by Meli Raine
How does anyone do it?
As Lily stares at me, how does she entertain the thought that I’m the one who held a gun to her head? Who pulled the trigger?
Then again, how could she not?
“Duff? What happened to Silas?” she asks again.
“He had to kill his own fiancée in the line of duty when she turned out to be a double agent–maybe triple–and started assassinating government officials on an air strip.”
Her mouth drops to an O of shock.
“I had no idea!”
“It's not like he wrote about it in his annual Christmas letter.”
“But–does Jane know?”
“Of course.”
“How–how awful! How do you do that? How do you kill someone you love out of–”
“Duty? Doing our job? What we do, Lily, is not much more than protect meat bags and weed through mind fucks.”
Wide eyes meet mine. “Could you explain what you mean by that?”
I point at her. “You. You’re a meat bag–”
“WHAT?” She looks stricken.
“So am I. We’re all just organs tied together with bones and tendons and flesh, with blood pumping through us. My job is to make sure that blood keeps pumping through you. That’s the simple part.”
She frowns, still confused.
I sigh and continue. This is a lot of explanation, but it's important. “At its most basic core, that is what I do. But then there’s the mind fuck. The psychology and strategy behind how we make sure that we protect you. In your case, someone is trying to kill you. How do we discern motives? How do we figure out which places are safe? How do we determine how involved you are in the plot to kill you?”
“Me? Why would I be involved in a plot to kill me?”
“Are we being manipulated? Are we manipulating? These are all questions that are part of what I do for a living. Same as Silas and Drew. This is what I’m trained for, Lily. I’m just a grunt. You’re coming into it as a civilian and as a traumatic brain injury survivor.”
She frowns. I trudge on. “So yeah, you should look at me with suspicion. And that’s okay. I’m not offended by it. In fact, I would think the other guys weren’t doing their job if they didn’t take into account the fact that maybe I did try to kill you.”
Our eyes meet on that last sentence, exactly the way I planned it. I know I didn’t hold that gun to her head. Trust is a funny thing. It requires that you let go of a certain part of humanity inside you. We have to override our instincts in order to trust because instinct says that survival is more important than connection.
But connection is how you survive. How do you let go of what is programmed into your DNA in order to save your DNA?
That’s the great conundrum of being human.
That’s exactly why Lily is dangerous for me.
“Tell me more about you,” she says, propping her feet up on the dashboard and giving me a weird mixture of an interested smile and a distasteful demand.
“What about me? I’m Duff. Seamus McDuff. Thirty-four years old. Army combat vet. That’s all you need to know.”
“I know you like coffee. Really good coffee.”
“Yes. What else?”
“Where are you from?”
“Philly.”
“And your parents are there? Brothers? Sisters?”
“I’ve got one brother. Parents are dead. Raised by my Gran.”
“What's your brother's name?”
A hole opens in my chest. “Wyatt.”
“Where does he live?”
“Don’t know.”
“What do you mean, you don’t know? I know where Gwennie and Bowie are.”
“Gwennie and Bowie are kids.”
“Of course they’re kids. How old is Wyatt?”
I do quick math. “Twenty-seven.”
“How do you not know where your brother is?” Her face changes as the answer dawns on her. “Oh, does he do what you do for a living, too? Is he, like, deep undercover in some motorcycle gang?”
I laugh. “Way to stereotype, Lily.”
“Well, it’s real, right? I mean, I watch it on Sons of Anarchy. You watch that show?”
“Sure.”
“Mom loves it.”
“I can’t imagine Bee getting into that kind of violent entertainment.”
“Oh, no. She doesn’t watch it for the violence. She watches for the nudity.”
Now I know she’s pulling my leg. I laugh.
“You think I'm joking? You've clearly never admired Charlie Hunnam's ass.”
“Got me there.”
Her turn to giggle.
Here’s the other thing about trust: I have to give her something. That’s the only way I’ll get her to confide in me, but that means I have to trust her. What I give her can’t be fake. It has to be real. So far, so good, because my little brother really is missing. And no, he’s not in the field.
He just went missing.
And it was my fault.
“How old were you when your parents died?”
Pain stabs me in the temple, memory rising up like a spire to the heavens. “Eleven.”
She gasps. “So young!”
“Right.”
“You don't want to talk about it, do you?”
“No.”
“Okay, then–where did you go to college?” she asks.
“I didn’t. I ended up in Afghanistan.”
“Were all of you there? Jane said that Silas was there.”
“Yeah. I was there, Silas, Drew, Drew’s friend Mark.”
“Were you there at the same time?”
“No. I didn’t know any of them over there.”
“What was it like?”
“What do you mean, what was it like? It was a hellhole. All combat missions are hellholes.”
“Fair enough. When did you go?”
“When I was eighteen.”
“Eighteen? I’m trying to imagine Bowie being in the army and going through basic training and being sent off to Afghanistan in a couple of months. He’s seventeen and his idea of discomfort is when he can’t get two double cheeseburgers at a fast-food restaurant.”
