He debated keeping to the ditch, but the going was too hard, especially when he’d put his foot down and the flapping sole on his loafer let stagnant puddle water seep in. Damien clambered up onto the road and broke into a trot, keeping an ear out for any vehicles coming up the road. The bright white cotton T-shirt and scrubs were now muddied and dark with pine tar and leaf stains, and his teeth were beginning to chatter from the cold.
If anything, Damien was glad for the filth, hoping it would make him blend into the road more. The slap of his feet on the asphalt kept an odd time with the pound-pound of his overworked heart, and Damien smiled, finding a tune in the offbeat rhythm.
“Sinjun, if I ever make it out of here, I’m going to have you write a song about this.” Damien forced himself to laugh at the absurdity of running away from an asylum. “I just need to fucking find you first.”
He had no clue what state Skywood was in or even what direction he had to go. San Francisco was his best bet. It was where he and Miki were from, and he could remember his best friend buying a warehouse to live in before they’d gone on tour.
“Shit.” The memory of warm brick walls and high ceilings came back to him. They’d bought two warehouses, side-by-side buildings so they could live next to one another. Damien’s head throbbed at the images surfacing out of his shadowed brain, but they were clear. He’d laid out enough money to have someplace to live next to his best friend after they were done doing a world circuit.
He chased the memory before it slipped away, turning nebulous when he concentrated harder. They’d teased one another, each claiming the other would move into their space instead of living in the place they’d bought. Miki longed for a studio, someplace he could wander into and throw out small pieces of brilliance while Damien fought to find the chords to match his best friend’s words.
“We were going to build a walkway between the two roofs. I was going to turn most of the bottom floor of mine into a garage for the cars I was going to buy—” Damien trawled through his memories as he slogged over the rough ground. Too caught up in his thoughts, he didn’t see the headlights coming over the rise.
Or the old Chevy truck that appeared around the bend and slammed into him.
Chapter 1
Standing in a river of stones
Drowning in sorrow
Water knee deep but cold
Even though my mouth is clear
I just can’t breathe anymore
—River of Stones
“HEY, boss, your cowboy’s back.”
Sionn refused to poke his head up from under the bar to look, but he didn’t need to. He knew who his manager, Leigh, was talking about. The rest of the staff at Finnegan’s Pub were too scared of him to tease, but the pub’s blue-haired, nose-ringed cliché of a bartender had no such qualms. Having worked for his gran first, then stayed on when he’d taken over, Leigh was as much of a legacy at Finnegan’s as the four-foot wooden leprechaun someone gave his gran at the pub’s grand opening. Both were impossible to ignore, mostly annoying and in the way, but without them, Finnegan’s would be missing some of its color.
Of course, Sionn thought when Leigh pinched his ass as he changed the keg out from behind the bar, the pub could sometimes do with a lot less color.
When his gran had been alive, she had a special hatred for street entertainers, tourists, and the English. She loathed them all with equal fervor, although if Sionn had to lay money down, he’d have said her dislike for Londoners outweighed them all. Tourists she had to tolerate. They paid the bills at Finnegan’s, coming in to spend their money to eat pub food right on the pier and watching the bay traffic float by the wide picture windows she’d reluctantly agreed to. San Francisco’s street entertainers were vermin too big for her to sic a ferret on, and if Sionn stood up, he knew he’d have a clear view of the very pretty guitarist Leigh liked to call his cowboy. She hated the windows most of all.
“No proper pub has windows, ye fecking git,” she’d muttered at his back, loud enough for him—and everyone else in the place—to hear. Maggie Finnegan was never one to let her opinion get in the way of good business, but she was going to make damned certain her grandson heard about it for as long as she had breath in her tiny Irish body.
The place lost most of its color when Gran passed, but Sionn could still hear her complaining about the light coming in off the bay and how it diluted the proper dark atmosphere a serious drinking man needed in his pub. Whitewashed walls and diffused sconces brightened the place up too much for her liking, but she soldiered on, willing to bow to change if it meant an extra dollar in the till.