Page 4 of Moonshine Lullabies
Dammit to hell, John-Paul, you draggin’ my family into your mess!I thought savagely, but I knew what to do. I was drivin’ for the city – goin’ for the clubhouse, but I honestly didn’t think for one minute I would make it all the way there.
“Think, Jessie-Lou,think!” I demanded of myself.
I shifted gears and picked up speed, but it wasn’t like my little old 1980s Datsun was going to outrun them. One pulled up next to me and pointed a gun at my head, and I ducked and swerved in his direction. I heard the bike drop a gear and disappear and I risked peeking up over the dash to see where I was going. Screaming, I slammed on the brakes, jerking the wheel off to the side of the road and bouncing along the grass shoulder, my little truck leaning precariously in the ditch.
White knuckling the steering wheel, I prayed through gritted teeth, “Don’t go over, don’t go over, don’t go over!”
I heard my son yell, “Mom!” through the speaker of my phone as it skittered along the dash as the truck careened onto its side. The passenger window went greenish-yellow, then dark, as the rich earth churned up past it, as my mirror snapped off and disappeared on the other side of the spider-webbed glass. I was honestly amazed my brain processed that, let alone that I wasn’t being crushed or something else stupid – mostly because I hugged the wheel with everything that I was worth and clung to it like a little spider monkey.
The world stopped moving, and I let go, cursing as my boots hit the inside of the window down below me. I accidentally stomped on my phone, cracking the screen, and watched it go all fuckery even as my son practically screamed, “Mom, what happened? Mom! Mom! Are you alright?”
“I’m alright!” I hollered at him. “Calm down, I’m alright,” I said, as I crouched in the narrow, sideways cab of my truck, which was much more cramped than it had been just a moment ago, looking for something,anything, that would make a good weapon. The motorcycle engines roared up on approach, coming to a stop.
Fuck!
I think I nearly sagged with relief when I heard John-Paul’s voice scream out, “Jessie-Lou! Tater!” and it took me only a fraction of a second to realize that the motorcycles that’d pursued me were going back the way they came. Back to the house…
“Tate!” I cried at my broken phone, just as the damn thing quit on me. I screamed in equal parts rage and frustration. A long loud sound that ain’t worth much in the grand scheme of things but fuck, shit, dammit! I’d earned it.
“John-Paul, get me outta here!” I demanded, and shoved at the inside of the door over my head. I braced my head and shoulders against it and tried to shove it up out of my way with my back, even as metal bent and flexed under the weight of someone or something crawling around up on top of the side of my truck.
“Duck down!” he hollered at me and I crouched with my head bowed, arms over my head as he struck the driver’s side window above me, busting it out on his final try. I reached up, hands grasping mine, and he pulled me effortlessly through the broken portal, my thick and heavy apron taking the brunt of the jagged glass left in the window frame.
“Go, go! Go get, Tater! Go!” I screamed. “He’s at the house! They went back to the house!”
“Shit!” John-Paul swore, and I was passed to another set of hands, a voice rich in timbre and heavy with that smoke that justmm…well, it declared out loud to another, “Take my bike, I don’t care. I’ve got her.”
I leaned back, and he jerked me forward and warned me, “Whoa there, no need to go leaning against the underside there. You’ll burn yourself on the exhaust.”
I looked up at Collier and said, “My son!”
“C’mon, now, I got ‘cha.” He towed me toward a big sleek and much newer RAM pickup and I went, putting one foot in front of the other and going for the passenger side. He let me go and, fueled by mama bear determination, I got myself up into the cab, even though I didn’t feel quite right. Like I was outside myself and the world felt a little off-kilter like. I didn’t know why, but it wasn’t too bad and so I very nearly slapped myself, demanding that I focus.
All I knew was that when this was all over, I was fixin’ to kick my brother’s ass. I didn’t care how much bigger ‘n taller he was than me.
CHAPTERTWO
Collier…
She was unsteady, her light brown eyes wide and dazed and her face shock white and pale, which made the blood stand out on her hands and at the side of her head all the more. She was determined to march forward and get into Hex’s truck in front of us, no matter how much I tried to slow her down and get her to stop so I could get a look at her. It was like she didn’t even hear me. Just kept screaming her son’s name and determined the only way a mama bear could be to get to her child.
I wasn’t fixin’ to stand in her way on that.
She got into the running truck and I got in too and kept right on going the direction the two mongrel mutts had fucked back off in when they seen us comin’ up the road.
We pulled into the front of Cy’s house and before I could even turn the dial to put the truck in ‘park,’ Jessie-Lou was out the passenger door, hit the ground runnin’ and was headed right for the smashed-in front door, screamin’ her head off for her boy Tate.
To his credit, Tate didn’t make his momma wait. He come pourin’ out the front door as I hit the ground myself. The kid was ungainly as fuck, all knees and elbows, reaching for his mom to wrap her up in a hug as much as she clung to him.
I threw chin at Hex, who come out the door and he jerked his head at me to leave Jessie and Tate to their hug-fest and to come on over to where he was at.
“They fucked off,” he growled. I looked past him onto the front porch, inside where Cy was on his burner.
“Yeah?” I asked.
He gave a nod.
“The boy was the priority. He did good. Didn’t come down until his uncle gave a codeword. Stayed quiet as a church mouse up there. Nearly gave me a heart attack, thinkin’ they’d got ‘im.”
