by Meg Jackson
“You don’t understand,” Damon said, shaking his head. “It doesn’t matter. I don’t care. Now that I know about it, I can prevent it. I need to fight. I need this fight…”
“We need you,” Mina said, stepping forward. “We need you a lot more than you need this.”
Damon looked at his sister, eyes softening.
“Please,” Tricia said, standing off to the side. “Damon, listen to them. Please.”
He looked at Tricia, and his jaw went slack. His shoulders slumped. She thought she’d never seen him so broken, so sad. It made her heart feel like shattering.
“Fine,” he said, finally, looking down. “Let’s go, then.”
Kennick and Cristov stepped to the side as Damon pushed past them towards the back door. Outside the other door, the faint sounds of a discontented crowd reached them. Damon was at the back door, pushing it open, when a man swept in through the front door.
“Where the fuck do you think you’re going?” the man said, pointing to Damon, who didn’t turn. “I got a crowd out there that wants blood, and fast. We had an agreement…”
The back door slammed shut.
“Agreement’s off,” Cristov said, turning to the red-faced man. “Damon’s not fighting. Whatever he owes you…just send us the bill, huh?”
“What? What the fuck do you mean he’s not fighting? I need him to fight, goddammit, I need him, Jesus Mary and Joseph…”
They left the man cursing and blubbering behind them, all feeling relieved – and yet, at the same time, heavy-hearted. Things didn’t feel finished. The storm was still coming. Damon had given up – for the first time in his life, perhaps, he had yielded.
There would be something owed for that, they were sure.
And when they stepped outside, into the first real slough of rain, they saw what payment was owed.
32
Damon left his family and his woman behind to deal with the angry promoter, walking out the back door before he could change his mind. Fucked. This was fucked. So long he’d waited, so damn long, and those biker fucks had to…
“Hey!”
The shout barely made it to Damon’s ears before a roll of thunder shook through the sky. Rain began to come down like a fine steam, the drops piddling across the cement, making Damon’s shirt feel slightly larger and less comfortable than it had moments ago. Damon turned. A man stood against the building, where a second door led to his opponent’s locker room. The man threw a cigarette onto the ground.
“Hey, you fuck! Where you going! We’re supposed to be in there any second!”
The rain came harder, turning fabric to glue, making the world heavier. Damon’s heart thudded in his chest. The man heaved himself off the side of the building, began to cross the pavement towards Damon.
How long had it been since Damon had seen him? The years hadn’t been kind. He was big, impressively big, but his muscles were a façade. His stomach protruded: a fat, sturdy drum. In a moment, Damon figured out his angle. He could take a lot of hits. Enough to wear a man down. His hair was thinning, his face carved and etched with wrinkles. Damon felt something strange welling up inside him and he stamped it down. Anger coiled around his shoulders, tensing his muscles.
“This is over,” Damon said, but the words were swallowed by the thunder, a flash of lightning across the sky. “I’m not fighting you.”
But, oh, how Damon wanted to. Curly Gottlieb stalked forward, his face a grotesque mask of cruelty. He was there. Right there. He was coming closer, walking right into Damon’s hands, offering himself up on a platter. Suddenly, Damon was a kid again, his heart thumping hard against his ribs as he watched this man take something that didn’t belong to him, something sacred precious, watched this man hurt someone as terribly as a human could be hurt…
“Damon,” he heard another shout, this one recognizable, over the increasing sound of rain hitting ground, the downpour like a curtain now. Wind swept around Damon, solid and immovable as a boulder.
“Fuck that shit, boy, you get in there and fight me,” Curly bellowed. “I need that money and…”
“Damon!”
“Do you know who I am?” Damon growled, staring at the man, now only a few feet away. Everything Damon had been chasing for twenty years stood between them, every nightmare, every thrashing pain in his heart, every dark corner of his mind. “Do you recognize me?”
Curly didn’t look like he did, and he didn’t look like he cared, either. The man pointed to the door to Damon’s locker room.
