It was clear he was gonna always be Klan. Believed the ideology still. And no doubt no longer saw me as his brother, but as a traitor to his race.
He’d hate me now.
My own brother hated me.
“They’re good,” I said to Tank. “They’re real fucking good.” I took another shot and checked around us to make sure no one was listening. They weren’t. Too busy dealing with their own place in this war.
I stared down at the empty shot glass in my hands. “I get that the Hangmen are strong. Their reach is unrivaled. And they have a lot of ex-military. Psychos who would kill just for fun. But today . . .” I shook my head. “Fuck, Tank. For weeks now we’ve been hit by the Klan. And each time they’ve been organized, mobilized, and trained to do exactly what they set out to do.” I laughed, no humor. “He’s done it.” Tank looked at me. I could tell by his face he knew exactly what I was going to say. “My old man. His dream has been realized. He has a Klan army. One that can actually do what he wants—start a real fucking war.” I shook my head, guilt burrowing a hole in my stomach. “And I’m responsible for creating it.” Tank poured another whiskey. “Destroyer of worlds.”
Tank smirked. “Oppenheimer quotes? You’re getting deep, brother. We’ll blame the whiskey.”
“It’s true. I created the Klan nuclear bomb, and now I get to sit back and watch it get dropped.” My throat started to close, but I managed to rasp out, “Get to watch my brother, my fucking baby brother, be the one to give the order.”
“We’ll stop them, Tann.” Tank gestured to the brothers from all the southern state chapters in the room. “We got men. We got balls.” Tank pointed to himself, then me. “We got us. We know the Klan. Maybe we just need to start thinking that way again. To figure out what their plans might be.” Another shot, the numbness this time starting to spread through my veins. I rolled my neck, my muscles loosening as the liquor began to do its job. “And we got your contact, yeah? Still got someone inside who’s helping?”
“Yeah.” I did. Wade Roberts. His old man was one of Landry’s closest friends until he died a few years back. Wade was inner circle and wanted out but, unlike me, lacked the incentive to leave. He’d decided it was better to bring the Klan down from the inside than to leave and have no fucking life, a target forever on his head for deserting the cause. Didn’t know if I could trust him at first. But he’d come through time and time again.
“He didn’t warn me about today though.” And I was gonna find out the fuck why.
The bottle was almost done when Zane came over to Tank and said that Ky was calling for the brothers in church. “Church!” Tank shouted when Zane cut the music. I waited until the brothers had left, then followed in last. The room was crammed. But everyone had a seat. Styx sat at the front, quiet as always, but his eyes blazing with fire.
He had just lifted his hands to speak when Arizona and Gull’s prez burst through the door. “They’d hung them from trees. Like they’d been lynched,” he said. His eyes were red and bulging with rage.
I closed my eyes briefly. “String them up,” I said. I smiled as the bodies of our old Klan brothers started to swing from the trees, the heavy wind moving them back and forth like pendulums. Charles took out a can of spray paint and drew on the cross and circle—our white-power symbol. That would teach the fuckers to try and leave us, to try and get the feds on our asses. “Leave them,” I ordered. “Let people find them. Let them know the Klan is not to be fucked with.”
When I opened my eyes, it was to see Tank watching me. He must have known I was remembering what we used to do . . . because he’d been there for a lot of them. He’d been standing right beside me.
When the room came back into focus, the brothers were all talking over one another, fucking pissed. A loud whistle cut through the room. Styx stood. His eyes bored into every one of us, telling us all to shut the fuck up or he’d do it for us. When everyone calmed and took their seats, Styx stayed standing.
His eyes fixed on me. He raised his hands, and Ky spoke for him. “We need to know all about them. We need to know how they’re organized. The training they’ve had. What they believe. Fucking everything. We need to know these fuckers inside and out.”
The room was deadly silent, and one by one every brother looked my way. “Styx—” Tank went to speak, but I shook my head at my best friend. I had to do this. I’d seen the looks I’d gotten from the brothers over these past few weeks. They suspected me. Not so much my own chapter, but the others. Every time there was an attack, I was asked how they would’ve known where we’d be. How many would’ve been there. Everything. Tank never got those looks. He’d paid his dues. Wasn’t coated in Nazi tattoos anymore, unlike me. As involved as Tank was, he hadn’t been born for the sole purpose of being the Ku Klux Klan’s heir. Raised to only champion the white race. In the Ayers household, the air we breathed was Klan and Klan alone.
I wanted to just cut tail and fucking leave all this shit behind, but I wasn’t gonna back down. All this? It was my fault. I’d created this. I had to fucking end it. Least I could do right now was try to save these men.
And I wouldn’t let them see me weak. I’d never fucking do that.
“It’s called the invisible empire,” I said, and could almost smell the lingering smell of smoke from a burning cross beside me. Could feel the air charged with the cause, the need for the race war to start. Like my old brotherhood had once looked to me, dressed in green robes and standing before the fiery cross, these brothers were looking at me too. But none like I was a fucking messiah. More like a suspect.
“Invisible because we exist where no one sees. No one knows who we are. We assimilate into society. We exist among you.”
“Y’all have flags outside your houses and giant swastikas tattooed on your skin.” Some of the brothers smirked. “Hardly invisible,” Smiler said.
“And they’re the ones you need to worry about the least.” I leaned on the table. My knuckles cracked from all the tension on my body. “As I’ve said before to my chapter, the rednecks and the skinheads who fight for fun and protest outside of town halls aren’t the ones you need to fear. They’re the show ponies, the distraction. They’re the waving hand, making you look one way while the real soldiers, the true army of the invisible empire, tear you down with the other.”
“I don’t fear none of you cunts,” Crow, the New Orleans president, said. The fucker was smiling, rolling the dice he always held in his hand.
“You should.”
Crow smirked. In fact, all the others did. It made my blood boil. The Klan—me, my brother, my father, my uncle—had worked all our fucking lives to make people think the way they did about us. To make us look a joke. But in secret we’d built the empire of thinking men. Of men and women who would allow the skinhead jokes to smash down your front door, while we, the true brotherhood, would sneak in through the window.
“We?” I followed the sound of the question to Hush. Cowboy had his hand on his friend’s shoulder. “You keep saying we.”
I did? My heart fucking pounded. I hadn’t meant to say we. I didn’t think of myself as Klan anymore. Not at all.