“Yeah. I noticed.”
She laughs. Then she stops, abruptly. “Tell me, Duff. Tell me the truth. Who can I trust?”
“You can trust me, Lily.”
“Isn’t that exactly what a killer would say to someone he was trying to convince?”
“Yes. You tell me, Lily. Why’d you go after Romeo today?”
The pulse at her neck flutters, giving away her emotional state even if her face is a blank slate. “What do you mean, 'go after'?”
“You went off on him.”
“Yeah. I did. He was being a jerk. I’m tired of letting people be jerks.”
“You did it in front of the president of the United States. Romeo is the head of his private security. That took some guts.”
“Maybe I was just being stupid and emotional and got overwhelmed.”
“I don’t think that’s it, Lily. I don’t think you got stupid or emotional or overwhelmed. I think that was calculated.”
She shuts down. I watch it, piece by piece, like emotional origami as she folds herself back in.
“I want to go–” she cuts off her words. “Wait. No. I can’t. I can’t go home.”
“Why not?”
“Because someone’s trying to shoot at me. I don’t want to take that kind of danger and bring it home to Mom and Bowie and Gwennie and Dad.”
“We’ve already figured it out. We’ve got a place for you if you want it.”
“You do?”
“Yeah.”
“Mom’s going to freak when she finds this out.”
“She already did.”
“You talked to her?”
“Yeah. She wants to talk to you.”
“Oh, God,” she groans. In some ways, Lily’s just a normal twenty-something woman and in other ways, she’s ripping my heart out. “What
’s this place that you have for me?”
“It’s a secured location.”
“What does that mean?”
“It’s a safe house.”
“What’s a safe house?”
“It’s a place that’s been checked over for bugs, for safety issues.”
“Sounds like a prison.” I shrug. “I don’t want to go there.”
“You don’t want to go home. You don’t want to go to the safe house. Where do you want to go?”
“I want to go home with you.”
Chapter 8
It’s cold.
That’s the first sign that something’s not right.
It doesn’t get this cold out here, where the sand gets between your toes and stays there for eighteen months, like it or not. Wind whips against the sides of my tent, rattling them until they sound like the banshees that my Irish grandmother used to tell me about.
She warned me they were real. That they came to haunt bad little boys. I always thought that was a crock of shit.
Maybe Gran was right.
I roll over and realize that what I thought was my sleeping bag turns out to be wet and slick. There’s fur on the top, above the part that sticks to me. I reach down in a panic and find myself holding a tongue.
Not a human one, either.
And it's attached to something.
Sitting up on my cot, I am in a pool of mud, the tongue gone but the breath still hot. Mud squishes between my toes, pushing the sand away. I’m naked, I’m cold, but I’m not alone.
An inner vibration takes over my spine, shaking me until the tremors make it impossible to stand up. Vulnerable and completely unarmed, I assess my situation in a half-asleep state and realize that I’m fucked.
The tent flaps are making a horrible whacking sound, as if someone is taking a hammer and hitting as hard as they can against the tent poles. The fabric ribbons out and forms a strange melody with the wind. Creatures start to run around in the muck and mire around my legs.
I look down, but suddenly the space is dark. There’s no moonlight. The creatures crawl up and down my arms, the viscous wet and dank smell of the mud turning to a copper tang I know too well. I’m coated in blood and now, finally, I can stand.
Stumbling through the dark, I find the corner of the tent. I’m disoriented and have no idea which direction is north, but I know that I’ve found an edge.
A boundary.
A beginning.
“Duff,” calls a voice in the distance. It’s not my buddy. Not my commander.
It’s Lily.
“Help,” she cries out, her voice filled with pain.
Panic does strange things to our circulatory systems. The heart starts to beat faster and harder. Blood pumps into the arms and legs to ready for fleeing or fighting.
Unfortunately, that means the blood doesn’t go to the brain in the amounts that are needed to be able to think through a layered strategy.
This is why we make mistakes when we panic. Because our brains literally can’t work right.
As I fumble along the edge of the tent, my hands find the canvas, dry and clean. I move foot by foot across the edge, seeking a door, an exit, a way out to find Lily. As I hit what appears to be a split in the fabric, I reach for the opening and find another solid surface.
This time it’s cold. Smooth.
Bone.
“Where are you, Lily?” I call out. The wind whips into my ear so hard. I pull back, stuck between two worlds: the unknown, bleeding sand and the known, muddy horror.
“Where are you?” she screams.
That’s it. I step out. I’m drawn by a force I don’t understand, unraveling second by second. I may be naked and covered in blood or mud or whatever this is, but I know this.
I have a mission.
To save her.
I take exactly three steps and crash into a similar-sized being. His body is radiating heat and he smells like a bear.
A very pissed-off, angry bear.
“You can’t have her,” the bear says to me, his fur coated in blood. “She’s mine.”
Instinct makes me shove as hard as possible, until the bear splits into a thousand black birds. They flock around me, nipping with their beaks, cawing into my ear, the sound a mourner’s wail.
