Chapter 3: Blackthorn

Selene 

The garage always felt different at night, as if once the sun had gone and the shutters came halfway down, it stopped pretending to belong to the rest of the world and remembered what it really was. In the day it was engines split open beneath fluorescent light, voices raised over tools and radios, men in stained shirts leaning into the guts of machines as though everything in life could be solved with pressure, heat, and the right wrench. It smelled of oil, metal, rubber, solvent and sweat, all of it honest enough in its own way. But at night, when the floodlights threw white glare over the yard and the barrel fires spat orange at the edges, another layer rose through it all. Smoke. Blood. Burnt meat. Something older, something greater. The place became less a garage than a den in disguise.

There were perhaps thirty of us in the yard that night, not in any formal circle, because Blackthorn life rarely worked like that, but in clusters and loose lines and instinctive arrangements; it was the structure that we were drawn to, that we needed. Some leaned against vans or stacks of tyres, paper plates in hand, tearing into strips of barbecued venison while grease shone on their fingers. Some stood by the fires, shoulders turned toward warmth and conversation alike. Others hung at the edges, watchful without seeming isolated, the younger ones more restless in their bodies, the older ones wearing that unnerving stillness we carried so naturally and outsiders so often mistook for coldness, awkwardness, or some damage they didn’t understand. I could smell all of it. The char of meat, the wet mineral note of blood still lingering faintly in the marrow, woodsmoke caught in fabric, male sweat, female skin, old concrete, motor oil, heat. Underneath all that, quieter but no less real, mood moved through us like another kind of weather. Curiosity. Irritation. Hunger. A low thread of unease. All of it present before anyone said a word about why we had gathered.

That was how Blackthorn life always was. Speech mattered, of course, but not in the way it mattered to others. Outsiders trusted mouths too much. They said things they did not mean and expected one another to ignore the body while they were doing it. We didn’t have that luxury. We knew too much about one another all the time. The set of someone’s shoulders, the angle of their jaw, the pace of their breathing, the scent they gave off under stress or attraction or resentment, all of it was legible if you were paying attention. Sometimes it made things feel safer than anything else in the world. Sometimes it made privacy feel like a story told to children.

I stood near one of the barrel fires with my arms folded loosely across my chest, letting the heat kiss the fronts of my thighs while the cold worked quietly at my back. I had come straight from the gym, still in leggings, boots, and an old dark hoodie thrown over my sports bra, my hair tied high until the pull of it at my scalp had become irritating enough to demand my attention. I tugged the band loose and let my hair spill over my shoulders in one long red wave, and immediately I felt the subtle little flicker of attention that followed. A pause in somebody’s sentence. A second glance not quite hidden. Nothing dramatic. Nothing unusual. Just the small tax of being visible.

My father stepped out from the garage then, and the yard changed around him in the way it always did. Not abruptly, not with any theatrical announcement, but in that deep instinctive way that belonged to us more than words ever would. Bodies shifted. Conversations thinned. Heads turned. Even the fire seemed louder for a second in the gap left behind. Garrick Blackthorn did not need to call a group to order. He had carried us for too long, bled too much for us, and stood too often between Blackthorn and collapse for anyone present not to feel him before he spoke.

Despite the age settling harder into him now, he remained the one we all looked to, the one we all respected and obeyed. He was broad and heavy through the shoulders and chest, the old strength still obvious beneath the wear, as if time had added weight rather than taken force away. His grey hair was cropped short and practical. The scar above his eyebrow caught the firelight pale and clean against a face roughened by weather, violence and grief. His jaw still looked dangerous when it set. Smoke clung to him as it always did, cigar and ash worked so deeply into my sense of him they had become part of my father’s shape in my head. There were days I could smell the years on him too; not weakness exactly, never that, but wear. The slow turn after standing too long. The faint stiffness he thought nobody noticed. The quiet truth of a body that had spent too long carrying too much and knew it would one day have to put some of it down. And because he was my father, because I had spent my life measuring safety by the breadth of him, that truth landed in me harder than I ever let show.

“You’ve all seen the reports,” he said.

No one answered immediately, but the air told the truth. Of course we had. Even those who pretended not to care about the news cared when too much blood made it into the wrong headlines. Animal attacks. Bodies torn open. Witnesses babbling nonsense into cameras. The outsiders never saw clearly, not really, but they were clumsy enough to stumble close to danger every now and then.

Dad let the silence sit for a breath longer.

“Three incidents in as many weeks. Two dead. One alive enough to talk shit.”

