[color=gray][h3][sup][sup]Like owl chicks peering warily from a tree cavity—like feral cats crouched in a junkyard, dinnerplate eyes all aglow with unease—like skittish children clutched to their mothers' legs—all of MacDonald Highlands paused, and listened, and tensed as a solitary V-twin rumbled past. On any other road this would have been nothing unusual; every night they ran 93 and the Blue Diamond in packs, [i]Hell's Angels[/i] and [i]Sisters of Perdition[/i], [i]Mongols[/i] and [i]Charons[/i], whooping, carousing, patrolling, chasing each other across their "turfs." And every week, one or two brain-painted the Beltway, crayoned the asphalt with their back tattoos. And once or twice a month page ten of the Sun or the Optic or the Review-Journal regaled the sleepy suburbs with the legend of the latest knife brawl: denim-clad road cretins stomping into battle, smashing up some dive bar. Being dragged away by their feet from puddles of their own leakage and dying in the ambulance. And the people would scowl, and the people would shake their heads, tutting, and they would say they feel sorry for the mothers and the sisters but at least there's one less rabid animal in the world needs putting out of its misery. Then they would go back to their golfing.

Not tonight, however. Tonight the lone biker turned off the Horizon Ridge Parkway and into the neighborhood; [i]their[/i] neighborhood. Past their combed pebble lawns and aloe vera hedges. Past their community clubhouse and their community swimming pool. Past their craft beer gastropubs with $21 dollar truffle aioli cheeseburgers (fries not included). Past their country club. And that would have been bad enough even if he was the tidy, respectable kind of outlaw: the kind who only rode to work and back and maybe on Sunday afternoons when the heat wasn't so bad, the kind who'd bought his Marlon Brando jacket and Kevlar jeans from the same dealership as where he'd got the bike, the kind named Harvey or Stan who owned a dental practice and went to brunch in boating shorts, the familiar kind, respectable, safe to gossip about over the phone. But he wasn't. This was one of those engine-oil-under-the-fingernails, dust-in-his-teeth kinds of brigands. His leathers chapped and his denim matted and the folds of his ears all black with road soot. A knotted, lousy, uniquely pungent freak-breed, streaking down their boulevards like a comet, his tail an oil slick of unwashed hair and hot exhaust. With the sort of indignation only the upper-middle-class can muster, they stirred from their queen-sized microfiber sheets, flicked on their porch lights, curdled behind their shuttered windows and deadbolted front doors; made sure the creature didn't stop for water on its way to anywhere else but there. They wondered, some of them aloud, whether it was even legal to have pipes that loud at hours this late; they wondered, some of them aloud, why they even paid their H.O.A. dues if it wasn't going to keep out "[i]those[/i] sorts of people."

All the trendiest bars hadn't shuttered yet for the night so they were still out there—out on the balmy sidewalks—the ones slurping down smoked salmon pizza under fancy umbrellas; busking out two-bit Simon & Garfunkel renditions on buzzy instruments in front of lacy shop windows, for dollars pity-thrown into the propped-open guitar case. Some plugged their ears as he passed, the scoundrel, his tailpipes snarling, engine crooning. Some traced him with leery, narrowed gazes, wrung like dry sponges over their hazy citrus IPAs and spiced chai martinis. But for the crime of popping their little bubble—of reminding them that crime exists in the world and cruelty and bombs and most wretchedly of all, poor people—unanimously they recoiled, and glowered—the revs shivering in the waters of their spines. A few moments passed. Down the street, past the golf course, up into the hills until his clamor had drowned in the rest of the evening ambiance. And so grateful were the MacDonalds Highlanders to once more hear their companions' blithe, gormless chatter, and the mediocre cover bands, and even the other (ordinary) traffic, they didn't stop to wonder what kind of business could have brought one of the [i]SCYTHIANS[/i] all the way out to the mansions. That's what the back of his jacket had said, all thick Tuscan lettering scrolled above the gang's center patch: a horse archer in profile, full nock, full draw, clenching a Harley instead of a stallion between his pajamaed thighs. He was still riding long after they'd forgotten about him. Still riding when adobe walls and decorative cacti gave way to lank roots clutched to tawny shards of rock; saltbush and globemallow and blots of swaying goldenheads. When he'd put Henderson so far behind him that it resembled a lichen more than a town, warm bioluminescence mottled across the ink-blue skin of the night. Frenchman Mountain, usually looming Acquiline noselike over the sagebrushed upper lip of the valley, now barely a freckle against the light-polluted sky.

