She dressed just like Olivia, so perfectly put together, until she got home and the disguise came off. She was always yelling at his uncle, the closest thing Grant ever had to a father. The man had been out of work at the time, laid off. Apparently, he’d been laid off for too long. He’d come home once in a while with a little money he made doing odd jobs in the neighborhood. It never pleased the woman though; she’d look down on his contributions, like he was some retard holding money out to her.
Grant still remembered how his aunt would come home, walking up the driveway in her heels, putting on airs to the rest of the neighborhood that everything was fine. She couldn’t handle the illusion she wanted everyone to see. She spent all day at work being perfect only to come home and take out her stress on Grant and his uncle. Grant remembered watching his uncle’s shoulders draw in, his eyes becoming downcast at the floor when she came home. It reminded him of a dog that had crapped in the house and was about to have its nose rubbed in it.
His uncle was a timid man, too timid for his own good. Grant never understood it, from as early as he could remember. He knew how strong the man was; why not put the terrible woman in her place?
One day, while Grant was lying on the living room floor watching cartoons, he heard her car door shut. He cringed. The sound of her heels walking up the drive still echoed in his mind. He was only ever happy during the day when she was at work. Once she got home it was just a never-ending lecture on his uselessness. His uncle never stopped her, never intervened, even when Grant was standing in tears in front of the woman, unable to please her.
That day was different though. She came home, hell bent on ripping into them. It could’ve been anything. A cereal bowl left out of the dishwasher, Grant’s shoes on the living room floor. Her reaction would never match the offense.
Something had broken in his uncle that day. He’d been in the kitchen. She was yelling again. She slapped him, a common occurrence.
“I’m sick of you just acting like a damn toddler when I’m angry,” she yelled. “You’re not a man, just a useless drag on my money.”
Grant had tried to slip up the stairs, but she had yelled for him to come back. He hated her. He just wanted to go to his room where he wouldn’t have to hear her tantrum.
“You see this, Grant?” she said, pointing to his uncle. “This is your future. Maybe if you’re lucky you can find a woman to pay for you to sit on your worthless ass all day.”
Grant hadn’t expected it, but his hatred of the woman had shown that day. She saw the flash of defiance on his face before he could stop it. Eager to crush what little rebellion he had found in himself, she turned away from his uncle and headed toward him. Her hand already rising to slap the look Grant had given her off his face forever.
That was when it happened.
His uncle had grabbed her arm; his face had become red with rage, redder still on the cheek she had struck him. She should have backed down when she saw that look. Instead, she just saw more defiance in her inferiors, and she slapped him again, as hard as she could, with all the rage she’d intended to take out on Grant. The sound of the slap, hand against cheek, rang out. When his uncle finally lost control; when he pulled back his fist and hit her hard in the eye, he sent her sprawling across the floor.
Grant remembered being relieved. His uncle had saved him. He’d finally fought back. It would be clear to her, she’d see who had the power now.
The man didn’t look relieved though. His aunt lay unmoving on the kitchen floor. His uncle had reached over to Grant’s shoulder with a quaking hand; his fury replaced with a deeper dread than Grant had ever seen on a grown man, a dread that he didn’t understand. He’d drawn Grant to his chest, hugging him.
Before Grant knew what was happening, his uncle had fled through the kitchen door. It was the last time he ever saw the man. Grant had realized years later, his uncle must have thought he had killed the woman with that blow. When he eventually realized that wasn’t the case, he hadn’t come back. He’d left for good.
His aunt had been worse than ever after that. The embarrassment was impossible to hide. The neighborhood saw her black eye and that his uncle had left them. It didn’t take a detective to figure it out. She came back home after work for weeks angrier than ever before; the embarrassment of sitting in an office with the swollen bruise over her eye too much for her ego to bear. Grant was the only one there to absorb it. Still, he’d learned the lesson, even if his aunt hadn’t; he knew there was an answer to his problem.
He’d built himself up in high school. As soon as his muscles would react to the training, he’d started lifting weights. He let her yell at him, slap him. He learned to hide his anger as he gained his strength. He waited for the day he was going to take any power she had over him away, then she would be the one afraid to come home.
When the tides had turned, when she came at him one day to belittle him and tear him down, he had pushed her across the living room floor and watched her slam into wall. She had been so frightened then; he’d seen it in her eyes and he’d never felt so powerful. It was the last time she dared lay a finger on him. He wasn’t going to be like his uncle.
He’d left for the army when he was Seventeen.
It had all led him here, and he considered himself fortunate. Something important was happening right now, and if he’d gone looking for Jonathan a year earlier, he might have thought there was nothing to find. Had he asked Paige for a drink back then, he would’ve been long through with her by now. Probably a week after getting in her pants, if he had been on his usual schedule.
Paige was just another girl, even if she’d originally been a hastily planned way to meet Jonathan without raising any suspicions. A year ago he wouldn’t have likely found anything out of the ordinary. He’d have told her he’d call to make plans with no intention to do so, and then when he didn’t, he would ignore her calls. Eventually she’d get the message.
