Chapter Two
Of course returning to Berkeley was out of the question. The SF’s would either be waiting or would show up soon. My mother lived in San Diego with her husband but even if I wasn’t afraid of imperiling her, I couldn’t be sure that she would welcome me in the first place. And all the brothers of the club, my father’s friends, the men who had helped raise me, were dead or likely soon to be dead.
Except, maybe, one.
His name was seldom spoken. He’d been my father’s best friend since they’d grown up together in a rough Oakland neighborhood. Two tough-as-nails white boys trying to make it out of there alive, they were natural allies.
I remembered Orion Jackson as an impossibly large man with startling blue eyes. He was one of the few Warlocks who didn’t choose to wear a beard but the set of his jaw and the tense outline of his broad shoulders was fearful enough a picture. When I reached back into the deepest origins of my memory, Orion Jackson was there alongside my father. He used to make me ice cream sundaes with piles of colored sprinkles and read me fairy tales in his raspy baritone. Still, Orion wasn’t the stuff of rainbows and butterflies. Once I saw him nearly rip a man’s arm out of the socket for being a suspected poker cheat.
It had been ten years since I’d seen him, since that awful night when I woke up to the rough sounds of a struggle in the clubhouse and hid in the shadows, watching as my father beat his best friend bloody.
I had thought it odd that Orion didn’t fight back. He stayed on his knees and let Crest pummel him again and again. Every once in a while he spat out a stream of blood.
“Take it off,” my father growled and without a word Orion removed his cut and tossed it across the room.
My father picked it up and handed it off to Talon, another original club member. “Burn it,” he ordered. The he reared back and punched Orion so hard a spray of blood landed on the wall next to me.
The man I thought of as practically an uncle rose once more, blood dripping from his battered face. His blue eyes locked on mine and he gave me a terrible grin which haunted my dreams for years.
“Now,” said my father in a voice which was half a sob, “you’re f*cking gone, Orion. You get that? You were my brother. And now you’re f*cking nothing.” Crest turned toward the wall but I could hear the misery in his voice.
Orion got painfully to his feet. I still didn’t understand why he didn’t fight back. My father may have been the leader but Orion was larger, stronger.
Crest continued to stare stonily at the wall as Orion spat a mouthful of blood one more time. The other Warlocks watched with identical pitiless expressions. Orion finally tipped an imaginary hat in farewell and left the clubhouse. A moment later I heard the roar of his bike. He never returned and my questions were never really answered.
“He did something bad, right?” I’d asked Crest.
He only looked off into the distance and nodded. “He did.”
And for a long time that was all I knew of Orion Jackson. He had crossed Crest Tolleson in some way. His punishment was expulsion. It could have been worse. I was under no illusions about my father. I knew damn well he had done more violent things to other men.
Then a few years ago I heard Talon and Crest speaking in low, slurred voices. I heard the name ‘Orion’ and the next day dared a question.
“So Orion’s alive?”
My father’s eyes narrowed and he poured himself a shot. “He is.” Crest took the shot and stared into the glass. “He’s in the Mojave desert, outside Quartzsite, got his own club now.”
“Oh,” I’d said, blinking with surprise that the question had been answered at all.
Crest Tolleson looked me straight in the eye. “Kira,” he said, “I pray like hell this never happens but if you ever find yourself in a spot where there’s no one left to turn to, go to him.”
Mojave desert, outside Quartzsite. Go to him.