by Sara Reinke
“Doesn’t matter.” Without bothering with a bra, she tugged her T-shirt back over her head. “He has a key.” She flipped her dark hair out from beneath the collar, then clumsily smoothed it back behind her ears. “Wait here. Let me handle this.”
She started to walk past him but he caught her by the hand. The bedroom door was closed to keep Barton out. From beyond it, they heard the dead bolt turn on the apartment’s front door, then the happy jangling of the tags on Barton’s collar as the dog rushed forward to greet their visitor.
“Sam?” Dean called.
“Jason, let me go.” Sam tried to flap him loose, but he pulled her back down to the bed. She was anxious, nearly alarmed, and when he kissed her, she shook her head. “Jason, stop. I have to go talk to him. Okay?”
It didn’t matter to him if Dean walked in and caught them making love—a part of him wanted that, even, an instinctive pissing game in which he wanted Dean to know without a shadow of a doubt that Sam was his again. He’d reclaimed her, body and heart.
But five years had passed and things had changed, and it was obvious that Sam cared about Dean. She didn’t love him. She didn’t need to tell Jason this—he could see it in her eyes, feel it in the urgent way she’d kissed him, made love to him, but nonetheless, she had feelings for Dean. She didn’t want to hurt him.
“Okay,” he said, nodding, relenting and letting her go.
“Stay in here,” she whispered, and he nodded again as she stood. “I’ll be right back.”
****
“I’ve been calling and calling,” Dean said from the living room. Jason could hear him as clearly as if he stood a foot away from him. More than this, he could see Dean now, if only in his mind, as the other man stood facing Sam in the apartment living room.
Sam had left the bedroom, but Jason had followed closely behind her. At least, the Eidolon had. He’d brushed his fingertips against the floor, hanging his hand off the side of the bed, and as it had the night before, his shadow had stretched out in a thin, nearly fluid stream, slipping beneath the door and trailing down the corridor beyond to reach the living room. It might have only been a hallucination, but in that moment, with him wide-awake, clear-headed and in relative broad daylight, there had been no denying it. Like something out of Peter Pan, his shadow was alive. Never mind how insane that sounded.
“My cell phone’s in the kitchen,” Sam said. “And I dropped the handset in the bedroom earlier. I think I broke it. I haven’t heard it ringing.”
“I was worried,” Dean said, looking around, clearly suspicious.
“No need to be.” Sam managed an awkward laugh. Hooking her hand against his sleeve, she tried to steer him around to face the front door again. “The electrician came by this morning. He found some things with the circuit panel downstairs. Here, I’ll show you.”
“That’s okay.” Dean shrugged himself loose. “Where is he?”
She didn’t need elaboration on who he meant. “In the bedroom. He’s sleeping. I guess. I checked in on him a little while ago and he’s been out cold.” Again, she tried to guide him toward the door. “I was just about to hop in the shower, but it can wait. Why don’t we walk down the street to the Sugar Shack, grab some lunch?”
“I’ve got to get to work,” Dean said. He frowned, cutting a dark glance toward the hallway, the bedroom beyond. “I thought you said Bear was going to be here. I don’t like the idea of you here alone with that guy.”
“He had to go to work. He’ll be back this evening, he told me. And will you stop calling him that? It’s not some guy.” Sam frowned, planting her hands on her hips. “It’s Jason.”
“No, Sam, you just want it to be Jason,” Dean said. He started to say more, opening his mouth and drawing in a sharp breath, but in the end, shook his head and flapped his hand. “You know what? Forget it.”
As he walked toward the door of his own accord, Sam caught his sleeve. “Forget what?” Dean shook his head again and her frown deepened. “No, Dean. Tell me.”
Dean looked at her for a long moment. “Bear’s right, you’ve got your hopes up. You want to believe that Jason Sullivan is back from the dead somehow—”
“He is, Dean. He’s in there, living proof.”