“Help, Duff!” Lily calls out again, telling me that the bear hasn’t killed her yet.
I run towards the sound of her voice, slipping and twisting, feeling something pop in my ankle but ignoring it. We’re trained to do that. Ignore everything but the mission.
Right now, Lily is the mission.
I reach her. She’s covered in blood and mud, and finally there’s a moon. Two, in fact. One shines down on us with a maternal glow. The other shines down on the bear. It grows suddenly, seven feet, eight feet, nine feet tall, expanding and spreading until it blocks out its own moon.
“He wants us, Duff, he wants both of us, he wants all of us. He won’t stop until he has everything.”
The bear says nothing. It just watches us. It knows.
It knows that it will win.
I shoot up out of my bed in a cold sweat, heart crashing against my ribs. The small rug next to my bed catches the soles of my feet. I don’t slip, but I come damn close, reaching for my gun without thinking. My hand grasps cold metal, finger on the trigger, the weapon pointed at my window before I realize it was all a dream.
“What the hell?” I think to myself, standing there in my underwear, wind from the partly open window of my fourth-floor apartment making the sheer curtain flap inward. I must have heard it in my sleep. Translated it all into that crazy dream.
It’s not the first time.
And definitely won’t be the last.
This is one of the rare nights I get to stay home, if you call this place home. It’s full of leftover furniture that someone at some agency picked up and threw together. Drew’s agency covers the rent and utilities. When you work in the field like I do, you can’t get attached to objects.
Not objects, not locations.
And certainly not people.
Lily.
She’s obviously gotten inside me.
I start pacing, because that’s what you do when you wake up in a cold sweat with a dream that won’t disappear. The body stores memories. It’s simple science. And when you’re struggling with a fight between the emotional or psychological side of you and the body side of you, there’s really only one good approach to finding your center again.
Beat the hell out of your body.
And where do you go to beat the hell out of your body?
To a gym.
As I set my weapon down on my bedside table, I look at the clock. 4:41 a.m. Screw the gym. I'll just run.
I’m supposed to be at Lily’s at 6:30 to take her to another physical therapy appointment. Grabbing an old pair of shorts that I left on the floor the other day, I throw them on and slip my feet into socks and shoes for running. A ratty old t-shirt and I’m ready, keys in hand before I can even think about grabbing a bottle of water or taking a piss. I walk into the living room and head straight for the door.
The run is all I need right now.
Or at least that’s the fiction I tell myself.
Just as my hand’s on the doorknob, I realize I’m not alone in my living room.
And I don’t have my gun.
Chapter 9
“Duff?”
I turn and look behind me, primal instincts standing down instantly. Lily’s asleep on the couch where she insisted on staying last night. Or at least, she was asleep.
The nightmare threw me off. I should have remembered, but I didn’t.
What the hell is wrong with me?
I reach up and run my shaking hand through short hair that feels messy. Chaotic. Out of control.
At least I didn’t put myself in any jeopardy. More important, I didn’t put her in any danger. It would have been easy to come out here with a gun drawn. I shoot to kill.
Tragic mistakes don�
�t just happen to untrained civilians. It’s easy to screw up when the adrenaline and the cortisol have taken over.
As I turn slowly and look at her, hair spread out against the pillow, body under a blanket that normally doesn’t cover anyone but me, I take a deep breath, square my shoulders, unlock my knees and say, “Hey.”
“Hey. Where are you going?”
“For a run.”
“Oh.” We stare at each other. I don’t know what to say. In my dream, I couldn’t find her. In my dream, I couldn’t save her. Yet here she is on my couch, staring at me.
And I’m staring back.
“Do you always go running at–” her words cut off as she shoves a hand through her messy hair, pushing it off her brow. “What time is it, anyway?”
“About 4:45.”
“Geez. Early bird gets the worm?”
“More like, early bird had a nightmare and couldn’t go back to sleep.”
I don’t know why I say that. I don’t know why I reveal something personal to her. Maybe it’s the intimacy of having her here on my couch, seeing her clothes piled neatly on the chair at her feet, knowing that she’s under that blanket of mine partly clothed, sleep still dusting her features.
Or maybe I’m just going soft.
Although one part of my body isn’t.
“I don’t want to go running,” she whines as she grabs a pillow and shoves it over her head. Her muffled words make me laugh.
“Stay here. I’m just going for a run. You’re fine.”
“Aren’t you supposed to guard me?”
“There’s a whole team outside in the car. They’ve got you, too.”
“You mean you’re not it?”
“No. I’m not it.”
“Why not?”
“I’m not it. Romeo’s not it. None of us are it, Lily. Your case goes all the way up to the president.”
“I know that.”
“I know you know that. I’m trying to give you the background, the details that you keep asking about, so shut up for a minute and let me talk.”
“Don’t tell me to shut up.”
“Do you want information or do you want to be right?” I ask her. She purses her lips, biting the lower one in a way that reminds me of our kiss.
I know what those lips taste like. Great.
Now I’m getting to the point where I can’t run because these shorts are too tight.
