Page 66 of Freak
Thumper smiled back and gave her a squeeze. Mel needed to get with him in private and have a chat about this. It wasn’t a good look to get close to a girl who’d been exiled. She could not be trusted with any kind of secret, and even these days, when the club worked mostly straight and was mostly boring, they had their share of dangerous secrets. Badger would lose his shit if Thumper truly got close with one of the Jasper girls—and he would be right to.
This moment was not the moment for that talk, however, so Mel sent a pleasant smile to Thumper and his misguided choice of companionship, and he focused instead on his own woman.
She looked so beautiful, with her hair loose and her pretty apron, white with embroidered flowers across the chest, still over her flowery yellow dress. He hadn’t had much opportunity to spend real time with her today, but he’d had plenty of time to watch her while he worked security—and in doing so, he’d fallen even deeper into his feelings for her. His love for her.
Abigail was like ... he didn’t know. Like a light source or something. Or a magnet. She drew people to her, and they were always better, sometimes a little, sometimes a lot, for having been in her company. He’d never known anyone like her, with no edge at all, but not because she was a pushover or a cipher. He’d seen her hold her own boundaries firm, and he’d seen her get firm when somebody needed a truth delivered directly. She had no edge because she’d shaped herself that way, smoothed down any rough point, so that she would be a gentle, welcoming force in the world.
This was a woman who had never known a parent. During one of their long evening talks, strolling along the creek on her property, she’d told him she’d been born to an eighteen-year-old girl, a high school senior, who’d simply walked from the hospital without her, called the nurse’s station from the parking lot with a message for her mother, Abigail’s grandmother, saying that she should have had an abortion; she didn’t want to be a mother and her boyfriend didn’t want to be a dad. They drove off and disappeared into the ether of the world. Abigail’s grandmother, Kathleen Freeman, had collected her from the hospital and raised her all her life.
Mel had done some minor snooping and learned that the whole thing had been a town scandal at the time, and that Kate Freeman had been regarded as a weirdo hermit. Abgail had memories of people laughing and calling her ‘Nell’ when she was little, something meant as an insult but lost on her because she hadn’t known about the movie until she was grown. As a girl, she’d simply thought they’d gotten her name wrong.
He thought that was the root of her invulnerability to insult: the first one had failed because she hadn’t understood it, and maybe she’d intuited a defense against such meanness: even when she did understand the intent, she could simply not believe it, and that robbed the insult of every ounce of its power.
What a mighty will she had, to shape herself and then to shape the world around her.
A burst of love shot through him, and he reached out to take her chin in his fingers and turn her toward him. She’d been chatting with Mindy, but he didn’t give a fuck about interrupting that.
Her pleasant smile for Mindy became a private one for him—with a faint cast of worry, too. “Hey, there. You okay?” she asked.
He answered her by pulling her close and kissing her fully.
“Oh my!” Mindy laughed lightly. “Miss Abigail, you got yourself a hottie!”
Neither of them replied, and they didn’t pull apart, but Mel felt the curve of her smile beneath his lips.
“Yes, I do,” she whispered softly, for him only, when they finally closed their mouths. “Yes, I do.”
“Me too,” he whispered over her cheek.
Dom’s voice broke into the moment, firm, clear, and coming from above their heads. He’d stood up. “I hate to break up the four-way y’all’re gettin’ started, but somethin’s poppin’ off up by the fire.”
Releasing Abigail at once and doing a twisting roll to his feet, Mel focused where Dom was focused: at least four men were fighting near the fire, with more headed into the fray. They were only silhouettes, backlit by the orange flames, but Mel made out the shape of kuttes.
Horde were fighting. At the festival. In town. Surrounded by civilians.
Suddenly, one of the silhouettes was either pushed or fell into the fire. Sparks flew into the sky like fireworks when he landed.
“Abs, Mindy, get back, far’s you can—get to the fairway if you can, but go wide around!”
With those instructions and a quick, hard kiss on Abigail’s lips, Mel spun around, and he, Dom, and Thumper bolted forward, toward the trouble.
A shot rang out.
And then the night was chaos.
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~oOo~
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As Mel ran toward thetrouble, flanked by his friends, he drew his Glock and was glad he could. Abigail didn’t love to see his gun under his kutte, so Mel usually went to her unarmed. Tonight, he’d almost taken it off and stowed it in his pack, but he’d thought twice. Wariness had been buzzing inside him all day, like an unattended alarm clock. Though he couldn’t quite conjure the idea that real trouble would happen during the picture-postcard Harvest Festival, he’d kept his piece holstered under his arm anyway.
At the time, it had felt more like a security blanket. Or a talisman. Something to make him feel better, but not otherwise necessary. But at the sound of that shot just now, as Mel and his friends all immediately drew their weapons, he wondered if he hadn’t had a flash of premonition. At any rate, he was damn glad he had his weapon, and he hoped he wasn’t about to have to shoot a brother.
As they arrived at the commotion, Mel couldn’t immediately make sense of the information his senses were collecting. Smoke, spark, flame. Screaming, crying, yelling. Civilians—women, kids, old folks—running in no kind of direction or order.
In the midst of all that, the three charters of the Night Horde were in full-out battle.