“But I’m telling you, Sam, there’s no way he could have survived the kinds of wounds he suffered.” She tried to cut him off again, and he raised his voice, sharp now and angry. “And if he did, if he somehow beat odds higher than his chances of getting struck by lightning at the exact same moment as winning the lottery, all while getting hit by a bus, then he should have catastrophic brain damage. Catastrophic, Sam, as in he shouldn’t remember anything: how to speak, eat, walk, talk, much less where he lived, who any of us are—hell, who he is. He should be laying in a bed somewhere, eating through one tube and pissing out another. What’s happening here isn’t possible. There has to be some other explanation.”
“Like what?” Sam asked. “If there’s some other way to explain it, then do it. Tell me who that man is in there if it’s not Jason Sullivan. Tell me how he knows things about me. About us.”
By us, she didn’t mean her and Dean, and to judge by the way Dean bristled, his posture growing ramrod straight, he knew it too.
“He’s someone who looks like Jason,” he said. “Probably enough like him to have seen his picture in the paper. They settled the probate on this building, the rest of Jason’s estate just last week, right? The debts are all paid, the building’s been sold. Everything that’s left, the state pays out to any beneficiaries. So maybe they ran his picture again, some little things about his life, enough so that this guy got the idea in his head to try to be him.”
“Why?” Sam asked.
“My guess is to try to sue the hospital,” Dean said. “Why pretend to be a beneficiary for chump change when you can go after the deep pockets?”
“That’s ridiculous,” Sam began.
“No, what’s ridiculous is that we’re even standing here discussing this,” Dean cut in. “More ridiculous yet, you’re letting him stay with you here. He could be a psycho for all you know. A rapist, a serial killer.”
Sam rolled her eyes. “Oh, for God’s sake,” she said. “He’s not any of those things, Dean.”
“How do you know?” Dean asked. “He’s been ‘out cold’ all day—isn’t that what you told me? And last night, he wasn’t much better off—a zombie, for all intents and purposes. So how the hell do you know anything about him at all?”
She blinked at him for a moment, caught off guard. “I…I just…”
His brows lifted, his expression growing wounded. “You slept with him, didn’t you?”
“What?” Sam shied back, trying to laugh. “Dean, that’s…”
“That’s what, Sam? Ridiculous? Then look me in the eyes and tell me you didn’t.” He grabbed her by the arm. “Look at me, Sam, and tell me you didn’t fuck him today—Jason Sullivan, the late, great love of your life.”
She didn’t answer. Dean’s hand fell away from her, and his eyes were filled with hurt.
“Dean,” she breathed, reaching for him.
Jason watched Dean take Sam by the shoulders. “I love you,” he said. “Doesn’t that count for anything?” He looked at her for a long, silent moment, then managed an unhappy laugh. “Apparently not.”
“Dean,” she began as he stomped toward the door, her voice tearful and strained. “Dean, please.”
She followed him out of the apartment, the front door banging shut behind her, her footsteps rushing down the stairs in his wake. Left behind in the living room, the dog, Barton, took notice of the Eidolon for the first time and growled as it retreated slowly, steadily back down the length of the hallway.
****
“Dean has some clothes in the bedroom closet,” Sam said when she came back upstairs. She and Dean had stood outside on the street, arguing for another good ten or fifteen minutes before he’d at last climbed into his car, a sporty little Mercedes coupe, and sped away, its tire
s scraping against the cold asphalt, the rubber squealing. Jason had stood at the window and peered through the blinds, watching as she stood on the sidewalk and watched Dean leave. From his vantage, he couldn’t be certain, but he’d thought she had been crying. Now he was sure of it. Her cheeks were dry, but her eyes still looked glossy and red-rimmed, her lashes clinging together with tears.
“Why don’t you pick some out and put them on?” she suggested to Jason. “Meet me in the alley in about five minutes?”
“Why?” Puzzled, he sat up, the sheets drooping in loose folds about his waist.
“You’ll see.”
He did as he was told, a lingering, visceral hurt seizing him as he sifted through the odd assortment of men’s clothes hanging in the bedroom closet, all expensive brands, top of the line, the sort of well-tailored shit Jason had never had the inclination to own, never mind the money.
