by Sara Reinke
It was a dream, he told himself, touching her cheeks, holding her face between his hands, pressing his brow against hers. It was just a dream and it’s over now.
“Jason,” she said, trying to draw away from him.
“I love you,” he breathed, kissing her mouth. He meant to pull her down to the bed and make love to her, to hook his fingers beneath the waistbands of her sweatpants and panties, jerk them down from her hips and bury himself in her warmth. All at once, he needed that, needed her, to be near her, inside her, if only to drive away the lingering, haunting memories of his nightmares, to prove to himself that they were really over. He wanted to taste her, touch her, explore every inch of her long, lean body with his mouth and hands, to cement in his mind what was real and important and necessary to him.
She placed her hands over his, her grip firm. “Jason, stop.” When she pulled back, he blinked at her in surprised confusion.
And then he saw the boxes behind her, the suitcases, the furniture he’d never seen before. “No,” he whispered, aghast, looking down at himself to find bandages against his chest.
“No,” he groaned again, shaking his head. Even Sam’s brows lifted with gentle sympathy and she moved to brush his hair back from his brow. No, no, no, oh, God, no!
“Listen to me,” she said.
“No.” Jason pushed her hands away, scooted back from her against the bed. He forked his fingers through his hair, gritted his teeth, clamped his eyes shut. It can’t be true, it can’t be. I must be losing my mind.
He felt Sam’s hand light against him again and opened his eyes, looking at her. “What’s happening to me?” he whispered.
“I don’t know.” There were tears in her large, dark eyes again, as if her heart, like his, was breaking. “But I’m going to help you. I’m going to find out. I promise, Jason. I promise.”
CHAPTER FOUR
“Mother of God,” Bear said, staring across the living room at Jason.
“Hey, Bear,” Jason said with a weary smile. Finally dressed in an old T-shirt and sweats, he sat in a spindly, uncomfortable chair. Sam had offered him some of the Chinese food Dean had brought—kung pao chicken, her favorite—and it had occurred to him that his presence that night had interrupted something far more than just a late dinner between friends.
Are you with him now? he wondered, bewildered and hurt, watching as Sam walked past Dean, reaching out unconsciously and brushing her fingers through his hair. It wasn’t something new, then, what was between the two. Jason had glimpsed numerous gestures like this, the small, unconscious, seemingly inconsequential interactions that develop over time between two people who share an intimate familiarity and fondness for each other. Like the way Sam had always stroked his arm whenever she’d been sleepy as they’d watched TV. Or the way she’d always reach instinctively for his hand, hooking her finger through his to keep from being separated in a crowd.
Are you in love with him now, Sam?
“Mother of God.” Bear crossed the room in wide, heavy strides. Dropping to his knees, he hooked his hand against the back of Jason’s neck and pulled him to his shoulder, clasping him in a fierce embrace. “It’s you. It’s really you.”
“It’s all right, Bear,” Jason said, smiling again, trying to reassure him in spite of the fact that it wasn’t all right, not at all. Everything is all wrong, Bear, but unless you have a time machine, it doesn’t look like there’s anything we can do to fix it.
“How?” Bear whispered. He glanced back over his shoulder toward Sam. “How is this possible?”
“That’s the million-dollar question,” Dean remarked.
“We don’t know,” Sam said. “He doesn’t remember anything, not even how he wound up back in the alley.”
Before Bear’s arrival, Sam had dug through one of her boxes and pulled out a heavy scrapbook. In and among the pages inside, she’d tucked newspaper clippings describing Jason’s attack. He’d stared down at the grainy black-and-white image of himself that had run in the obituary section, feeling numb inside, shaken and dismayed.
Jason Randall Sullivan, 25, died November 19, it read. He was preceded in death by his father, Jonathan “Jack” Sullivan; mother, Helen (Reynolds) Sullivan; grandparents, Herbert and Jesse (Strouse) Sullivan and Peter and Claire Ellen (Phineas) Reynolds. Jason is survived in spirit through the hearts of those who loved him and called him a friend.
