing.
She'd kept the fire from eating through to the structure. She'd kept it from spreading.
Across the lot, the fight was over. Bustout had two Iron Kings zip-tied on the gravel.
Viper stood over a third with blood on his knuckles and that calm, dark-eyed patience that said he could do this all night.
The prospect was sitting on his man's chest with a split lip and a wild grin.
The remaining Iron Kings had broken—two bikes tearing out of the funnel and across the 395, running north without their dead.
The lot went quiet except for the hiss of smoldering wood and the tick of cooling engines and the buzz of the neon sign, still strobing, untouched, throwing pink light across the smoke like it didn't know the world had changed beneath it.
Sam walked across the gravel toward him.
She was streaked with chemical foam and ash. Her hands were steady on the empty extinguisher. Her eyes were clear and they found his through the smoke the way they always found his—direct, unhurried, seeing everything.
She looked at the dead man against the ice machine. She looked at the blood on Blizzard's arm and his face. She looked at the smoldering units and the smoke curling into the dark desert sky.
Then she looked at him.
"Let me see your arm," she said.
"I'm fine."
"That wasn't a question."
She set the extinguisher down and took his wounded arm in both hands, turning it to catch the neon light.
The cut was long but not deep, a red line running from elbow to wrist that was already clotting.
She held his arm and studied it with the same flat attention she gave everything, and her hands were warm and sure and the only thing in the world that wasn't burning.
He pulled her in.
One arm around her waist, sudden and fierce, crushing her against his chest with the smoke still rising around them and Cutter Vane dead on the concrete and the Basin Star's walls still smoldering.
She came without resistance, her hands flat against his chest, her forehead against the side of his jaw.
"He was going for you," Blizzard said. His voice came out raw and shaking. "He was going for the office. For you."
"I know."
"Nobody gets to you. Not through me. Not ever."
She didn't argue. She didn't push back. She pressed her forehead harder against his jaw and her hands fisted in his shirt and they stood there in the smoke and the strobing neon with the second of Boyer's men dead at their feet and the Basin Star scarred but standing.
Two down. Boyer still out there somewhere on the 395, absent and furious, running out of men to send.
The cost of this one was still smoldering around them, and Sam's hands were the only steady thing in it.