He has a key, Sam had told him of Dean. And while there weren’t enough clothes in the closet to suggest that Dean had lived with Sam at her other apartment or that he’d be moving in with her any time in the future, between that and the fact that Dean had a key to her place, Jason know he’d made himself at home with Sam at some point, with Sam’s obvious and implied consent.
His emotional response to this was immediate, instinctive and visceral. His heart suddenly raced, a flood of adrenaline seizing his limbs, tightening his muscles, steeling his jaw. His hands closed into fists, his brows furrowed and he felt like wrenching all the clothes of the hangers, stuffing them in the trash, because no matter how much time had passed, things had changed. I’m back now, goddamn it, and things are back too, back to the way they’re supposed to be.
He finally found a sweater, jeans and some kind of slip-on loafers and put them on. As he sat on the edge of the bed, shoving his foot into one of the slightly too-tight shoes, he caught a wink of sunlight through the window blinds off something small and metallic on the floor. Curious, he leaned over and picked up one of the cartridges Sam had ejected from his pistol clip.
It must have fallen out of her pocket, he thought, balancing the cartridge upright between his forefinger and thumb, turning it this way and that, examining it more closely. Silver against silver in a nearly seamless, monochrome design, the bullet, sheathed in a shiny casing, had been carefully and deliberately engraved. Jason frowned, tilting it more toward the sunlight.
What is that? he wondered. It looked like some sort of triangular or clover design, a trio of football-shaped figures intertwined with a circle inset behind them. As he studied it, puzzled, it occurred to him. I’ve seen that before.
When Nemamiah had stabbed him, when Jason had first realized and stared in breathless shock at the blade that had punched through his torso, he’d seen this same strange mark etched on the pommel of Nemamiah’s sword.
He’d placed the gun on the bed as he’d dressed and reached for it now, releasing the empty clip. Where did this come from?
He’d been trying his damnedest not to think about that, or the thing in the bathroom made of sewage and dirt he’d imagined shooting in the darkness. Because that wasn’t real, couldn’t have been, he told himself. Something’s happening to me. I’m having hallucinations, leftovers from my nightmares. I’m seeing things that aren’t real, aren’t possible.
But the gun was very much real, which begged the question of where he’d found it. Had it belonged to his father? It wasn’t the revolver Jason had remembered Jack hiding beneath the bar, but as Jason had offered Sam in lame explanation, Jack could have replaced it before he’d died. Jason had never had the opportunity or reason to pull the gun out, and Jack had hollowed out a secret alcove in the thick mahogany bar shelf that could have been well kept from notice when everything else in the building had been stripped and sold.
That’s got to be what happened. He switched out the guns underneath the bar, and I must have blacked out or something, taken it.
That didn’t seem as ridiculous to him as it might have ordinarily, because he’d apparently blacked out for the last five years somehow. Five minutes of lost time during which he could have retrieved the handgun didn’t seem quite so improbable by comparison.
Everything else was an illusion, a hallucination of some sort, he thought. The thing in the bathroom, thinking he’d somehow instantaneously traveled to and from an alleyway in Seattle, all of it had been in his imagination. He’d been shot in the head five years earlier. Even though he’d apparently recovered, it had to have had some kind of long-term effect on him. Brain damage, he thought. Something. Isn’t that what Dean said? I’d have to have catastrophic brain damage if I’d survived a bullet to the head.
But still, there was something about that little trefoil design engraved in the side of the silver bullet that seemed familiar to him, and the same could yet be said for the gun. Jason had the distinctive impression it was his somehow, not his father’s, and that the bullet with its peculiar little carving had meaning to him, a significance of some sort.