When he wanted to see how far he could push it, he’d wait a few weeks, call her up just to see if he could get her back into his bed after having so clearly blown her off; see if she’d still let him have her even though she knew he just wanted to get off again. Now though, with this deception between them, he couldn’t get enough of her; making a fool out of her made him feel intoxicated with power.
He didn’t have an end game for Princess Olivia, getting the government handler into his bed would have to wait. Taking orders from someone with tits was just something he’d have to endure for the time being. Regardless, he sat here now and put both women aside in his thoughts, a difficult task with Paige’s naked body beside him. This was after all, not about them. This was about Tibbs.
Jonathan Tibbs, another person who thought of him as some arrogant idiot. That though, was by design. He’d gone out of his way to give that impression, coming off like some musclebound moron so the guy would let his guard down around him; poking at the man, letting him know that he knew this story about a strange man attacking him in his home was a cover up for something else.
It hadn’t worked out as he’d planned. He’d been trying to feel out how to get a reaction out of the man. Grant had over-stepped somehow, he knew that now. Jonathan was supposed to be the son of an army ranger, not some pussy college kid. He hadn’t expected Tibbs to play at being some kind of wimp.
He’d been able to learn a lot from Paige, carefully coaxing the information out of her. It grated on his nerves, as he realized just how much time she spent worrying about her roommate. He was the one she was sleeping with after all; she shouldn’t be so concerned about some friend. It wasn’t right of her to make him feel competitive with Jonathan, not when it came to the woman’s affections. He had no interest in worrying if he had control of her loyalty. That she was so worried about some other man made his deceit all the more rewarding.
When he succeeded at getting her to open up, share things she seemed reluctant to say, he felt like he was winning battles against Tibbs. If it appeared that he was prying too muc
h into Jonathan’s business, he’d confess he was just concerned about his behavior affecting her safety, then she’d warm to him, just to relieve his fears.
Tibbs was bad news. It hadn’t been obvious at first, but the more events had unfolded, the more he’d thought about it, and he had spent a considerable amount of time thinking about it, the clearer it became.
That anyone had believed the man’s fabricated story made Grant indignant. The guy had become a recluse upon coming home from the hospital and was having dreams so bad that he was waking his roommates in the middle of the night. Grant had been there to overhear a few of those himself, he’d even snuck across the hall from Paige’s room to listened to the man tossing in his sleep.
Please. Help me, Heyer. Dammit, I’m sorry.
He could swear he’d even heard him crying out for his father. What kind of stress must a man be under to have dreams so disturbing he’d lose his shit like that?
More curious, he’d dropped out of school. Paige hadn’t even known what he was doing with all his time outside the house. Grant hadn’t said anything about it, but Jonathan had gotten a membership at his gym; he’d seen him there frequently, though he’d never let Tibbs realize it. Apparently, when Jonathan wasn’t at work or the gym, he spent all of his time in their garage.
He was up to something down there; people with nothing to hide don’t just decide to drop out of college junior year, train like an insurgent, and spend the rest of their hours in a garage doing god knows what.
No, little Tibbs has got a bad secret.
Jonathan was why Homeland Security had pulled Grant into this. Paige was just a convenient cover story to get him involved, manipulate a person into the house without having to pull too many strings. Princess just thought he would blow the operation if she told him who they were really after. He’d thought she was on to him the moment he’d seen the surveillance photo of him at the hospital. Turned out that arrogant woman just saw a convenient tool for the job, but didn’t have a clue why that tool really happened to be there.
He’d find out what really happened to Jonathan that night. All that blood and no explanation, he’d seen the house before the roommates had cleaned. Someone was killed on that floor. Jonathan had covered it up with the story about the attacker, and he didn’t think Tibbs could pull that off on his own.
Obviously, something about it had set off a red flag at Homeland Security. It had to have been something important, something specific, for all this trouble to be put into watching him, something greatly significant to US security.
What Grant couldn’t figure out was why the operation was going at this so sideways. Why bother getting intelligence from someone like him? Why not just bug the house? Get a search warrant, break down the door and turn the place upside down until they found what they were looking for? At first he thought that Jonathan must be some unibomber type and that they had wanted to see who he made contact with. Grant hadn’t known what to expect when he’d gone looking for Tibbs himself, but that didn’t seem to fit. If he was just a small piece of a bigger operation that Olivia was controlling, Jonathan had to be involved with something bigger than a terrorist operation.
That was what really drove Grant now. Everything was coming together. The world was finally making all the pieces fit into place, to give him what he was owed. His chance to really do something, to be a hero for his entire country after a lifetime of being told he was worthless. It had all been leading up to this, and all fate needed him to do was piece it together. Destiny was arranging things so he’d be there at just the right moment, to stop Tibbs while he had his hand right over the doomsday button.
“Can’t hide forever,” Grant said to himself out loud.
Paige roused next to him at the sound, but he didn’t imagine she’d really heard him.
“What’s wrong?” she mumbled in her sleep.
“Go back to sleep, babe,” Grant said softly.
She wasn’t awake enough to know she was speaking. She rolled back to her side, away from him and seemed to drift right back. When he thought her far away, he heard her speak again.
“More bad dreams Jon?” she murmured.
