THE electric guitar was heavy. No heavier than others he’d carried, but running with it was a bitch. Damie’d hit more people than he avoided. The flat case was wide and long, unwieldy most of the time, but going full tilt through a herd of businessmen was whacking the heads of mums off with a golf club.
“Slow it down, Damie,” he cautioned himself. Cops were going to spot someone running before they noticed anything else. Forcing himself to a slow saunter, he wove through the stream of people pouring out at the BART stop. Keeping his head down, Damie glanced around, his spine stiffening with fear every time he spotted a flash of bright blond hair bobbing up behind him. With his guts turned to jelly, he mounted the train car, slid down into a seat, and pulled the case up over his lap.
“Fuck.” He let loose a few more curses, muttering under his breath fiercely enough the woman sitting a seat away looked at him nervously before getting up to move off. Left alone in the back of the car, Damien waited for his heart to stop trying to pound through his ribs.
What little he remembered of the night he’d fled Skywood was fragmented at best, but he clearly recalled the gargoyle frame of Jerome’s killer and his nearly sunburst-bright shock of hair. Even in the dead of a winter night, it had shone yellow in the smoke-filtered moonlight. When he’d turned and aimed the gun at Damien, the man looked more Grim Reaper than human, his skin almost translucent over jutting bone.
Cocky as shit, that same man had been standing by a coffee cart across from the pub as the cops milled about, taking interviews and tromping through Damien’s fragile safety. When the blond lifted his paper cup in Damien’s direction, he knew the man was the same one who’d tried to kill him in Montana.
And now he’d brought the killer to Sionn’s place, practically guilty of placing an apple on the gray-eyed Irishman’s head in a sick game of William Tell.
The ache along his chest scar bloomed to a full spasm, and he tried rubbing at it through his shirt, wishing he could risk going to a doctor to have the throb checked out. When his heartbeat began to skip back at the pub, Damien began to wonder if he shouldn’t have let the blond man just shoot him through the head back at Skywood.
He was no closer to finding Miki, and his options were getting limited. There wasn’t anyone he could really trust, and the fragile threads of his memory were knitting in an altogether fucked-up home life and screwed-up family. Leaning his head back against the seat, Damien reached up, pulled his hat off, and rested it on his lap. Working his hands through his hair, his fingers skimmed over the patchwork of scars hidden under the strands. They thrummed as much as his chest did, running hot with the pound of blood in his veins.
And Sionn. The asshole had shot at Sionn. As much as he hated to, he might have to give up Sionn, and that hurt more than anything else.
“Hey, don’t I know you?”
Those words chilled Damien’s bones, and he risked opening his eyes a slice, only enough to take a look at the dark-haired young man sliding onto the bench next to him.
The guy looked like practically every other college student, complete with beat-up backpack, a Han Shot First T-shirt, and a pair of thick-rimmed glasses Damien was pretty certain were used for birth control back in the fifties. Unlike Damien’s own too-lazy-to-shave bristled jaw, the man’s beard was clipped to a nearly mechanical precision, each hair measuring the exact same length across his chin. He was packaged tighter than a gourmet cupcake, a daub of sparkle spread over a cloying, pedestrian sweetness.
Damien’s head began a different type of throb when he realized the bouncy young man was someone he’d have taken to a back room at a club and fucked back when he’d been playing with the band. He was too much to take in, an eager brush of hands and smile Damien didn’t want to deal with.
Especially since he’d probably just fucked up any chance he might have had with Sionn by running.
Thinking on it, Sionn wasn’t really an option either. His life was fucked up, turned inside out by too many what-ifs and maybes. There was still a small part of his brain murmuring doubts about his identity. He wanted to fling off the hat, tie back his hair, swagger onto a talk show, and quit hiding.
Except you might not be real, his mind whispered. What then? What happens when you find out you’re lying to yourself and Damien Mitchell really is dead? Who are you going to be then?