“Get your ass inside, kid, and let’s give ‘em a show,” he said. “Been waiting for you to get out there…”
“Damon, just go!”
Tricia put her hand over her mouth, felt the rain pouring down around her, gluing her hair to her forehead and her clothes to her skin. The world was darkening, the sky was opening up. Thunder rumbled. She watched Damon pull back, watched his fist smash against the man’s rotund stomach, watched the man double over slightly in pain and shock. Damon reached down, grabbed the man by what was left of his hair, and yanked him up until they were face-to-face again.
“I asked you a fucking question,” Damon growled, the rain flowing across his lips, making everything slippery, making the world into a wet and dizzy fuzz.
“Fuckin’ punk,” the man spat back, and before Damon could move away he felt a fist against his jaw, felt his teeth knocking together as Curly managed to find the one place on Damon’s body that would force him to release. Damon had his left hand fisted and swung it back even as his body screamed in pain, his mouth slack, his face feeling broken. He hit Curly at the ear, forcing the man to stumble to one side, where Damon’s right fist was waiting to hook him in the ribs.
That was the last blow Damon would land.
Curly knew he didn’t have any choice at this point. He pulled the blade from where it was hidden in his waistband, flipped the switch and plunged it into Damon’s side just as he felt the impact against his own ribs. With a howl of pain and burst of sudden rage, he ripped downward, pulling the blade through flesh and gristle, digging it deeper, deep as it would go.
For a moment, it seemed, it wouldn’t matter. Damon wrapped his arm around Curly’s neck, yanked him down, raised his elbow high to slam into Curly’s back.
And then he stumbled.
His arms went slack.
Lightning crashed, thunder rolled, and Damon fell to the ground.
Curly coughed, backing away, the water running into his eyes. Damon’s legs twitched as he tried to lift himself; his eyes caught on the silver sticking out of his side, the blood running clear but thick, mixed with the rain. Curly reached forward and grabbed the blade of the knife, ripping it from the wound. Damon would die quicker that way.
His heart was thudding, too loud it seemed, or maybe those were footsteps…
Curly gasped, finally getting his breath back, and turned just in time to see a blonde-haired, green-eyed clone of the man he’d just sliced open running towards him, rage in his eyes. And behind him, another man, thinner than any of them but no twig. Curly had approximately two seconds before the first man would be on top of him, and Curly didn’t have to be a psychic to know that he’d be joining Damon in hell before this kid stopped wailing on him.
So Curly ran.
As fast as his aged, taxed, already-aching body could carry him. Girls were screaming. Car doors were opening, shutting, and Curly ran. He didn’t look behind him, he only looked ahead, as far as he could see through the rain. The whole world was one big ocean, and he had to outswim the sharks. But fuck it, he’d gotten out of worse situations before, and he’d get out of this one. Two blocks – three blocks – four blocks and he turned.
He was alone.
Panting, he waited.
The sky cleared while he waited.
He stood up straight. Fuck, he thought. So much for another day, another dollar…
33
“Listen, you still gotta pay me,” Curly growled, standing with his arms c
rossed. Roper snarled back at him.
“Pay you? We don’t even know if you did what you said you did!”
Curly pointed to the bloody knife on the table between them.
“What, you think I got all that blood cutting myself? Think I chased down a seagull and stabbed it in the heart? I saw your boy, I cut him good, I get paid.”
“No body, no money,” Roper said, shaking his head.
“Aw, you gotta be fuckin’ shitting me,” Curly groaned. “I’m already getting stiffed by the club ‘cause the crowd didn’t get their pound of flesh. You gotta give me somethin’. His buddies started comin’ after me, it was gonna be two against one. Didn’t have time to collect the body. Shit, they wouldn’t have let me anyway. But I’m tellin’ you, I got him deep, and I got him good. Check the obits. He ain’t getting up again.”
Curly was lying, of course. He didn’t know if the wound he gave his would-be opponent was fatal or not. All he knew was that the last he saw, the guy wasn’t moving around much. And he knew his rent was due, and that he was a good amount of money short. He’d tell these guys that he’d put their man on a rocket ship to Saturn with Freddy Krueger at the helm if it got him the money.
