All the Rage, Page 26

  that. But since you’ve suddenly turned smart and it seems that you’ve regained your senses, you might want to think about finding her and apologizing yourself. The only reason I didn’t come after you myself was because she told me not to. For some reason, my crazy bitch likes your even crazier ass.”

  “I like her too,” I admitted.

  Bear shook his head and blew out a breath. “I don’t know if I can get used to this new Rage. Gonna take some time, that’s for fucking sure.” Bear paused. “Fuck, I know what you’re up to.”

  “Huh?” I asked, looking around the room at random things, anywhere to keep from looking at Bear.

  “You’re trying to unite the MCs.”

  “I didn’t say that. I wasn’t here and I didn’t say that. But if I were here and I did say that, then it would be a really, really great idea to give each other a reason to not want to kill each other moving forward.”

  Bear scratched his beard and grinned.

  “So…yes?” I asked.

  He let out a breath. “Yeah, but don’t fuck it up. You know what happens when someone crosses me. I don’t give a fuck that you’re a girl, you cross me and I’ll unleash hell on you and Goon,” Bear warned.

  I nodded, his warning did nothing to diminish the pure joy surging through me.

  Bear walked me down the steps toward the gate. On the way, we passed several members who were all cleaning up as if a tornado had touched down the night before.

  A bloody tornado.

  “One hell of a party ya’ll had here. Sometimes you just need a good old fashioned blood bath to get the juices flowing, don’t ya think?” I asked.

  Two brothers walked by, one of them tapping the other on the shoulder and whispering in my direction. I returned their whispers with a sweet and over enthusiastic smile, which quickly had them turning their attentions back to the banner they were raising. With one of them on each side of the courtyard, they pulled down on ropes attached to a pulley, raising the huge black sign so that it would be the first thing everyone saw when they first crossed through the gates. It read THE LAWLESS, MC in bright white lettering, which matched the new patches I’d noticed on Bear’s cut.

  “I’m gonna have to agree with you on that one,” Bear said, taking in the destruction.

  “Oh!” I exclaimed as we reached the gate, clapping my hands together. “There is one more thing I want.” I pointed to the only garment of clothing I ever saw Bear wear besides dark jeans. “I want a cut,” I said, hopping on the balls of my feet.

  “No fucking way,” Bear said with a laugh. He lit a cigarette. “Don’t you think Goon would be a little pissed that his old lady is wearing a Lawless cut? You didn’t want a war, right?”

  “But he won’t give me one, just a stupid little one that says OLD LADY on it, and that’s not what I want. But why not? Because I’m a girl? That’s fucking sexist. I could take down most of the brothers in here without so much as having to touch up my nail polish,” I said, crossing my arms over my chest and tapping my foot on the ground. “Just because I have a vagina and not a dick doesn’t mean—”

  “You having a pussy has nothing to do with it,” Bear said, still smiling, unaffected by my tantrum.

  “Then why?” I asked, furious that although I just pledged to him and his MC, my sort of loyalty, the loyalty I’d never so much as thought of giving anyone else in a professional context, that he would still deny me as a member because of my lack of dick.

  Bear put a cigarette in his mouth, letting hang from his lips as he grabbed my shoulders and spun me around to where my scooter was parked. “Because of that,” he said, pointing to my scooter. “This is an MC, a MOTORCYCLE club, and darlin’, that thing ain’t no Harley.”

  “My apologies” I said sarcastically, placing my hand over my heart and turning back around. Shielding my eyes from the sun as I looked back up at Bear, I craned my neck to meet his amused gaze. “With all the death and destruction going on around here, I kind of skipped over the motorcycle part.”

  “Happens to all of us from time to time,” Bear admitted with another laugh. He shook his head. “I can’t promise you anything. We vote around here now and there is protocol that needs to be followed, but I tell you what, apologize to Thia, and I’ll see what the fuck I can work out. Deal?”

  “Deal,” I said hopping on my scooter. Turning the key, I kicked it off the kickstand and backed slowly out of the gravel lot.

  As I drove off in a loud buzz that was nothing like the roar of a motorcycle engine, but a sound I loved anyway, I could hear Bear’s rumbling deep laughter as it followed me on the wind all the way to the main road.

  For once, the sound of someone laughing at me didn’t make me murderous. Suddenly, my own laugh burst out from me, trailing behind me as I sped down the road toward the endless possibilities the future might hold and a life I could make whatever the fuck I wanted out of it.

  About the Author

  T.M. Frazier resides in sunny Southwest Florida with her husband and daughter. She loves music, reading, traveling, and annoying Mr. Frazier.

  LINKS

  Visit her AMAZON author page here. Join Frazierland, the best group of readers in the entire universe here. Order signed paperbacks here.

  Other works by T.M. Frazier

  King Series:

  King

  Tyrant

  Lawless

  Soulless

  Standalones:

  The Dark Light of Day

  All the Rage

  Coming Soon-ish:

  Preppy, the life and death of Samuel Clearwater

  Other awesome shit

  And now a little sneak preview from one of my favorite authors…

  A psychological thriller

  By LILI ST. GERMAIN

  ABOUT THIS BOOK

  Girl meets boy.

  Girl and boy fall in love.

  Boy accidently almost kills girl’s mother.

  Boy goes to prison.

  Boy gets out of prison.

  And then the real horror begins.

  When Cassie Carlino was seventeen, her world ended.

  The boy she loved was the boy who ended her world; Leo drank too much, got behind the wheel and smashed his car into her mother’s as she drove home from work. He went to prison, and Cassie went to live with her stepfather.

  Now, Leo’s getting out.

  He’s coming back to Gun Creek.

  He’s coming back for her.

  GUN SHY is a psychological thriller, releasing on June 27, 2016. This sneak peek contains the first three chapters. The full-length book will be released in ebook and paperback formats.

