Whiskey and Wry (Sinners Series) (2 page)

“Better get your ass moving there, Damie.” He blew on his fingers, trying to get his hands warm. The helicopter whirred past, circling around to point its beam down on another part of the valley floor, and Damien took off, slogging through the damp tall grasses in the hopes of finding a way out of the hell he’d been trapped in.

Ever since he’d woken up and found himself the proud owner of a torso-long scar down the front of his body and his shorn hair growing up around staple holes along his skull, Damien had wondered where the fucking hole was that he’d fallen through and how the hell he could find his way back without his own personal White Rabbit. The doctors kept insisting he’d gotten injured while stoned out of his mind and snowboarding in Aspen, but people who said he was their son once told him he was in a car accident. Their conflicting stories were shaky at best and became transparently false when they’d begun to elaborate on the missing chunks of his memory.

Especially since Damien
hated
being cold, and the chance of him being caught on a piece of steel-edged polyethylene and hurling himself down a frozen mountain was about as good as a Norwegian Blue waking up from its nap.

Despite the intense physical therapy he’d been given after he woke up from his Sleeping Beauty phase, he was winded. All the muscle mass in the world meant nothing if his lungs weren’t cooperating. Worse still, his chest was beginning to hurt, his repaired heart pounding hard to keep up with the demands he was putting on it. His stamina was shit, and his body was in pain because of it.

The alternative was to turn around and give himself back over to his wardens, kissing off any chance of having a normal life ever again.

“Fuck that,” Damien huffed, then yelped, sliding across a patch of damp grasses. “I’m going to fucking break my neck out here. Then that fucker won’t need to shoot me.”

The thought of dying out in the middle of the snow-dusted boonies forced Damien to his feet. He couldn’t do that. Not when he had too many damned questions needing answers.

“Sinjun. Go find Sinjun, you stupid fuck. Everything will be okay once you find him.” He
remembered
his best friend. He
knew
they’d lost the other two members of their band in the accident. There’d been a hazy moment when he’d surfaced out of the darkness he’d been plunged into and heard someone say Dave and Johnny died.

He ran until he couldn’t breathe anymore, and finally, Damien had to stop. Finding a thick pine tree to lean against, he let himself breathe.

Damien could only remember their existence and some fragments of things they’d done together. Everything else had been wiped out under the steel frame of the limo popping his skull open. There were gaps in his mind, long expanses of nothingness Damien couldn’t fill with any whisper of a memory. He knew Miki St. John liked to eat the insides out of a
char siu bao
before nibbling on the white bread exterior and what a twelve-bar blues progression was—he could even finger one out on a broom handle, since they’d not allowed him access to a guitar—but couldn’t tell anyone what he’d been for
any
Halloween. Damien didn’t know when his birthday was, but he’d been able to instantly recognize the opening bars of “Rude Mood” playing on a radio at the nurses’ station.

Everything made him cry. The loss of who he’d been was nothing compared to the sudden disappearance of the friends he’d come to call his brothers. At least Miki was still alive. He
knew
in his gut Miki was still alive. The oh-so-brief glance at an unattended computer console proved it. He’d paid for it with a two-week stint in solitary, but it gave Damien enough to focus on. Even if the article didn’t have any pictures and he couldn’t fully remember what Miki looked like.

Stamping some feeling back into his legs, he began heading down a long hill, half sliding along on the slick meadowland. His knees were beginning to hurt from slamming into large rocks when he’d fall, and his palms throbbed, making him suspect he’d scraped them raw in places.

“Sure, don’t take care of your hands,” he snorted. “You’re only a guitarist.”

Hands could heal, Damien consoled himself. Running harder was more important. Especially since it sounded like a pack of howling dogs were now competing with the fire engines and ambulances. He tried not to think of anything else—Miki, Jerome’s shot-split skull—nothing but putting one foot in front of the other was more important. Getting warm again definitely was on the agenda as well.

The road was a surprise, and Damien blinked when he hit the stretch of black ribbon curving through the hills. He’d been concentrating on climbing a deep ditch when his fingers touched the rough asphalt. Nearly crying in relief, Damien almost kissed the oily tarred surface in glee, but a flash of red lights coming up over the hill made him duck back down again.

A fire truck screamed past him, a whir of lights, noise, and exhaust stink flying by fast enough to ruffle the hair lying across his forehead. He waited until the dust settled back onto the road before standing up, and if his breath wasn’t already suffering, it would have been taken away by the sight of Skywood’s long halls buried under a wall of flames.

From what Damien could see, the retreat was engulfed, its brick walls crumbling down from its perch on the high hills. The towering evergreens surrounding the grounds were crackling and popping from the heat, spirals of sparks rising up from their burning branches.

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

“H
EY
,
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.

She definitely had no complaints about the money that came in once tourists discovered Finnegan’s, and they’d certainly come. Jugglers had their place, as did the man who scared the crap out of people by hiding behind a bush, then screaming at them when they passed him.

Musicians, however, were a different story. Unlike the tourists and a brighter pub, she’d take great delight in running them off from in front of the pub, sometimes a bit too enthusiastically, hurrying them along with a swat of a broom or a bucket of ice water. Musicians, in her mind, were as much of a nuisance as pigeons. Except you can’t put them into a pie, the damned bastards, she’d grumble to Sionn during one of his after-school shifts.

Damned if he didn’t miss her.

He’d slunk home after the shooting, limping only slightly from the scarring in his thigh. Odd that he’d come to Finnegan’s for solace, something he’d not done even after Gran’s passing. But now, there he was, changing out kegs, slinging drinks, and calling out orders to the waitstaff like he’d never gone off into the world to protect the innocent.

Except he’d lost an innocent, and now the busker outside was his problem and his alone.

Many of the street musicians were familiar to him, but the guitarist they’d taken to calling the Cowboy was a new addition to the pier crowd. No one at Finnegan’s remembered seeing him before he showed up three weeks ago, but even Sionn had to admit the man was pretty to look at. At least as much as they could see past the rolled-brim cowboy hat he wore canted forward on his forehead.

“You going to run him off?” Leigh’s bony elbow dug a divot into his shoulder, and she leaned her weight into him, watching as he clicked the last connection together. “It’s kind of nice, you know. The stuff he plays. Classic.”

“But not Irish,” Sionn grunted, shoving the heavy tank into place. “We’re an
Irish
pub. He’s out there playing whatever the fuck he’s playing. He can go do that in front of Sciloni’s or something.”

“People like it, and just because
you’re
Irish, doesn’t mean it’s not music.” She straightened up, shaking out the ribbons she’d used to tie her Smurf-hued hair into ponytails. “I like it, and technically, I’m the manager. You’re just pitching in, remember?”

Sionn didn’t need
that
reminder that he was drifting along. He wasn’t needed at the pub. It ran fine without him. Probably better even, but he had nowhere else to go, nothing else to do. Damn, he needed to get his shit together and figure out what he was going to do now that he’d walked away from being a body shield for rich people.

“Finnegan’s doesn’t
do
music, remember? No buskers, no darts, and no telly, other than during the
futbol
finals. That’s the rules, Leigh girl.” He wiped his hands on one of the bar towels, then tossed it into the laundry bin to be washed. “I’ll go roust him. Don’t fuss at it. I’ll take care of it.”