And when Roper tried to intimidate Curly, giving him a long hard stare, Curly gave it right back. He’d lived too hard and fought too many guys to back down because this asshole wanted to be stingy.
“Half,” Roper spat. “We’ll give you half. And the other half if we find out he’s really dead.”
Curly opened his mouth to argue, but heard the telltale sound of a gun cocking behind him. His mouth closed fast. He nodded. Better than nothing, he thought, and much better than a bullet in the back.
And wasn’t that just the measure of these men? He counted out the money as he walked out the door. Shoot a fellow right in the back. Like cowards. For a split second, Curly Gottlieb hoped that man had lived, and that he’d come around to teach these fuckwits a lesson. They sure as hell deserved it.
34
Damon didn’t need to open his eyes to know that the light would be too bright. He felt like he was leaking from his ribs, and for a confused moment he imagined his marrow seeping away from bones that had given up the ghost.
Voices surrounded him; low and grave, alternately high-pitched, all harsh as the light that filtered through his closed lids. But he could turn his hands to fists. He could wiggle his toes. He could move his head, at least slightly, from side to side. For a moment, the sound around him wavered, turned watery and sonic. His imagination bloomed with an image of the river Styx, lapping at some dark stone floor, and a white-faced Charon offering his bony hand for passage.
“You fucking asshole.”
The words made the picture in his mind ripple away. He recognized the voice even through the haze; he realized, suddenly, how thirsty he was. It seemed like his senses were suffering from that thirst, that the reason the world sounded and smelled so weird was because his body was withering away like a tumbleweed. The anger and the ire in the voice at his ear, Cristov’s voice, meant nothing. Nothing meant anything until he got some water. His own voice croaked out, feeling alien.
“Water,” he said, his dry lips scraping together, his tongue barely moving, stony and cracked.
“No way motherfucker,” Cristov raged. Damon sensed the heat of his brother’s body close at hand, heard a rumble of chairs against linoleum, the heat receding as Kennick’s voice came low and level through the air.
“Calm down, prala, let him have some water.”
“Is he even allowed to have water?”
That was Ricky’s voice, he knew. Damon groaned as he tried to force his eyes open against their will. Even the slightest allowance of light made his head explode in pain.
“Why not?”
Tricia. The pain forgotten, Damon opened his eyes, whipped his head to find the source of that voice. She was sitting closest to him, her knuckles at her mouth, eyes wide and worried. When she saw his gaze fixed on hers, a single sob escaped her mouth. She reached out with one hand and grabbed his aching head, rising to meet his lips, the pain in his jaw radiating, swallowed by her lips. It returned when she pulled away, shaking her head, her mouth contorted somewhere between a smile and a frown.
“Cristov is right,” she said, voice barely a whisper. “You are a fucking asshole. Jesus, Damon, I thought you were dead…”
“Tricia,” he croaked again, his mouth savoring the little bit of her that lingered after her kiss. “Water?”
“Right,” she said, sniffling as she turned to the little table beside her, pouring out a glass of water with a shaking hand.
“Dude, wait,” Ricky said, coming into focus now as Damon’s eyes drifted over the small crowd gathered at his hospital bed. “He might be like…”
She grimaced, then put her hand to her side, right under her chest, over her ribs, and splayed her fingers out.
“A sprinkler,” she said, blushing.
Leaking, Damon thought, recalling his earlier sensation. He looked down, lifting the flimsy blanket draped across his chest. He had a bandage wrapped around his ribs and across the top of his abdomen, tight. Touching his side, he felt pain erupt in a bright bloom.
“They stitched him up,” Mina said, raising one eyebrow as she studied Ricky. She was sitting next to Kim, the three women lined up in chairs against the wall.
“I know,” Ricky said. “That’s what I mean. Try pouring water into a pillowcase and guess where it starts dripping.”