Mercifully the dirt road congealed into one final stripe of asphalt, dying in the curl of a cul-de-sac. A single villa jutted there, moonlight glistening off the mission tiles, the aquamarine backglow of a swimming pool shimmering along its north wall. A small fleet of luxury towncars, black and silent and glinting like beetles. Mr. Keene already guarded the front step; had already heard the ascent; already affected in his demeanor that the lone rider was expected—though not exactly welcomed.

A gentleman never shouted so he waited until the biker had pawed the killswitch, until the engine had lumbered to a halt, hiss-ticking as it cooled. Until one boot had shoved the kickstand and the other had swayed up and over the saddle and there stood the intruder in all his ramshackle glory, leering up at him. "Yes. Can I help you?" dribbled the majordomo's question from mustachioed, sneering lip, wary and contemptuous. The biker took his first step.

"If you are not expected then you will have to wait," Keene continued, seeing that. "Mr. Pagani is a very busy man and there are proper channels for—and there are—look, you, all the doors are Warded. No one gets in without our wanting it—or without burning."

That warning—that [i]word[/i] and that word alone—[i]Warded[/i]—gave pause to the Scythian; who all the while had been approaching the granite-flagstoned stoop. Only with one boot already planted upon the very bottom step did he hesitate. Chuckling.

"Last I checked I don't need your permission, thrall," he rasped, more inconvenienced than angered, "not when your hand will open that door just fine. Still attached to the rest a you or no it makes no difference to me."

The Scythian smiled a coffee and cigarette-yellowed smile, gleaming with more than one black-tarnished silver tooth. Keene was beginning to squirm, the jellying of his bowels threatening to erode at his practiced, urbane exterior. Seemed the ghoul of a deadly and powerful ancillae was still only a ghoul. But with the night whiling, the visitor rolled his eyes, and feigned some newfound interest away in the hedgerows. Feigned something bored and nonchalant, entirely unconcerned with this little standoff in which they'd found themselves. Even as the manservant's scrawny neck tantalized him. Even as he made himself seem the juiciest little morsel, ripe for the plucking.

"Whatever. Just make sure he gets this and we're square." He reached into the Napoleon of his leather jacket; unrolled what looked like a magazine, its covers all glossed and anchovy-crammed with banners, with insets, with QR codes. With a toss it fluttered from his iron eagle-bedecked fingers to Keene's feet, clumsy as a half-burned moth escaping the candle, flapping stiff like a housefly drunk on bug spray. Keene, with his bad knees and bad lower back, struggled down into a crouch. It was one of those casino brochures: coupons and calendars, celeb sightings and stand-up comedy promos. Peeling through the contents, he noticed the first of several circlings made in permanent marker: the word "Blackjack," appearing in a full two-page spread for a high-stakes tournament two weeks away. Eight pages later, the name of Caligula's Hotel & Casino (running a variety of dinner specials at its Mediterranean-themed wine-bar-buffet). A $53,425 dollar slots jackpot not yet won at the El Dorado: of five digits, only one underlined (the first five). Finally, a cabaret schedule, wherein was circled one date of many: [i]tonight's[/i] date.

The message was quickly revealing itself to the majordomo, still shrewd despite his years.

"And assuming this drivel even means anything," he called back to the Scythian, the latter already saddling up, straightening the handlebars, nudging the kickstand back up against the frame, "who is this 'we' to whom he should make out his reply?"

Just before a chirp from his starter button and the engine's ensuing grunt, the biker warned, "He knows who it's from." Then, squealing the bike into a tailspin, and speeding away back down the hill, he left the ghoul unscathed; to inhale the bitter smoke from his rear tire, and wonder, and clutch his heart as sheer relief flooded his arteries.[/sup][/sup][/h3][/color]