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“Gia took Zelda to my place. Badge just texted that there’s trouble at my place. Danvers came for me!”
~oOo~
By the time the Springfield crew roared into Zaxx’s neighborhood, his yard was already full of bikes and trucks. It looked like the entire club was here now. Patches milled about or strode with purpose, old ladies did the same, and a few of his neighbors were watching from a distance. Trudy, his next-door neighbor, still dressed in her housecoat and slippers, holding Queenie in her arms, stood between their houses, talking to Shannon and Cory, shaking her head sadly.
Tasha’s Cadillac was here, too, without the horse trailer.
Where was Zelda? Where was Gia? What the fuck had happened?
His driveway was full, so Zaxx stopped in the street and jumped out. He ran straight through the crowd, straight to his house.
“Zaxx! Hold up!” somebody, maybe Tommy, yelled, then several other voices yelled the same thing. He ignored them all.
His screen door was held open by the pin on the piston, and the main door was ajar. He pushed into his house and stopped, trying to make sense of what he saw.
On the floor to his left, near his square dining table and matching chairs: a lump of something under one of his flat sheets. Blood had soaked the sheet in a pattern like the peonies that grew wild at his parents’ place. He couldn’t make sense of the lump as a body, so he set that aside for a second.
On his sofa: Gia, stretched out, leaning against her father, who sat at the corner with his arms protectively snug around her, and her hands clutching them like she needed that protection. Tasha sat on one of his dining chairs beside the sofa.
All three were looking at him.
“What happened? Where’s—” He stopped abruptly when he realized Tasha was working on Gia’s bare leg, the thigh bright red and hugely swollen; Tasha had paused in the middle of wrapping a bandage around it.
Then he saw the chunky splash of darkening red on the wall behind the sofa. He couldn’t make sense of everything he saw. Jesus fuck, what had they done to her?
“You’re hurt!” He surged toward the sofa, but Isaac threw up a hand, holding him off.
“Easy, brother, easy.”
“I’m okay, Zaxx,” Gia said, and she did sound relatively normal.
His eyes drifted to the gore on the wall, the splintery hole where a bullet had gone through the cheap paneling. What was that, then?
Gia must have noticed the direction of his attention, because she said, “That’s not mine, and it’s not Zelda’s.”
Fuck! His sister! For the second time in this mess, Gia had so consumed his head he’d forgotten his sister. “Zelda! Where is she?!”
As Tasha opened her mouth to answer, Zaxx felt a hand on his back. He spun around, ready to fight. That didn’t make sense, the danger had obviously passed, but it didn’t feel that way at all. For Zaxx, the danger was happening right now, all around him, all the things he’d missed and couldn’t make sense of, all the mistakes he’d made, all the ways he’d failed.
He’d gotten Gia hurt, too! He was no good for anyone.
Lilli dodged and grabbed the arm that he’d swung around. “Hey, easy,” she said.
“Where’s my sister?” Zaxx asked, striving for calm as hard as he could. He thought of the calming, grounding power of Gia’s touch and wished he could reach her.
“In your room,” Lilli answered. “She didn’t get more hurt in all this today. She’s as okay as she can be.” Lilli shifted her grip from his arm to his hand; she led Zaxx back to his own bedroom.
There was a big bloody smear on his kitchen floor, drying to ruddy brown. Sweet holy fuck, what had he allowed to happen?
~oOo~
His bedroom door was closed. Before Lilli released his hand so he could go in, she said, “Hey,” again and pulled him to face her.
Zaxx was an overwound music box, twisted up so tightly his mechanisms were about to break. “What?” The word came out like a threat, but he didn’t apologize.
Lilli gave him a sad, maternal smile. “I’m just taking this moment to say that what we talked about before? That day by my garage? Forget it. I was out of line.”
He blinked. She was referring to the morning he’d left Gia’s little house. Weeks ago—months, even. When Lilli had told him what a terrible idea it would be to get close to her daughter. How terrible it would be for Gia.
