VICE (Bone Hollow Sinners MC #13)

Prologue

Petra

The kid is dying on my tarp and his cornerman is fucking up the flashlight again.

"Hold it steady, Marcus. Steady. I need to see what I'm doing or your wolf bleeds out in this van, do you understand me?"

The light wobbles, then settles. I'm elbow-deep in a twenty-year-old beta named Cade Whitlow, my fingers wrapped around a nicked femoral branch that's pumping arterial blood up my forearm in little hot pulses, and the flashlight is the only thing standing between this kid and a body bag.

Marcus is nineteen and scared and his hands are shaking, but he's a cornerman, which means he's seen worse than this, and I have approximately zero patience for shaking hands tonight.

"Clamp," I say. "Left hand. Don't drop it."

He passes me the hemostat. I get the clamp on the artery and the bleeding slows to a trickle.

The kid's vitals stabilize on my portable monitor — pulse still tachy, blood pressure recovering, oxygen sat creeping back into survival range.

He's not out of the woods. But he's no longer actively trying to die in the back of my van.

"Suction. There. Good. Hold that."

I work for another forty minutes. Repair the artery, irrigate the cavity, close the abdominal wall in three layers because this kid is going to heal at shifter speed and I don't want anything kinked when his body knits itself back together.

Marcus keeps the light on. He's better now that I've talked him through it.

He'll be okay. So will Cade, probably, if his pack doesn't put him back in the pit before his liver finishes regenerating.

The cargo van smells like blood and fear and motor oil and the cheap pine air freshener that's been swinging from the rearview for two years.

It smells like every other field surgery I've done in eleven years on the circuit.

I don't notice it anymore. I notice when the smells change — when something turns sour, or septic, or when the iron tang of blood starts to thin into the bright copper of arterial bleed.

I notice the smells that mean someone is dying. The regular ones I tune out.

I peel off my gloves, drop them in the biohazard bag, and step out of the van into a Roanoke parking lot at one in the morning.

The fight was in the basement of an old textile mill, which is a stupid place to run a shifter ring because the air doesn't move and the wolves get hot too fast. I told the promoter that two years ago.

He didn't listen. Tonight I stitched up four fighters and almost lost one, so I'd say the promoter is going to keep not listening until somebody actually dies, and then he'll find a new line of work or a new venue, and I'll go wherever the fights go because that's what I do.

I sit on the back bumper. My hands are clean — I washed them with the bottled saline I keep in the kit for cases where running water isn't an option, which is most of them.

I pull a sandwich out of my cooler. Turkey and cheddar on rye.

It's cold. The cheese has gone a little rubbery. I eat it anyway.

The Roanoke skyline is mostly low — a few towers downtown, the rest spread out into the foothills. The lights are pretty if you don't look too hard. I look too hard. Eleven years of looking too hard.

I think about Cade Whitlow, twenty years old, taking his fifth pit fight in a pack that should have benched him after his third.

I think about Marcus, nineteen and scared, who will probably be a fighter himself in two years.

I think about the four names I carry — Henry, Brick, Jameson, and Theo.

The four I lost. Henry was the first. He bled out in a barn outside Lexington, Kentucky, in March of my second year on the circuit, and I was twenty-one and I didn't know what I was doing and I held his hand while he died.

After Henry I learned. The other three I lost despite knowing.

Sometimes the wolf is too far gone before you get to it.

Sometimes the body just decides it's done.

Sometimes you do everything right and they die anyway.

I eat the sandwich.

My phone buzzes against my hip.

The number isn't in my contacts. I open the message anyway because half the messages I get are from numbers I don't recognize — fighters, cornermen, promoters, the occasional pack handler who needs a medic at three a.m. and was given my number by someone who was given it by someone else.

Tournament at Bone Hollow. Three nights. Twenty fighters. Need a medic. Pay is ten thousand plus room and board. Interested?

I stop chewing.

Bone Hollow.

Every medic on the circuit knows Bone Hollow.

The Sinners MC runs the most prestigious underground shifter fighting tournament on the eastern seaboard out of an old mine shaft somewhere in the Appalachian backbone.

Alphas pay five figures to compete. Spectators pay four to watch.

