“You lookin’ to get another hole in you, cousin?” Big Country asked.
Zeus, still healing from the damage a now-dead Maxim Kragen III’s men had done to him weeks ago, shrugged. “I think maybe my woman would have a problem with another hole,” Zeus said. Not ‘no, I don’t want to be shot again’, or ‘no, I don’t want you to shoot me.’
Crazy bastard.
“There a reason you out here by yourself, Zeus, in the pitch of dark…carrying a machete?”
“I’m not by myself.”
Big Country waited a moment, rubbed one hand over his jaw as he casually scanned the trees with the flashlight in the other. “Sabrina out here with you?”
“Nope. Sleeping in our room.” Zeus did smile then; well, kinda. “We liked the gift bag.”
Sometimes it just didn’t pay to try and follow Zeus’s line of thinking.
Already frustrated with everything life had thrown at him tonight, Big Country took a deep breath and stepped backward up the hill. He stilled again, reaching for his weapon as a black dagger with a beaten metal blade, red and black corded material woven over the hilt and black feathers dangling from the end, embedded in the tree trunk to Big Country’s left.
Zeus was rooted in place, hadn’t moved a lick except to begin circling the machete in wide arcs at his side, the indescribable yet unmistakable gleam back in his eyes.
“Who’s out here with you, Zeus?” Big Country asked again, slow and measured, so there would be no room for misunderstanding.
Zeus stopped scanning the trees to his right and locked onto Big Country.
“Death,” he said, then he shook his head as if to clear it. “Cizan. Cizan’s out there. We’re playing a game. You want to join?”
For a second, Big Country actually considered it.
There was a whole mess of aggression churning inside that needed to be released but he didn’t come to the mountain for that. He was here because the man closer to him than his blood brothers had urged him to come to Mama’s House. The forest surrounding the building was technicallynotwhere he was called to be.
Turning, Big Country headed up the steep mountainside.
“It’s human chaos up there,” Zeus warned. “Better to stay away.”
Big Country swung around and aimed the flashlight in the place where Zeus had stood seconds before, encountering only darkness. Senses now on high alert, Big Country pushed up the hill, aware that the two men who had the least-reliable grasps on reality in the Brood were stalking through the darkness around him.
Ignoring his belabored heart, he stomped up the trail, thinking back to what Coen had said when Zeus was brought into the Brood as a substitute for Cizan.It’s like exchanging one psycho for another.
As if Cizan heard and took issue with his thoughts, a spear adorned in the same weave of red and black sailed through the air and embedded in the ground near Big Country’s feet as he crested the hill and stepped onto the parking lot.
“One day, you death-lovin’ son of a bitch, me and you, we gon’ go round and round,” he yelled into the darkness. Thunderous laughter reverberated around the treetops, dogging Big Country’s heels as he made his way over to Mama’s House.
Opening the door, he was assailed by loud music and the sight of Lynx, posted in the doorway like a bouncer, grinning like he hadn’t made an urgent call less than an hour before.
This night was becoming surreal, Big Country thought as he stepped into the bar, which had been transformed into some kind of nineteenth-century saloon with red and purple decorations, and a bunch of dancing women he’d never seen before.
What. The. Hell.
Mama rarely allowed outsiders to have parties in her bar, mostly ’cause the folks who gravitated there were a hair-trigger away from all-out brawling. In the interior of the building it was usually safe enough, but once you stepped outside, there were no rules, no holds barred, no guarantees of safety or survival. Zeus and Cizan were a shining example of that reality.
Nudging Lynx aside, Big Country stepped into the bar and leaned against the doorframe.
“That, my man, is the future mother of my children,” Lynx said over the music.
Big Country’s gaze tracked across the room to the black woman dancing on top of one of the booth tables. Damn woman was built like a brick shithouse. Her rich brown skin with red undertones reminded him of the Oklahoma soil back home. Big Country felt an unnatural urge to sow wild oats all up and through her body, and hell if she didn’t move like she was the original sin that made mankind fall from God’s grace. Unlike the woman he’d brought into his home earlier, this sienna-red-skinned woman had a raw sensuality that only those well versed in the sex-in-exchange-for-goods industry tended to cultivate.
When she dropped her ass low, bounced it a few inches above the table top, then wound all that gloriousness back up until she was upright and laughing with the women around the table, he knew she had to be one of his kind of woman; the kind that you paid to fuck and keep on retainer.
“I think I just came in my pants,” Lynx said.