Grant glared at her. She’d spent all night with him, in his bed, and still she worried about that lying bastard.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
THURSDAY | AUGUST 11, 2005 | 8:00 PM
IN the corner of the garage, a fan whirred. Sweat ran down his face and saturated his shirt. His eyes closed, he stood on the rubber mats that now carpeted the cement floor, listening to the fan blades, visualizing motions he would execute in his mind.
Strong forearms, relaxed shoulders, palm down.
As his eyes opened, the sting of sweat from his brow threatened to cloud his vision. He observed his stance in the mirrors that now lined the garage walls. His instructor’s words ran through his mind.
Pull the strike to the shoulder, not the tricep. Sweep the leg, regain your stance quickly, and roll the staff over your neck, strike.
The movements began, his bare feet gripping the floor mats as he performed the precise combination of attacks. The mirror reflected his hard won grace, the result of countless repetitions.
To Jonathan, the maneuvers sometimes seemed like someone else entirely, such deadly precision reflecting back at him, a lack of awkwardness he hadn’t previously been capable of. The thoughts that floated in his mind after hours of training, much like the grace itself, seemed to belong to someone else entirely. He only half recognized them as a part of himself, a combination of the clarity of focus, a quietness of mind, and a fatigue he held at bay. It wasn’t his first time experiencing this; it was becoming the state of mind he embraced.
Words translated into movements without being so much thought but as if they were sensed. Every attack was efficient, no wasted step, no imperfect strike requiring him to overreach. His hands landed on the staff precisely where he meant them to; his feet precisely the distance from his imaginary opponent as would deliver the most powerful blow and give up the least of his defense. The weapon danced around him like an extension of himself.
Three Hundred and sixty degree spin, reverse, maintain momentum, two handed figure eight, step and strike, smooth, strong, powerful.
Three weeks had passed since Jonathan had asked Lincoln to put him in touch with his martial arts contacts. He’d experimented with a few alternate weapons, but the staff had felt right from the first time he’d picked it up.
It wasn’t as difficult to learn a weapon on a theoretical level as Jonathan had expected. He’d drilled every night with the staff. His forearms had become dense with the muscle from perpetual use, his hands callused. He practiced until the movements became such an embedded part of his muscle memory that he could facilitate the motion required as quickly as they occurred to him. He was far more critical of himself than his instructor had been. He absorbed his training with the focus of a starving man hunting prey.
Watch the collar bone, don’t over extend your elbow, don’t lean forward, strong stance, trust the staff.
Sometimes, he imagined it was the voice of his father, the ghost standing behind him, pointing out the flaws in his technique, coaching him to try it again, to be better. Other times, when he wanted to quit, he’d see Douglas sitting on the steps leading into the house, encouraging him to stay.
He’d been a mess of bruises after his first two weeks of training, but the fruits of all the pain and perseverance were becoming apparent. The dexterity he’d initially found so elusive now flowed from his fingertips as though he’d known how to yield the weapon since birth. The nerves of his body, his shins and forearms were deadening to the pain of constant assault. He was more familiar with his muscles than he’d ever been.
Still, the problem remained.
There was no real way to train for this fight. There weren’t any sparring partners who could prepare him to engage a Ferox, and no Ferox was going to fight him like a man.
Jonathan steadied himself, finding the
balance in his stance. He closed his eyes again. From within the self-imposed darkness, undistracted by the perception of sight, he set the stage. The beast came at him. He whipped the staff around him, dodging to the right as its phantom claw reached for him. As he spun, the staff spun with him, sweeping the monster’s leg out from under it. Without pause, Jonathan spun again and lowered his frame to strike downward as he came around, the staff following him, catching the beast in the skull just as it completed its fall to the floor.
Amply executed in his imagination, the only tool he had to train against. Back in reality, the staff struck the padding on the garage floor with an unsatisfying thwack.
He opened his eyes.
His technique hadn’t been flawless. He’d felt the slight imperfections in his movement. The combination of moves were fresh to him, so he drilled, alternating between his left and right side to make sure he was capable of it on an ambidextrous level.
As was happening more frequently, he felt the deadly grace rising through the movements, felt himself being watched by something within, something growing stronger.
When exhaustion surfaced, he dropped the staff and peeled off his shirt. It was heavy with perspiration. He took a deep breath, sat on the edge of the weight bench, and faced himself in the mirror. In the reflection, he noticed something he hadn’t before. There were marks under his arms, between his chest and around his biceps. They looked like scars.
Stretch marks. Lincoln had warned him this was likely.
“Anyone who goes from never lifting weights to training like an Olympic athlete stretches his skin as the muscle grows faster than the skin can adapt,” he’d said.
Jonathan didn’t like it. The skin looked webbed and shiny. It was ugly, the product of hours of cruelty to himself. The longer he looked, the more the differences surfaced. He hadn’t cut his hair in a month; he needed to shave. He was surprised Mr. Fletcher hadn’t said anything. He was getting worse and worse about it as he’d had less and less time; things like grooming became more irrelevant. What he didn’t like more than any of it were his eyes. They looked tired, shadowed, and something else, something he couldn’t put his finger on.
Chronicles of Jonathan Tibbs 1: The Never Hero Page 22