Page 20 of Beast

“And if they do, then we will find them,” I reassure him. “But until then, we need to keep moving ahead.”

Lars leans forward and rests his inked forearms on the table. “And what about Gaston?”

The club knows what he did. Knows he broke the code we live by and not one of them was surprised. I didn’t need their vote to throw him out of the club. But even if I did, not one man would object.

“He’s now a Nameless Man. Let’s not talk of him and what he did. His name is not to be spoken in this clubhouse.”

I remove a baggie from the breast pocket of my leather cut and throw it on the table. Inside is a yellow-white powder. On the outside is a logo of a skull and crossbones, with a bulging eye protruding out of one of the eye sockets. It’s the phantasia logo.Ourphantasia logo. But what is inside the bag is definitely not our product.

“What is this?” Viking asks.

“One of our patrols picked it up from an overdose they came across in Devil’s Kitchen last night. It’s a phantasia knock off.”

The mood in the room changes. Phantasia is our largest trade. The only true phantasia berries are grown on clubhouse grounds. Eaten fresh, they taste like a sweet berry. Added to drinks, they make the flavor out of this world.

Dried and ground up into a powder, they can get you higher than cocaine and give you a better orgasm than ecstasy.

It’s also not addictive. Which makes it more appealing than narcotics and alcohol.

For more than a hundred years, the Knights have sold phantasia exclusively. The formula is a carefully guarded trade secret. Only a sworn Knights alchemist and the president know the recipe, and it’s a recipe that hasn’t changed since the beginning.

Decades ago, a rival gang saw the potential in the trade and decided to move in on our territory. Coke was too hard to get, and the phantasia berry grew wild throughout St. Boniface, so this rival gang brought war to our doorstep by trying to take over our trade.

After we decimated them, our alchemist at the time wanted to ensure nobody else could produce true phantasia except for the Knights and so he spread a virus through every plant that grew outside of the clubhouse grounds.

The virus destroyed the DNA structure so no one could replicate the effects of pure phantasia. It’s kept our recipe pure in the decades since.

The logo on the front of the baggy tells me someone has either reused the bag, or someone is synthetically creating their own phantasia. And it’s deadly.

“Our patrols haven’t seen anyone dealing,” Lars tells the men in the room.

“Which means they’ve missed them,” I add. “Someone is feeding this shit to our townspeople.”

Lars brings his bright blue gaze to me. “I’ve increased patrols, and we won’t stop until we find the dealers.”

Lars is the club enforcer and a damn good one.

Bear picks up the baggy and holds it up to inspect it. “It’s yellow,” he says with a look of disgust.

“And it’s deadly,” I add.

“Do we know what effects it brings on?” Ryder asks.

“I’ll have Opie test it.”

In charge of overseeing our phantasia operation, Opie is an experienced chemist and will be able to pull this fake shit apart so we have a better understanding of what we are dealing with.

“This has got the Psychos written all over it,” says Gambit, our head of clubhouse security.

“That’s what I was thinking,” I agree. “They’ve been wanting into our trade for years. And this is it.”

“But we can’t be sure it’s synthetic phantasia or the Psychos,” Axe says.

“My gut tells me it is. But you’re right. Before we act we need to know who, what, where and how.” I turn to Bram, our tech wizard. “I want you to hack into town surveillance. If the Psychos are bringing this into our town, it will be on there somewhere.”

Bram nods. “It will take some time.”

“But time well spent.”

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