Sam was right. He didn’t remember anything. But something had happened to him, that much was clear. And life had gone on without him.
That much is clear too.
“I didn’t see anything that looked like a bullet wound on him,” Dean told Bear. “No scar, nothing. I was at the hospital when they brought him in, working the ER, so I remember roughly where he’d been shot in the chest. He has a pretty good-sized stab wound, though. Looks like someone ran him through with a butcher knife.”
“A sword,” Jason murmured as his assailant’s name, Nemamiah, and face flashed momentarily through his mind.
You are unmarked.
“It was a sword,” he said again, looking up at Bear. “There was a man in the alley. He stabbed me with a sword.”
“I didn’t see anyone when I got back from the liquor store,” Dean said when Bear glanced between him and Sam, his brow arched. “I checked all over downstairs to see if someone might have followed Jason inside. We should take him to the hospital,” he added with a pointed look at Jason. “I cleaned the wound out, stitched it up, but he needs X-rays, at the least, to see if there’s any nerve damage or—”
“You can’t take him to the hospital,” Bear cut in. “He’s supposed to be dead.” He shook his head. “No. He lays low until we figure out what’s going on here, where he’s been all of this time.”
Remaining squatted before Jason, he rested his elbows on his knees, looking the younger man in the eyes. “You got anything I can go on here, kid?” he asked. “Someplace I can start? Because I’ve got to tell you, in my twenty-five years on the force, I’ve never seen anything like this. Nothing at all. You don’t have a clue where you’ve been?”
Jason shook his head.
“You don’t remember anything at all? Nothing except this guy out in the alley with a sword. What about before that?”
Jason shook his head. “I don’t know.” He thought of the blood on Nemamiah’s face, the bruises and fresh injuries. “We were fighting, I think.”
Bear raised a brow. “You and this guy?”
“Nemamiah,” Jason said, and Bear arched his brow higher. “His name is Nemamiah.”
“Neh-muh-mie-uh?” Bear said, pronouncing it slowly, breaking it down syllable by syllable phonetically. He frowned. “What kind of name is that? Sounds foreign.”
“I don’t know,” Jason said.
“What did he look like?” Bear asked.
“Angry,” Jason whispered, remembering the murderous ferocity in Nemamiah’s face, the deep-seated and inexplicable hatred that had abruptly faded when he’d pushed Jason’s hair back from his brow and examined his forehead with a sort of rough urgency, as if he’d been looking for something. As if he’d been expecting to find something.
You are unmarked.
“Why were you fighting?” Bear asked.
“I don’t know,” Jason said.
“Is he the one who shot you?”
“I don’t know.” Jason shook his head again, helplessly.
“Bear,” Sam said quietly.
“Would you know him again if you saw him?” Bear asked Jason. “This guy from the alley. Could you pick him out of a lineup?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well, you saw the guy, didn’t you? You know him enough to know his name?” Bear’s voice had sharpened, growing louder and more emphatic with every word. His brows had started to crease, his gaze hardening. “You know who he is. You know where I can find him?”
“Bear,” Sam said again, reaching for her uncle now.
“I…I don’t…” Jason stammered.
“You know where he lives? An address? Some place he hangs out? You saw his face. You could describe him, then. What color were his eyes?”
“Brown,” Jason said.
“What about his hair?”
“Black, I think,” Jason said. “Maybe dark brown. But I don’t—”
“What’s his last name? Or is Nemamiah a street name?”
“Bear, come on,” Sam said. “Stop now.”
“How tall is he? What’s he built like?” Bear caught Jason by the arm and gave him a slight shake, like he might have a puppy that had just pissed on the carpet. “You know his name. You saw his face. Tell me what he looks like.”
“I told you, he looked angry,” Jason snapped. “Like…like…” Like he was my enemy, he wanted to say, as corny and stupid and ridiculous as that sounded. Like he was my sworn enemy, and he had spent an eternity waiting for that moment, hunting me down, wanting to kill me.
“Stop,” Sam exclaimed, grabbing Bear’s sleeve. “Leave him alone. What’s the matter with you?”