That drew a few low laughs. Tight ones. Quick. The kind of laughter that skimmed over nerves rather than eased them.

“Could be a lone wolf,” someone said from the left.

“Not local” came another voice.

“Could just be gangs doing what they do and blaming it on anything with teeth.”

A few more chuckles. Somebody muttered agreement around a mouthful of meat.

Then from nearer the back: “Greyfen maybe.”

That one got a proper reaction.

A laugh broke first, then another, then a little flare of amusement moved through the yard. Someone by the grill snorted outright. “Greyfen? What, did they find a dusty old prophecy and beat someone to death with it?”

“They’d write you an essay before they bit you.”

“History bores. They care more about dead blood than living bodies.”

Even I smiled at that, though it was unfair in its own way. Greyfen were odd, or at least odd by our standards. Too quiet. Too studious. Too interested in old records, hidden texts, bloodline whispers and the kind of buried truth most of us only cared about when it became useful. If Blackthorn lived in the body of the present, Greyfen seemed half in love with the bones of the past.

“No,” my father said.

He didn’t raise his voice, but the laughter dropped away anyway.

“Greyfen keep to themselves. They don’t make this kind of noise.”

Something in his tone sharpened the mood at once. You could feel it move through us, a quiet tightening of muscle and breath. The smell shifted too. Less amusement now. More attention. More edge. Someone stopped chewing. Someone else straightened without meaning to. Somewhere near the vans a plate hit metal with a small, ugly clatter no one acknowledged.

Nobody wanted to say the name.

That was how I knew exactly which name it would be.

“Red Maw,” someone said at last.

The whole yard changed.

It is difficult to explain exactly what it feels like when a name alone can alter the atmosphere of a place, but all of us know it. It is almost physical. A tightening through the body. A drop in sound that is not silence, but something more alert than silence. A narrowing. I felt it move through me immediately, cold and familiar. Around me the others had gone still in that instinctive way that means attention has sharpened into readiness. I looked to my father and saw the old darkness shift across his face, subtle enough that others might have missed it, but I knew him too well. Red Maw was not just another pack to him. It was history. Blood. The smell of loss that never quite leaves a life once it has entered it deeply enough.

My mother’s death sat between Blackthorn and Red Maw like an old open wound that had scarred badly and never stopped hurting underneath.

“Maybe,” my father said, and that quiet maybe carried more weight than anybody else’s certainty could have done.

Red Maw were filth. Not because they were rivals. Not even because they were violent. Any of us could become violent under the right pressure. No, what made them rotten was that there was no shape to their hunger anymore. No discipline. No clean line beneath it. Drugs moved through them like sickness. They were weak, vicious, exiles, the sort who could not hold themselves together inside any honourable structure, all of them drifted there sooner or later. They traded with outsiders more carelessly than they should. They killed when it was useful and sometimes, it seemed, when it simply amused them. Something too eager. Even when you couldn’t see them, you felt the stain of them.

My father looked slowly around the yard, pinning us all one by one with his gaze.

“Blackthorn do not kill needlessly.”

He said it like law, like prayer, like memory. The sort of truth repeated so often it had become part of the pack’s spine.

“We do not go charging across territory because a story on the news makes some of you boys feel restless. If this is Red Maw, and I am saying if, what I want first is information.”

Nobody spoke. Nobody was stupid enough.

“Rumours. Movement. Patterns. Who’s buying. Who’s travelling. Who has been seen near our edges. Which names keep coming up. Which little mutts are suddenly flush or suddenly vanished. You listen. You smell. You ask questions quietly. You do not retaliate because you are bored or because you think blood will make you look brave.”

He let that sit, and this time his gaze settled, briefly but very deliberately, on a couple of the younger males near the back. One of them had the grace to look faintly ashamed.

“If Red Maw are moving, I want to know why before anyone here gets us all dragged into their mess by acting on instinct alone. If this is spreading into our territory, then we are already later than I’d like.”

That landed harder. I could feel it in the yard at once. Not just tension now, but urgency. A current running under the stillness. Heads turning fractionally. Thoughts moving faster. Somewhere beyond the yard walls a siren rose and died again, distant and thin, and for one strange second it seemed to sharpen everything rather than belong to another world.

There was a low murmur of assent then, running through Blackthorn like another current under the smoke. Around me bodies began to shift, not into action yet, but into that tense intermediate state between stillness and movement. Readiness. The sort of posture that says the meeting may be ending, but the real work is only just beginning.

