Whiskey and Wry (Sinners Series) (18 page)

“Then why the hell is there an alien trying to chew its way out of my stomach?” he’d grumbled to himself as he buttoned up his borrowed shirt before they left.

It was too big for him. When Sionn’d tossed him a burgundy shirt out of his closet and said it was one that no longer fit his shoulders, Damien knew it would
still
be too large. The man was built like a white pony meant to carry Valkyries. Still, he had to admit the shirt looked good on him, even with the shoulder seams drooping halfway down his upper arms and the tails dragging down to his midthigh. Rolling up the sleeves helped.

So did the kiss Sionn placed on the back of his neck.

No, his nerves were just going to have to step to the back of the bus and sit there quietly. If things got bad, he’d go into the bathroom, and they could chuck themselves into the bottom of a toilet.

“Parents fucking hate me, you know,” he said for the tenth time since they’d gotten into Sionn’s Jeep and headed up toward the Presidio.

“You keep saying that.” The traffic was fairly thick despite the steady drench of rain tangling up the roadways. Two lanes over, an orange cab slithered around, its balding tires unable to get a good purchase on the slick hill. Sionn slowed the Jeep down, keeping out of the taxi’s way. “Aunt B loves everyone.”

“Dude, I’m always the one person parents hate. Shit, they even love Miki, and he’s a fucked-up mess.” He worried at his tongue, suddenly missing the stud he’d had through it but never knew he’d had. There were
parts
of him missing, and it pissed him off. His chest zipper throbbed, and he grimaced, belatedly mourning when an unknown someone cut off his piercings so they could save his damned life. Slouching down in the seat, he readjusted his cowboy hat until it angled over his forehead. “They could have at least put my earrings back in.”

“I should have burned that thing instead of tossing it into the backseat.” Sionn glanced at the leather hat. “It covers too much of your face.”

“I like it,” he defended it with a growl. “It was the second thing I got after I ran out of Skywood. A trucker named Jim gave it to me.”

“A trucker, huh?” Sionn grinned. “Okay, so I bite. What was the first thing?”

“Clothes. And a few bruises, but so fucking worth it. Grizzly Walter and his mutt, Fred, hit me with Walter’s Chevy. He felt like shit about it, so he took me into town.”

The guy who’d hit him in the middle of the Montana wilderness had spare clothes at his cabin and a fierce distrust of the retreat he lived in the shadow of. They’d stopped there long enough for Damien to get a shower and change clothes, stepping over Walter’s dog, who seemed to only move quickly when it was time to get in or out of the truck. Fred’s owner was even slower. Walter drove about as fast as he talked, a molasses-slow process that took them nearly two hours to go thirty miles.

Listening to the gray-bearded mountain man grumble about conspiracies and electroshock therapy was a small price to pay for a few pairs of jeans, worn boots, an old flannel shirt, and a ride into Billings. By the time they reached the city, Damien was ready to walk back to California just so he could move a bit faster, but every inch Walter drove, he was that much farther away from the burning mess of his prison.

His nerves kicked back into overdrive, and Damien tapped at the Cherokee’s dashboard, beating out a rhythm he’d been working on in his head. The tempo was a bit complicated, and he knew he’d have to slow it down for Dave until the drummer—Damien stopped the thought before he could finish it, fumbling the upbeat. Dave would never play the song he’d woken up with. Johnny would never help him lay down its bass line or grumble when Sinjun rearranged something right as they’d almost gotten it down.

Fuck, that hurt.

So damned bad.

But—he bit the inside of his lip—Miki was still here to help put the words to the notes. He had that. If he was thankful for anything, it was that someone somewhere decided the world still needed Sinjun in it. Meeting Sionn’s relatives was a small price to pay to see Miki again. Shit, he’d offer to blow them all one by one if it got him a step closer to home.

Although he’d prefer to keep it to just Sionn. Maybe he could just buy them each a car.

Sitting back up, he grinned over at Sionn. “So, your family… they got Rock Band, maybe?”

H
ELL
took the form of a large, rambling Victorian-style home on the hills beneath the Presidio. It was an impressive place, painted a cheery color, a bright spot against the backdrop of rain and storm clouds. Bits of rainbows were gathered about the house, flower beds ripe with brilliant petals, dotted with silvery water drops and surrounded by a lushly green lawn. To Damie, it was a hidden demonic conclave, packed with people connected through laughter, bloodlines, and shared stories.