“I’m just trying to get some answers,” Bear replied, shrugging her off, rising to his feet.
“Well, you don’t have to bully them out of him,” Sam said hotly, and Bear relented, drawing back, holding up his hands in mock surrender. “Give it a rest for a minute, okay?” She sighed heavily. “Look. We’re all worked up and confused. I think the best thing to do is to wait until tomorrow, get a good night’s sleep and try to look at things again with clearer heads.”
“That’s a great idea,” Dean said. “I agree. There’s that hotel right up the street, over off of Oak. Their sign says they rent by the week. I’ll go get a room for him and we can put a bag together with some—”
“What?” Sam said, her eyes widening. “We’re not putting Jason up in some fleabag dive, Dean. He can stay right here.”
“Here?” Dean blinked. “But Sam, there’s going to be contractors coming in and out of the building all day long starting first thing tomorrow morning.”
“I know. Which is why it’s better if I just stay here too,” she replied.
“Are you kidding?” Dean cocked his head. “This place isn’t even remotely livable. It’s barely got electricity. We just unloaded all of your stuff today. Nothing’s even unpacked yet, your kitchen is empty and—”
“It will be fine. I can unpack while the guys are downstairs working. And I can go to the grocery store. It’s not like we’re in the middle of a third world country, for crying out loud.”
“I’ll stay here with him,” Dean insisted. “You go to my place.”
“You have to work,” she replied. “You’ve got four nights this week, back to back, remember?”
“Then I’ll stay here with him.” Bear said, and Dean turned to the older man with a look of abject relief. “If there’s some guy running around stabbing people, it’d be better to have a cop here anyway. Besides, he can’t be running around where folks can see him. What if someone gets a look at him, thinks he’s Jason?”
“He is Jason,” Sam said with a frown.
Bear shot her a dubious glower. “Jason Sullivan is dead,” he said. “And if he’s not somehow, our friend here is going to have a lot of explaining to do. It’s better if he just lays low. And I’m going stick around to make sure that he does.”
“I’m staying too.” Sam crossed her arms. It was a stubborn, familiar gesture that apparently hadn’t changed in Jason’s absence. I’m not taking no for an answer, it said, and when it came to sticking to her guns once her mind was set on something, Sam could be as obstinate and bullheaded as her uncle. “I don’t want you grilling him anymore, Bear. Stay here if you want. That’s fine. I’ve got the floor space. But Dean, you need to sleep. You’re working tomorrow. Go home. I’m taking the couch.”
To judge by Dean’s expression, the crimp between his brows, he wasn’t happy about this prospect, but again, he’d obviously been close enough to Sam for long enough to recognize a moot cause when he saw it. He threw his hands up and shook his head, huffing out a sharp, exasperated breath, but offered no further protest.
****
“You know, we don’t even know for sure this is him.”
Jason had retreated to the bedroom, where he’d all but collapsed. He’d taken two pain pills Dean had offered him, and the medicine had taken immediate, powerful effect on his mind, not only dulling his pain, but leaving him teetering on the brink of consciousness.
“I’m telling the truth,” he’d murmured to Sam upon crumpling against the mattress. He’d winced as this effort hurt his shoulder, despite the haze of medication, and had reached for her as she tried to move, to leave the bedside, grabbing her by the hand. “Sam, please, I’m telling the truth.”
“Try to get some sleep,” she’d told him, her voice gentle, her cadence soothing as she’d smoothed his hair back from his brow.
“Do you see anything?” His eyes had fallen closed, his words slurring. “On my head. Nemamiah…he told me I was unmarked.”
“Sleep,” she’d whispered, her lips lighting against his cheek.
He could hear the three of them now as they talked in the living room, the sounds of their voices drawing him from his drug-induced sleep. Even though he remained in the bed, he opened his eyes, blinking blearily at the darkened bedroom.
“I keep telling you. Of course it’s him,” he heard Sam say. “You saw him, Bear, you looked him straight in the face. How can you say that?”