“Ricky,” Kim said, leveling her sister with a gaze. “That is the stupidest thing I have ever heard. They didn’t even hook him up to a fluid drip. If he couldn’t drink water, they’d have given him fluids.”
“It’s not that stupid,” Ricky grumbled, arms crossed. “I read that a woman once got pregnant from giving a blowjob because she got stabbed in the stomach after swallowing.”
Tricia stared at Ricky, the glass of water in her hands. Everyone was staring at Ricky. Her face reddened even more.
“Oh, just go ahead,” she said. “I don’t know what I’m saying. I’m just…fuck, Damon, you worried the shit out of us.”
She directed that last bit straight at Damon, and wiped at a tear that rolled down her cheek.
Damon felt the first drops of water against his lips as Tricia leaned the glass towards him. He drank until he couldn’t breathe, then sat back gasping, feeling the water do its work on his body. The world seemed a bit clearer. Unfortunately, everything seemed to hurt a little more, too.
“What’s this?” he said, pointing to the IV leading into his veins. “If it’s not water…”
“Pain meds,” Kennick answered, still standing behind Cristov, who was staring down at Damon with an unreadable expression on his face. Somewhere between anger and fear and relief. Damon found himself unable to meet that gaze, kept his eyes bouncing between Kennick and Tricia.
“Stop them,” he growled, grabbing at the tube that disappeared into his arm. “I don’t want them.”
“Oh, fuck no,” Tricia said, lunging forward to grab at his hand. “You have no idea how much it’s going to hurt without them, and you can’t go around ripping needles out of your fucking veins. Do you know how much blood they had to put back in you already?”
“Don’t care,” Damon said, struggling as Kennick’s hand joined Tricia’s. Normally, he knew, he could break free in an instant. But this wasn’t a very normal circumstance. He’d never felt worse, never felt weaker. The barest struggle left him feeling breathless and drained. “I don’t want them. I want to feel it. I want to feel what he did to me. What I let him do…”
“Shut up,” Cristov said, taking a menacing step forward. That, more than anything, made Damon’s arm go slack. For the first time in their lives, Damon thought Cristov might actually try to hit him. They’d sparred before, practiced before Damon’s bouts, gotten into verbal fistfights…but they’d never actually hit the other out of anger. Damon had never even feared that. He didn’t fear it now.
What was a little more pain? It was what it would mean that scared him. An unspoken vow finally broken.
“Cristov,” Damon said, finally meeting his younger brother’s eyes.
“Don’t you fucking try to drop some psychobabble bullshit on me right now, Damon,” Cristov said. Around them, the room was quiet, everyone seeming to hold their breath as the two brothers faced off.
“You nearly died. Do you understand that? What, it wasn’t bad enough when you were doping? You had to risk your life again? Without telling us? Like we’re nothing, like we’re not family, like you don’t owe us a fucking explanation? What you do…what you do involves all of us. You love sitting around, doling out pansy-ass advice like you’re some goddamn phuro, like all our problems are your problems. But you don’t think we’re good enough to shoulder your burdens? Is that it? We’re not smart enough, not strong enough?”
“Cristov,” Damon said again, his brother’s red face growing redder with each word.
“We need you, Damon,” Cristov continued. “And you need us. You pretend like you don’t, but you do. You need us.”
“Cristov,” Mina said, mimicking Damon with a softer voice, and rising from her chair to put a hand on Cristov’s bunched bicep. He shook her off like a fly.
“Do you know what you almost missed? Do you know how much you would have hurt us? Did you ever even think about the people who’d be left behind? You’ve got a fucking niece or nephew to worry about now, Damon. I almost lost the chance to introduce my child to his uncle. His kako.”
“Shit,” Ricky muttered, breaking the sudden rise in tension in the room. She groaned, burying her face in her palms. Tricia and Kim were the first to turn to her.
“What the fuck,” Kim said, and reached out to her sister, grabbing her roughly by the chin. “Ricky, you’re pregnant?”
“Well, we didn’t really plan on telling anyone like this,” Ricky snapped, fixing angry eyes on Cristov, who turned to face her.