And it scared the living shit out of him.

From the looks of the cars parked around the house, the family appeared to own stock in SUV production. Everything was huge, with large tires, and screamed of tight-bodied men who used redwoods for toothpicks. Sionn’s chunky red Jeep fit right in. If the house wasn’t looming enough, running through a gauntlet of vehicles with police stickers on them was psychological intimidation.

Tapping a rear window emblazoned with a fire shield, Damie crooked an eyebrow at Sionn and smirked. “Black sheep of the family?”

“Brae?” Shaking his head, Sionn pushed Damie up the long walk. “More like the off-gray sheep. Quinn’s got the market down on being the odd one out. He teaches history over at the uni. Think he’s a doctor or summat.”

“Family must be so fucking ashamed.” He was muttering to himself. Sionn’d overtaken him and headed to the front door, taking the steps to their doom with an almost cheerful glee.

Damie was expecting Sionn to knock on the door or ring the bell, but no, the man grabbed the knob, turned it, and swung the way wide open for Damie to follow. Standing on the threshold, he jerked his head toward the inside of the house, urging Damien to hurry up. “Don’t dawdle. I’m letting all the heat out of the house, and while none of us are hurting for money, it doesn’t do to waste. Come on.”

Inside was worse.

There were ghosts of happy childhoods running about the place. They lurked everywhere, in pictures of smiling young men with their arms flung over the shoulders of two redheaded, freckled-faced girls with equally wide grins, and a handmade, lopsided vase painted a lurid red. The foyer’s wood floor gleamed, and a faint lemon-oil scent lingered, doing its best to fight off the smell of roasting meat coming from somewhere deeper in the house. Laughter hung in the air, deep, booming voices with a dash of Irish in them arguing about a rugby match they’d all seen.

It was
painful
to be in the house. It held too much… promise of things Damien never had, of Christmases and birthdays spent with a family who argued over small things but stood together to weather the storms. His chest filled with a familiar ache, one burrowed down deeper than the zipper scar he wore on his skin. He’d found that snippet of laughter with Miki once, and he’d clung to it, digging himself deep into that friendship until they’d grown together.

He reached for Sionn’s hand. Blind and needy.

Sionn’s fingers were there, wrapping around his and holding Damie tight.

“It’ll be okay, Cowboy.” Sionn snagged Damien’s hat and tossed it onto an oak sideboard against the foyer’s long wall. “We’ll talk to my uncle and then get some food in you. Maybe a beer or two.”

“Beer? Just hand me a fifth of Jack and I’ll go find a corner to crawl into,” he grumbled back, but he kept his hand firmly in Sionn’s.

“If it gets to be too much for you, then I’ll show you the widow’s walk on the roof and bring one,” Sionn whispered in his ear. “We can hide out there. I’ll find an umbrella or something.”

The foyer opened up to a large, open space the family used as a common area. The furniture was comfortable, enormous couches purchased for coziness. The room had a mixture of art and personal photos, a progression of children aging to adults dotting the walls and tables. French doors took up most of the far wall, looking out onto lawn and a covered pool. Several archways offered peeks into other rooms, a more formal living room and, to the right, a large, homey kitchen filled with very tall men with broad shoulders and teasing eyes.

All except one.

That
man wasn’t as tall as the others. His face didn’t share their rugged Irish planes, square jaws, or ocean-hued eyes. Instead he was a pretty mélange of exotic cheekbones, hazel irises, and a full mouth Damien knew from experience could fling out the foulest string of profanities when its owner was pissed.

He couldn’t breathe. Something was choking him, closing his throat up from the inside out, but Damien still took a step forward, unable to believe he was staring at the one man he loved as a brother. The world must have moved around them, because the distance between them closed. Somehow, in the dim awareness of suffocation and his thundering heart, he found himself with an armful of warm Miki and a face full of tears.

Miki smelled of coffee and cloves, his chestnut hair tickling Damien’s nose. There was so much noise around them, a querulous buzz accented with craggy stones and emerald hills, but Damien pushed it all away, tightening his grip around his brother. Then his lungs began to work again, and he whispered through his tears, unable to find anything deeper to say but the one word he thought of as home.

