Iron coven

CHAPTER FOUR: The Old Guard

Marcus didn’t find a gun. He found three, laid out on a workbench in the clubhouse armory by a prospect who clearly had orders to arm him the second he showed his face, no questions asked — which told Marcus something about how thin the club’s manpower had gotten if a man three years removed and still bleeding grudges was being handed steel without hesitation.

He was checking the action on a Glock when Reyes found him again, alone this time, no Selene between them.

“You want to know the rest,” Reyes said. It wasn’t a question either. The man seemed to have stopped asking questions and started just naming the things that were true.

“I want to know how a twenty-year-old ends up holding a shotgun on a fire road while a man makes a deal with something that doesn’t have a face.”

Reyes pulled a stool over, sat heavy, the way men sit when their knees have thirty more years on them than their heart does. “Selene’s father — Big Tom Vance, everybody called him — he wasn’t a monster. I need you to understand that first, because everything after makes less sense if you think he was some cartoon devil-worshipper looking for an excuse. He was a man who’d built something out of nothing, watched the DEA come in with helicopters and dogs and take it apart in eleven months, and he was staring at the end of his life’s work with nothing to show for it but debt and dead friends.”

“That doesn’t make it right.”

“No. It doesn’t.” Reyes rubbed a hand over his beard, old habit, the kind of gesture that had probably worn a groove into the hair itself over the years. “I was his second at the time — younger than Selene is now, if you can believe that. He told me he had a meeting out on the old fire road, said he needed a witness he trusted, and I was fool enough and loyal enough to think that meant something good. We rode out there at midnight. The ground opened up the same way it did for Danny — I didn’t know that was a preview of anything at the time, I just thought I was losing my mind.”

Marcus set the Glock down carefully, gave the older man his full attention despite himself.

“It didn’t look like anything I had words for. Still doesn’t. But it talked — or it made something happen in your head that felt like talking — and it told Tom Vance it could keep his club standing forever. No more raids that worked. No more wars that went the wrong way. No more good men dying for nothing. All it wanted in exchange was a name, once a month, chosen by its own hand, no negotiation on who.” Reyes’s jaw tightened. “Tom asked how many names, total, before the debt was paid off. It laughed. I felt that laugh in my teeth before I heard it. And it told him there was no total. That’s not how a debt like that works. It’s not a loan. It’s a subscription.”

“And he signed anyway.”

“He signed because the alternative on the table that night was watching everyone he loved go to prison or the ground within the year, and this was a devil that at least let you choose the order the bodies came in.” Reyes looked up, and there was something almost pleading in it, not for forgiveness exactly, but for Marcus to at least understand the shape of the trap before he judged the men caught in it. “I’ve spent fifteen years hating him for it in the daylight and understanding him for it at three in the morning. Both of those are true. That’s the only honest thing I can tell you.”

Marcus was quiet a long moment, turning the empty Glock over in his hands like the weight of it might steady something in his chest that wasn’t steadying on its own.

“You said you think it can be rewritten,” he said finally. “By somebody who was there.”

“I think so. I’ve spent a decade and a half chasing men who study things like this — half of them frauds, a couple of them not, though I paid dearly to learn the difference. The ones I trust most told me deals like this are built on witnessed language. Whoever stood as witness when the terms were spoken holds a kind of authority the terms themselves don’t account for. Nobody thinks to build a loophole into a threat. Tom didn’t think about me standing there. The thing on that road didn’t think about me either. But I was there, and I heard every word, and apparently that means something, if I can figure out exactly what.”

“If you can figure it out.” Marcus’s voice was flat. “You’ve had fifteen years.”

“I’ve had fifteen years of doing this alone, in secret, because the one time I brought it to Tom before he died, he told me some doors don’t get walls put back on them, and that trying to rewrite the deal risked making it angrier, not looser. He forbade me from pursuing it. I obeyed him for ten years out of respect for a dead man’s fear.” Reyes stood, joints cracking audibly, and something in his posture straightened despite the sound. “I stopped obeying it the night I had to put your brother in the ground with no ground to put him in. That’s when I decided being afraid of making it angry mattered less than the alternative — watching it eat everyone I love, one name at a time, forever, because we were all too scared to ask if forever was actually the only option on the table.”

Outside, an engine roared to life, then another, then a ragged chorus of them — the sound of a club gathering itself for something.

Reyes looked toward the door. “That’s Selene calling church. The Cutlass Kings aren’t going to wait for us to finish our feelings, Marcus. Whatever’s between us, it’s going to have to keep for a few hours. Right now the club needs both of us pointed the same direction.”

Marcus picked the Glock back up, slid a magazine home with a click that felt like punctuation on everything just said.

“For now,” he said. “That doesn’t mean I’ve forgiven you.”

“I never asked you to,” Reyes said. “I just needed you to know the truth before somebody else’s version of it got to you first. Come on. Church waits for no one, not even old grudges.”