The tournament happens twice a year and it has a body count of zero in eight years running, which is unheard of in a sport where wolves rip each other apart for an audience.

The Sinners have always used their own people.

Their club doctor — a woman I've heard called Jo, never met — runs the medical side and apparently has refused to let outside medics anywhere near the operation.

So either Jo is unavailable this weekend, or something has changed, or somebody important wants me there specifically, and the third option is the one that makes my stomach do something it hasn't done in a while.

I wipe sandwich crumbs off my thigh and type back.

When?

The reply comes in fifteen seconds.

This weekend. A car will be at the Roanoke Marriott parking lot at six a.m. Bring everything you need for three nights of high-stakes bouts. We provide the suite.

I stare at the message. Six hours from now.

I think about my van, parked in a lot in Roanoke, with eleven years of equipment in the back and a body that's been sleeping on the foldout cot more nights than not.

I think about my apartment in Norfolk, which I see maybe forty days a year and which currently contains nothing perishable because I learned years ago that I never know when I'll be home.

I think about Cade Whitlow's pack handler, who is going to call me in six weeks needing his next fighter patched up, and who will find me regardless of where I am because that's the nature of the work.

I think about ten thousand dollars. I think about Bone Hollow. I think about being the first outside medic those motherfuckers have ever let through the gate.

I type back.

I'll be there.

I finish the sandwich. I drive back to the Marriott.

I check into a room I'm only going to use for four hours, shower the blood off in water that runs pink-brown into the drain, and lie on the bed in a towel staring at the ceiling.

My kit is repacked and sitting by the door.

My phone is charging. My alarm is set for five-thirty.

I don't sleep, exactly. I do the thing I do, which is rest with my eyes closed and my brain running through every protocol I'll need for a multi-night tournament — feral protocols, hemorrhage protocols, cardiac protocols, spinal protocols, the protocol for what to do when a wolf bites a human medic, which I have only had to use once and never want to use again.

At five-thirty my alarm goes. At five-fifty I'm dressed, fed, and standing by the Marriott's south entrance with my kit at my feet. The lot is empty. The sky is the color of an old bruise.

At five-fifty-nine, headlights.

A black SUV with tinted windows pulls up.

It's not the kind of car a hotel courtesy van would be.

It's the kind of car that says we do not want anyone to see who is inside us.

The driver's door opens. A man steps out.

He's young — early twenties, maybe — lean, with the kind of restless coiled energy I associate with prospects who haven't earned their patch yet.

His cut says BONE HOLLOW SINNERS in arched lettering across the back and PROSPECT in smaller letters across the bottom rocker.

He has a face that hasn't decided what kind of face it's going to be — boy or man, smile or scowl.

Right now it's set in something polite and watchful.

"Ms. Kazan?"

"Petra."

"Petra. I'm Wren. I'm gonna take your bag."

"I've got it."

"Yeah, ma'am, I know you've got it. I'd still like to take it."

I look at him. He looks back. He's not trying to be a jerk.

He's trying to do whatever he was told to do, which is probably be polite, don't fuck this up, the medic is important.

I hand him the kit. He hefts it like he was expecting it to be heavier, and his eyebrows go up slightly, and then he settles it into the back of the SUV with the kind of careful placement I'd give a child.

"Coffee's in the cup holder," he says, opening the passenger door. "Black. Didn't know how you take it."

"Black is fine."

I climb in. The interior smells like new leather and faintly like cigarettes that someone has been very careful not to smoke in this vehicle. Wren shuts my door, gets behind the wheel, and we pull out of the Marriott parking lot at exactly six a.m.

The drive is three hours. We go west, then north, into the mountains.

The interstate becomes a highway becomes a two-lane state route becomes a road that doesn't have a number, just a name, and then a road that doesn't even have a name on the GPS.

Wren doesn't talk much. He tells me his name is short for Wrenley, which is a family name on his mother's side, and he was prospected eight months ago and he's hoping to be patched by spring.

He asks me one question — how I got into the work — and when I give him the short version (Detroit EMT, bar fight, partial shift, splinted an arm, asked questions), he nods like that's an answer he understands.