I watched my father as he stepped down from the low bench he had half-used as a platform. For all his steadiness, for all the force still in him, there was a heaviness tonight that made something tighten inside my chest. Perhaps it was only memory. Perhaps it was age. Perhaps the one had become impossible to separate from the other. He had held us all together for years through things many of the younger ones barely understood, and somehow seeing him there in the firelight, still strong, still carrying us, made the truth of time feel sharper rather than softer. One day, someone else would stand where he stood. One day we would look to another in that same instinctive, unquestioning way.

The thought always left a sour taste in my mouth.

I felt my attention slide, as it often did, toward Lucas.

He stood not far from my father, arms folded, his face half-shadowed by the angle of the lights, listening with that hard stillness of his that always made him seem slightly set apart from the others, even when he was standing in the middle of them. He was tall and broad without looking showy about it, physically grounded in a way that made other men seem restless by comparison. Dark hair hung loose to his shoulders, shoved back carelessly but already slipping forward again at one side. His eyes caught the light with that strange sharp gold they carried, not bright enough here to be unnatural, but difficult to look at for too long all the same. He had a hard masculine face, strong jaw, heavy brows, straight nose, a mouth better suited to severity than easy smiles. And the rest of him matched it. Thick neck. Broad shoulders. Powerful forearms. Rough mechanic’s hands. The kind of body built by labour rather than performance. Even standing still, he looked as though he contained more force than he had any need to show. He was handsome, yes, but in that infuriatingly simple way some men are handsome because they make competence look like a physical trait.

Around him, even now, I could feel that faint inevitable current that had attached itself to him years ago. Lucas as the most likely successor. Garrick’s natural continuation, despite no blood between them. We all sensed it on him already. Or perhaps they sensed what they wanted and called it fate.

He made sense. That was half the problem.

Everything about the idea of Lucas and me made sense. He was strong. Respected. Controlled. He would steady us when my father could no longer do it. A bond between us would make the transition cleaner, quieter, more legitimate in the eyes of those still clinging too tightly to symbols. Garrick’s daughter with the strongest male. Blackthorn joined neatly to Blackthorn, as if lives were merely pieces to be aligned for structural stability.

And yet, standing there watching him in the smoke and the firelight, all broad masculinity and contained force, I felt that old dissatisfaction stir beneath the surface of me. Not because he was lacking. He wasn’t. Not remotely. He was everything he ought to be. But Lucas had never known how to feed the thing in me that was always hungry. He looked at me with respect. With care, even. With awareness. But never with that small greedy warmth that says I see you and I want you and I am glad you are here. He made me feel important in the way structures are important. Necessary. Sensible. Significant. I did not want to be sensible. Not always. Not in the deeper parts of me.

I wanted, shamefully, to be wanted.

The meeting loosened then into smaller knots of conversation, but not with any real ease. Names started moving through the yard. Who knew which dealers. Who had seen unfamiliar men in clubs or bars. Who might ask questions without drawing the wrong kind of attention. The young ones clustered fast, eager in that way youth often is when danger is still half exciting. The older ones spread more slowly, speaking lower, wearing concern with less obviousness. The air had changed too much now for anyone to pretend this was only a warning.

I stayed by the fire a little longer, watching the whole of Blackthorn rearrange itself around the new tension. Dad was already being drawn aside by two older members who always wanted his ear when trouble threatened. Lucas had moved toward another small group, his body language calm in that deliberate way of his, never wasteful, never overstated.

And somewhere in the shift of all that, under the smoke and the blood and the memory of my mother’s absence woven through the place where she should once have stood, I felt the old ache again. The private, humiliating ache of not knowing what my place would become when my father was gone. Everyone assumed I would remain central. Of course I would. Garrick’s daughter. Useful. Symbolic. Worth keeping close. But there is a difference between being kept and being cherished, and I knew enough of men to understand that one does not always guarantee the other.

Around me, the others had sharpened themselves into readiness. Quietly. Efficiently. Too quickly for comfort. Questions were already leaving the yard in human clothes. Eyes were already turning outward. Somewhere, not far enough away, something had started moving, and I could feel the pressure of it now like distant weather coming in hard.

I stood in the firelight with my hair loose over my shoulders, breathing smoke and venison and the old hot scent of my own people, and felt something dark and restless turning under my ribs, as if trouble had already reached the yard and simply not yet taken shape.

And for the first time that night, I had the sudden ugly certainty that by the time it did, it would already be too late.