  “Will you walk into my parlor?” said the spider to the fly;

  “ ’Tis the prettiest little parlor that ever you did spy.

  The way into my parlor is up a winding stair,

  And I have many pretty things to show when you are there.”

  “O no, no,” said the little fly, “to ask me is in vain,

  For who goes up your winding stair can ne’er come down again.”

  – Mary Howitt

  You would think that when you bury someone deep enough in the ground, you’d be able to keep them hidden. Smooth your shovel over fresh-tilled soil, compact it under your boots, and pray nobody ever digs there.

  But dirt doesn’t let you forget what lies beneath it. It keeps settling, leaving a hollow in the earth, a dip in the landscape that reminds you of the horror encased within. A hollow that demands to be filled until it becomes a mound, rising up instead of curving down. You give it one body, then two, and three, and still it hungers for more.

  Lie down, Death whispers, greedy in its want, a faint rasp carried on an autumn breeze.

  Join me.

  CHAPTER ONE

  I am a girl with a darkness inside me. Carefully placed. Cleverly concealed. A darkness that could devour you.

  One hand on a cold pane of glass, watching the snow fall outside. It’s so pitch-black out here in the
woods, you can’t see a thing. You can only feel fingers digging into your hips, hot and insistent, a tug of hair, a smack of skin, and the snowflakes as they fall through the weak pool of light that the porch light illuminates below. I think he likes it like this, up on the bed, against the window, as if somebody might see. But nobody could ever possibly see. It’s too dark. No streetlights. No houses for a clear mile in every direction.

  Just us, and the silence, and the darkness.

  And the snowflakes, steady as they fall, through that yellow beam below.

  You could never count them all. One blink and you’d miss some. One sharp stab of pain that drives your face into the mattress, and you’d miss plenty.

  And that’s the point, I suppose. You keep counting. You watch the snow fall, and you count every snowflake your eyes can catch, until it’s finally over.

  The darkness wasn’t always there. I was bright and shiny once. There was no tarnish at my edges, no very bad thing that existed inside me. I had a mother, and a boyfriend, and a life, and I was loved. I had plans and goals and aspirations.

  One moment and they were all gone.

  I know what you’re thinking. You think I went mad when I saw Leo being burned alive, or when I gazed down at my comatose mother in the hospital after, as words like Brain swelling and head—on collision drifted through the air, meant for me but headed somewhere beyond.

  Or maybe, maybe, you think it was that first time, on the kitchen floor, a tangle of limbs, mouth pressed to palm, fingers squeezing wrists.

  And every time I’d tell you, you were wrong. That, even as I cried in the aftermath of Damon’s sudden interest in me, I still was a girl without a black coal heart.

  I can tell you the exact moment the darkness burrowed in to stay. I imagine it like some filthy worm, coming up from the earth, chewing a neat circle in my skin and wriggling in. Finding that hollow space beneath my heart, in my ribcage, and curling up. Sated. Satisfied. Warm. I feel it sometimes, when I’m frightened, and my heart won’t slow down. It beats like mad, like a machine gun with the trigger locked on. I can’t breathe. My vision tunnels. In those moments, I imagine the worm, how happy he must be, how comforted by my fragility.

  It’s strange how you know something has happened, even if you can’t remember it.

  When you wake up in your bed, and the sheets beneath you are wet, and you haven’t wet the bed since you were little, a three year old girl who started to cry because she’d slept through instead of getting up and going to the bathroom.

  Eighteen years old, naked, and laying in a cold, wet spot, damp thighs and a bitter taste on your tongue. The taste of a medication you took once after your dad died and you started having nightmares that kept you awake. The bitter pill that your mother crushed into a glass of milk for you, the one that knocked you under and held you there so that you could still see the nightmares in your sleep, but could no longer wake up from them. It was terrifying, and it’s terrifying now. It’s in your mouth and in your nostrils and down the back of your throat.

  You have been drugged.

  Somebody has undressed you, tucked you into your bed, and they have left something inside you.

  A darkness. A coiled, buzzing midnight that becomes all you’ve ever known.

  You don’t like it at first. It frightens you.

  The darkness is where nightmares come to life.

  But after time goes by, you start to feel differently.

  You begin to realise that the darkness you’ve been given is not a burden, but a gift.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Thanksgiving Eve, 2014

  The day of

  I’ve never felt rain like the rain we had that night.

  It didn’t fall from the sky so much as it drove into the ground, each drop an individual missile that indented the earth and turned firm-packed dirt to mud. It bit at your skin like tiny stinging bullets, if you were stupid – or unlucky – enough to be caught out in the deluge.

  It’s imprinted in my mind like it’s still happening now, on a constant loop.

  I smell disinfectant as Clare, the owner of the diner where I’m working, wipes spilled beer off the bar.

  Truck lights flash past on the interstate, on their way through our tiny town, in and out of Gun Creek in fifteen seconds. We have plenty of customers here, but nobody ever stays longer than a meal and a bathroom stop. The truck stop out front lies empty most nights, the once bustling stop in the road usurped by a fancier one up the highway fifty miles or so, with it’s shiny gas station and fast-flow gasoline pumps and sealed parking lot for the trucks to pull in for the night.

  This diner is the most alive part of our town, and it’s dying.

  There’s a storm outside tonight, not unusual for this time of year, but the business it’s bought us is incredible. Dana’s Grill is heaving; I can’t remember the last time I had to seat customers at the bar while I cleared off tables. I overheard a couple truck drivers talking about some flooding North, and I’m guessing the shiny rest stop has been cut off by the deluge.

  I’m handing change to a table of truck drivers when I hear the sound. It’s dampened by the unrelenting rain, the water almost