“
Sinjun
.”

From somewhere in the noise, Damien heard his name. It was dipped in gold and warmth, a litany of tears and chanting mantras strung together into a song of sparkling white lights and shadowy blues. Miki’s arms were around him, stronger and firmer than he’d remembered. His friend… his brother… squeezed him hard, then cupped his face, and Damie’s heart skipped a beat when he saw the familiar, off-kilter cant of Miki’s ring finger, its first joint twisted slightly in from the man’s odd way of writing. Those arms were back around him before Damien could cry about their loss, and Miki’s shoulders shook as he cried with the shock dealt to him.

“Oh, Sionnie boy, what have you done?” A man’s fierce, peaty timbre cut through a crackling noise of softer accented male voices, and Damie nearly shoved Miki behind him so he could defend his lover, but in that instant, he found himself frozen in the amber of memories pouring over him. “Who the hell have you brought with you?”

The next rumble Damie heard was even stronger, a patriarchal blade slicing past the chatter to call for quiet. He swallowed and blinked, his eyes flitting across every face until he found the man speaking.

He was a mountain, a solid piece of stone quarried from the slabs of Irish beauty around him, but his strength was left undiminished by time and the trials of life. Silver flecked the black hair at his temples, and while his eyes weren’t as brightly cerulean as the men around him, they were forged steel honed sharp by the passing years. He reached for them both, and his enormous hands closed over first Miki’s shoulder, then Damien’s, shielding them from the battering verbal storm brewing around them.

It was a different type of warmth. So very different from the encompassing wrap of Sionn around his soul or the beacon flash of starshine of Miki in his heart. This man, Damien realized, resonated with a fire hot enough to melt rock, and he would flow around those he loved, protecting them from anything they weren’t quite strong enough to withstand.

“Da… we don’t know if he’s… real.” Someone in the pack spoke up, but the man quelled him with a sharp look.

“Yer wrong, son. I’d know Mick’s brother anywhere. God knows I’ve seen him on Ryan’s walls now for years, and no one else could have brought that awe to Miki’s face. So shush, all of ye, and make way.” Now that man stood around him… for him and Miki… as he squeezed their shoulders reassuringly. “Come on, ye two. Let’s find ye someplace ye can have some peace and our Miki can welcome his Damie boy back.”

I
T
HAD
been an ugly cry. There was no getting around that fact. Even knowing that, Damien was surprised to find himself feeling as if he’d drowned in the bay. His face was swollen, nearly tight to the touch, and everything tasted of salt. Sniffing, he was thirsty, but he didn’t want to move off the bed he was lying on. Especially since Miki was lying beside him, their sides touching as they nestled on a mound of pillows and stared through a sliding glass door to the darkness outside.

Donal had led them from the main house, letting the remains of Sinner’s Gin hole up in a small studio apartment behind the garage. It had to be someplace Miki hid in often, because the place smelled like him. Even the bed’s daisy-dotted cotton sheets, soft and worn from use, held a scent of the man next to him. As well as a cedar-citrus something else he now knew came from a man named Kane Morgan.

“I can’t believe you’re here.” It was Miki who murmured those words this time. When they could finally talk, exhausted from the tears and then the laughter of holding one another again, they’d passed them back and forth, breathing them in then exhaling the phrase back out, the words warmed between them. Miki’s fingers clasped over his and squeezed, reminding Damie his brother was next to him again. “Fucking hell. D. Dude.”

“I can’t believe you named your dog Dude.” He laughed at the sheer joy filling him. “Shit, I can’t believe you have a dog.”

“He kind of just moved in. He’s an asshole. Reminds me of you. He steals shit too. Like sneakers.” Miki inched even closer. “Kane kind of did too. Sort of. Moved in. Not steal my sneakers. His feet are damned huge. My shit wouldn’t fit him.”

“He’s nice,” Damien admitted slowly. “Can’t believe he didn’t tell you they’d found my fingerprint on that envelope.”

“Yeah, we’ll talk about that later.” Miki’s melodic voice turned dark. “They were arguing about it when I came in. I was so fucking confused, and then suddenly you were there. Fucking cops. Fucker told them. You believe that shit?”