A thin line of dim illumination cut beneath the door, and as Jason’s eyes adjusted to the gloom, he saw his hand dangled over the bedside, his fingertips brushing the cold hardwood floor. Here, the shadows seemed to mingle and pool together, coalescing into one broad black puddle that spread out in all sorts of misshapen directions to envelop the floor, fill the room. As he moved his hand, it seemed like some of the shadows moved with him, a patch of darkness slightly deeper than the rest, more viscous somehow. He spread his fingers and watched with dazed fascination as the shadowy counterparts against the floor splayed more widely to match. In fact, the fingertips of his shadow seemed to elongate before his very eyes, stretching to reach beneath the bedroom doorway and creep beyond the corridor beyond, sliding in thin, diaphanous streams toward the living room.
“But it’s impossible,” Bear said, and the farther those slim tentacles of shadow extended, the closer they drew to the living room, the more clearly it seemed Jason could hear them. “There’s no way he can be alive, not after what happened to him.”
“There could have been a mistake,” Sam insisted, and Jason had a mental image of her in his mind, as plainly as if he was standing among them: Sam flanked by Dean and Bear, all of them sitting in a tight circumference. Her brows were stubbornly crinkled again, and she shook her head. “Maybe he wasn’t dead.”
“Sam,” Dean began at this.
“Things like that happen,” she cut in. “You told me just last week about that someone who’d been pronounced dead on the operating table but started breathing again after fifteen minutes.”
“That was a fluke, Sam,” Dean countered, “a medical anomaly. It rarely happens.”
“It happened then,” she said. “Maybe it happened with Jason too.”
“And that man has been in a coma ever since,” Dean continued. “He suffered permanent brain injury. Which Jason—if this is Jason—should be suffering from too, because a bullet tore apart most of the temporal and frontal lobes of his brain.”
“You don’t know—” Sam began, and again, as if standing in the doorway watching, or seeing it on a movie screen from the sanctuary of a darkened theater, Jason watched Bear put his hand on her shoulder, quieting her.
“He does know that, Sammi,” he said, his expression kind. “He was there in the ER when they brought Jason in. And I know it too. I may not have seen the body, but I saw the autopsy report.” Holding his index finger and thumb up to mimic a pistol shape, he leveled his fingertip at Sam’s temple. “It said Jason took a shot
in the head about like so, by a Remington 38-caliber hollow-point bullet that punctured his skull, then blew apart, turning his brain into hamburger.”
“Stop.” She slapped his hand away from her, folding her arms again, tightly across her chest.
“Just before that, he was shot in the chest,” Bear told her. “Puncturing his lung, clipping his heart and pretty much flooding his chest cavity with blood.”
“Stop, Bear.”
“So if he hadn’t died from the bullet to his brain, it’s a safe bet he would have from this other wound. He would have drowned on his own blood.”
“I said stop it,” she cried, tearful now. “Shut up. Just shut up, both of you. Why are you doing this?”
“Because you’ve got your hopes up,” Bear said. He leaned forward, taking her by the hand. “Sammi, can you really say that’s him in the bedroom? I mean, with one hundred percent certainty?”
“Of course I can,” Sam said, but her voice wavered.
“Then we’ll find out for sure.” Bear stood. “You got a ballpoint pen on you, Doc?”
Dean patted his pockets, found a Bic and looked puzzled as he handed it to the older man. “I’ll go in there right now, take his prints,” Bear said. “Jason Sullivan had an arrest record. Misdemeanor assault from the year before he was shot, when he punched out the Doc.” He nodded to indicate Dean.
“That wasn’t his fault,” Sam said with a frown. “Dean was drunk and being an ass.”
There was the understatement of the year. Dean had blundered into Sully’s late on Friday night, three sheets to the wind as the old saying goes. He’d apparently been laying on the Captain Morgan pretty hard and heavy, as Jason had judged from the stench of his breath. Jason had tried to lead Dean outside to a waiting cab, and Dean had taken the opportunity to smash the butt end of a beer bottle into the back of his head.