He loaded the cartridge into the clip, then used the heel of his palm to secure the clip back in place inside the pistol. He double-checked the safety, aware of the fact that this action came naturally to him, inexplicably so. Tucking the pistol against the small of his back, nestled beneath the waistband of his blue jeans, Jason ran his fingers through his hair and left the apartment, taking the steps down to the alley door two at a time by a habit that remained instilled in him.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Jason and Sam took a streetcar to the waterfront, wading through a crowd of tourists and standing pressed together in the cramped confines of the historic tram. A placard inside the lemon-colored car explained that it had been built in 1946, painted in the yellow and gray pattern of Baltimore transit cars. Jason wrapped his hand around the nearest strap dangling from the ceiling, leaning his weight against his uninjured side to spare his shoulder any more pain. The ibuprofen he’d swallowed earlier had done the trick, but he wasn’t taking any more chances. Sam stood in front of him, close enough for the curve of her buttocks to rest against his groin, close enough to smell the fragrance of sunshine and shampoo in her hair, less than an inch away from his nose.
They’d walked about five blocks from the pub to the nearest depot, leaving behind the relatively quiet streets for the more heavily trafficked tourist district. Two blocks to their east were storefronts featuring haute couture Jason had never seen anyone buy, much less wear; two blocks to their west was Chinatown, with its brightly colored souvenir shops, shotgun bakeries and noodle houses. A dozen blocks or so to the north was the Bayside Bridge, which spanned the channel leading out from the bay into the icy waters of the Pacific Ocean. On a clear day, you could see the bridge, a ghostlike shadow on the horizon, from Jason’s apartment. On that same clear day, if you looked a dozen or so blocks in the opposite direction, you might have caught a glimpse of their ultimate destination along the south shore.
“You were talking about this place yesterday,” Sam said once they’d stepped off the streetcar. They stood together on the boardwalk beneath the broad, arching sign painted with fading candy-cane-striped letters: Holiday Island. Her hair fluttered about her face in the breeze, stronger now than even a block or two inland, with nothing between them and the neighboring ocean but the open air and clear blue sky. “I thought you might like to go.”
The beachfront rows were lined with amusement park rides and cheap, cheesy games like Sskee-Bball and ring toss booths, water gun contests and darts, all with colorful stuffed animals dangling from overhead hooks, an assortment of prizes never worth the small fortune invested to win one. It smelled like hot grease and sauerkraut, hot dogs and caramel corn, a pleasant mixture of aromas intermingled with the bitter, cold scent of the sea. Beyond the park, beyond the faded wooden planks of the boardwalk, the beach lay like a gray blanket of sand and the water was a deeper shade of slate that slapped against it in foamy waves. Seagulls and pelicans stayed close to the shore, circling overhead, clustering together
in imposing gangs along the walkways, waiting for food. Sea lions kept well beyond reach but within ready view of the beach, gathering on rocky outcroppings along the shallows offshore.
Sam slipped her hand against his and her fingers were warm. He let her lead him down the boardwalk at an unhurried pace. “Bear used to take me here all the time when I was a little girl,” she remarked, using her free hand to shield her eyes from the dazzling glare of the sun. “I’d spend all day riding the bumper cars or the carousel.”
The skyline looked different to him and it took him a long moment to realize why. There was the Waterfront Eye, the gigantic Ferris wheel. Near that was the Iron Tower, and undulating in and among these was a network of wooden and steel-framed roller coasters and other rides with whimsical named like the Mermaid, Astrotram, the Wonder Wheel and Spook-A-Rama.
“The Thunderbolt is gone,” he said, surprised.
Sam nodded. “They tore it down a few years ago.”
For a moment, holding her hand, walking along and chatting with her, it had felt to Jason like nothing had changed. But as she spoke, that illusion, however pleasant, shattered. In his mind, only a week earlier, they’d strolled along this very same path, and to their right, they’d been able to see the rising pinnacle of the Thunderbolt roller coaster, a wooden behemoth that had been a Holiday Island landmark for more than fifty years.
And now it’s gone, he thought, a wistful sort of forlornness momentarily seizing him. Just like my life and everything that had been in it.
Sam stopped and bought a stick of cotton candy, pink and blue swirled together, which she pinched off in dainty bites and popped into her mouth. They passed the sideshow theaters where a magician performed outside, pulling playing cards out from hidden alcoves in his sleeves while his tattooed and scantily clad assistant snapped her gum and looked bored.
Jason drew to a halt at the Shoot the Moon booth, and Sam went on without him for a few strides before turning, her expression curious. The prizes were different now…