Chapter 4. The Bike Nobody Touches

Wade /"Atlas" POV

My brother's text came in while I was still sitting on my bike in the back lot, too tired to swing my leg over it.

ELI: Gus's mechanic just came through the gate.

ELI: Come smell her. I'm not joking.

I'd ridden two hours from Larch Creek on three hours of sleep. Eight months of rebuilding another pack's clubhouse after a fire, burying two of their wolves, and listening to their Alpha cry in a truck where he thought nobody could hear. I wanted a shower, a steak and a bed with nobody else's grief in it.

I did not want to smell anybody.

I went anyway, because Eli doesn't joke about such stuff.

The wind was blowing toward the fire, so I didn't catch it until I stepped into the light. Woodsmoke. Brisket. Thirty-odd wolves and their human families.

Then her.

Motor oil and cold air. Clean cotton. Underneath, something that hit the back of my throat like the first breath of a high-country morning, pine resin and rain on hot stone. My wolf, who had spent eight years pacing the inside of my ribs, sat down.

Just sat. Went quiet and looked.

And under all of it, wrong, was a bitter green smell like crushed weeds, wrapped around her scent like a hand over a mouth. As if someone had tried very hard to make sure nobody would ever find her.

Mine, my wolf said.

The bottle broke in my fist before I knew I'd tightened it.

Thirty people watched me drip beer into the dirt. Birdie's eyebrows went all the way up. Brick looked like he'd swallowed his tongue.

I made my hand open. One finger at a time, the way the counselor in Bozeman taught me after the crash. Five breaths. Name five things you can see. Fire. Birdie. Brick. Cooler. Her.

That last one wasn't helping.

"Sorry," I said to nobody, and dropped the glass in the burn barrel. "Long ride."

I knew her face. That was the strange part. I'd seen her a dozen times at Gus's shop over the years: boots sticking out from under a truck, a dark braid down the back of gray coveralls, a voice swearing creatively at a stuck bolt. I'd walked within ten feet of her more than once.

And I'd never smelled a thing.

That bitter green smell. Somebody had been hiding her from noses like mine.

"You're Gus's mechanic," I said.

"Rae Dempsey." She didn't step back, which most people do when I talk to them. She tipped her chin up instead. Gray eyes, ringed darker at the edge. A smudge of barbecue sauce on her jaw. "And you're the guy everybody's been warning me about."

Brick choked on his beer.

"Probably," I said. "I've got a bike in the back shop that won't idle. I've been through the fuel system twice. If you've got five minutes."

It was even true. That was the only reason I could say it with a straight face.

She glanced at Birdie, who was suddenly very interested in her own feet, and then back at me.

"I've had two beers," she said. "I'll look. I won't wrench."

"That's fair."

She held up her sauce-covered hands. "Sink first."

I walked her to the washroom off the shop and stood outside the door while she scrubbed up, my back to the wall, my eyes on the dark. I could hear her humming. Something old, Patsy Cline. Off-key on the high notes.

My fingertips ached. I looked down. The nails had darkened and lengthened, just slightly, just enough.

I put both hands in my pockets and kept them there.

When she came out, she'd rolled her sleeves up to the elbow. Small scars across her forearms, the kind every mechanic collects. A burn shaped like the edge of an exhaust pipe. I wanted to know the story of every one.

I wanted a lot of things in that moment, and I didn't trust a single one of them.

She was holding a flat old tobacco tin, turning it over in her damp hands like a worry stone before she tucked it back inside her jacket. I saw the lid for one second.

A wolf's head inside a pine tree.

I knew that mark. Every wolf in Black Pine did. It was worked into the rusted gate of the empty lodge on the ridge next door, the house of the family that owned the ground under our compound and hadn't set foot in Copper Fork since I was a boy. Judge mailed a lease check to their lawyers every September and said their name the way you do when you're afraid someone might hear you.

Ashcroft.

What was a Dempsey doing with an Ashcroft tin over her heart?

I didn't ask. But I set it beside that bitter green smell, and the two facts sat there together, and I didn't like the shape they made.

The Larch Creek bike was up on the lift. Rae walked around it once without touching it. Then she crouched, put her ear near the cylinders and asked me to start it.

She listened for about four seconds.

"It's not your fuel," she said. "Your cam chain tensioner's going. Hear that tick at idle, under the lope? Everybody chases fuel on these because it sounds like a stumble. It's not. It's timing walking around."

I'd had two mechanics at Larch Creek chase that fuel for a month.

"You got all that in four seconds."

She stood, wiping her hands on her jeans out of habit even though they were clean. "I'll write down the part number for you."

That was when she saw the tarp.

It sat in the far corner, where it always sat, under the shelf with the old tires. Eight years of dust on it. Nobody touched it. Nobody even swept near it. The newer prospects thought it was bad luck. The older riders knew better and stayed away out of respect.

Rae didn't know any of that.

She crossed the shop before I could open my mouth and lifted one corner.

I heard the sound I'd been dreading for eight years: canvas sliding off chrome.

A 1979 FLH. What was left of it. The front end folded back on itself. The tank caved in. The paint, a deep forest green my mother had picked, blistered black on one side where the fire had reached it before I did.

I didn't move. For one second I was back on Route 12 at night, with the smell of burning rubber and gasoline in my throat, my brother screaming and something inside me tearing loose.

Rae ran her fingers along the frame, gently, the way you'd touch a horse.

"The frame's straight," she said quietly. "Look at that. The rest is cosmetic. Fork, tank, wheels, wiring." She glanced back at me, eyes bright. "I could bring her back."

"No."

It came out harder than I meant. Something in the walls seemed to flinch with it.

She didn't. She just went still, the tarp in her hand, and looked at me properly for the first time.

Whatever she saw there softened her voice.

"Whose was she?" Rae asked.

I made myself answer.

"My father's," I said. "He died on it."