Tristan (The Ruins of Emblem #1)

by Cora Brent

  “Because using him that way is a whole new level of fucked up.”

  Stoker wasn’t impressed. “You a cop now? I know all about you Mulligan. Heard you don’t have what it takes to keep up with the big boys anymore and you’re too busy munching on some high school teacher’s pussy to give anyone the time of day anymore.”

  Every muscle in my body begged to be unleashed but I remained still. If I made a move the three of them would be all over me and just because I wasn’t flashing a gun didn’t mean they wouldn’t.

  “Got nothing to say?” Stoker taunted. “Fuck, you used to be cool.”

  “Keep Pike out of your bullshit. That’s all I’ve got to say.” I hated risking turning my back on them but I couldn’t walk to my truck backwards and keep my dignity.

  “Hey boys.” Stoker raised his voice to ensure I heard every word. “I think there’s a visit to the high school in our future. Maybe that pretty teacher wouldn’t mind tag teaming.”

  Get in the truck. They’re not going to do a fucking thing.

  Stoker wasn’t done with his taunting. “We’ll let you watch, Mulligan. Bet we wouldn’t even have to hold her down too hard.”

  White hot fury nearly blinded me and I rushed him harder than I’d ever tackled anyone on the football field. We collided with his gold monstrosity and I backed up only so I could slam into him again.

  “You fucking go near her and I’ll fucking kill you.” I’d gone wild, bashing Stoker’s wiry body against the car over and over and speaking in the only language a shit stain like him would understand.

  But by now his buddies had decided to stop standing around on the sidelines and get in on the action. One of them jumped on my back and I threw him off. That gave the other one an opening to kick a boot into my side hard enough to send me stumbling and Stoker contributed with another bruising kick that had me kissing dirty asphalt. I didn’t stay down, bouncing right on my feet and ready to smack all their heads together but there was a fist waiting to crash into my face and for a few seconds I saw stars.

  A second later the sound of shattering glass made me wish real hard I’d stuck my gun in my waistband before running into battle. Because now the Rojas brothers had an iron grip on my arms and Stoker was closing in with a broken bottle.

  “Say goodbye to that pretty face of yours motherfucker,” Stoker snarled and all I could see were the jagged edges of glass but the Rojas boys had underestimated my strength. I wrenched my right arm free from one and hurled the other one in Stoker’s direction.

  There was blood.

  There was screaming.

  There was the sound of glass falling on the pavement.

  There was Stoker jumping on me like a wild animal while the non-bleeding, non-screaming Rojas brother delivered a bunch to my gut that knocked the wind out of my lungs and sank me to my knees.

  “You want to die, Mulligan? Because you’re gonna fucking die,” Stoker swore in my ear and then he froze at the distinctive sound of a shotgun being racked at very close proximity.

  Stoker and Rojas brother #1 were already backing away with their hands up.

  Rojas brother #2 was ten feet away with hands pressed to the bloody gash in his side.

  And Elena Rivera was posed in the middle of the scene with her shotgun aimed at Stoker’s head. She slowly looked at each of us in turn as she kept her weapon pointed in the same place.

  She’d seen me grow up. I’d been to her house many times, back in the ancient era when Raf and I were schoolboy buddies. I tried to imagine what the woman saw when she looked at me now. The ghost of my father lying in a pool of blood on the floor of her store, or maybe the shadow of my older brother with his gang tattoos and fearsome reputation. She might have been reminded that I represented a piece of the rotten underworld that had seduced her eldest son and cost her husband his freedom.

  On the other hand it was possible she just saw me, a high school dropout and career criminal who was on the ground getting his face kicked in.

  She lowered the gun and shook her head with disgust. “Get out of here, all of you. Before I call the cops. And don’t come back.”

  Stoker and Rojas #1 wasted no time collecting the bleeding Rojas #2 and piling into Stoker’s car. They peeled out of the parking lot, leaving just me and Mrs. Rivera. My left cheek was already swelling and there was a good chance I’d be pissing blood for days thanks to the blow to my kidney. I climbed to my feet as she watched.

  “I’m really sorry about this,” I told her, gesturing to the broken glass on the ground.

  “I don’t care,” she replied and returned to her store with the shotgun dragging at her side.

  Fuck.

  I hadn’t solved a thing. In fact I’d made the situation about a hundred times worse. Not only had I failed to persuade Stoker to quit using Pike but I’d guaranteed my place on his bad side. Stoker wasn’t the type who allowed a grudge to go unchallenged. One way or another he’d come after me.

  Me, and maybe Cadence too.

  The thought made me so sick I could hardly focus to stick the key into the truck’s ignition. I even had the desperate idea to go to the police but I realized there was nothing they could do. If they questioned Stoker he would only get even more enraged than he was right now.

  My only consolation was that even though Stoker was a violent bastard he wasn’t a complete fool. Coming after me was one thing. Going after an innocent high school teacher would attract the kind of attention he didn’t want.

  That didn’t mean I was relieved. I was about as far from fucking relieved as anyone could get.

  At least I caught a small break when I started driving down Main Street and saw Pike wandering out of the police station. I pulled over to the curb and rolled down the window.

  He stuck his head in and gaped at me. “What the hell happened to you?”

  “Never mind. Get in and I’ll take you home.”

  Pike obeyed. I tried to quiz him on his time with Emblem PD but he’d already grown confused over the chain of events. He said he was doing a favor for his buddy Tim Stoker and last night Tim had accidentally left him behind after telling him to wait in an empty shed out on Old Farm Road. When daylight broke and Tim hadn’t returned yet Pike decided to take a walk back to town since he’d left his phone in Tim’s car. Pike was proud of the fact that he’d followed Tim’s instructions after he got picked up and carted down to the station. He hadn’t talked, hadn’t let on that he knew the origin of the drugs in his pockets. I thought it was possible Pike had intentionally made himself seem more out of it than he really was. At least the police chief was an okay guy named Jim Barnes. When Barnes caught wind of the fact that Pike was at the station he gave him a ham sandwich and a coke and told him he could go if he agreed not to do anyone anymore favors.

  Pike chuckled. “Dumbasses,” he said and I wasn’t sure if he was referring to the cops or if he was having a Pike moment and thinking about something else entirely.

  I edged the truck through the crowded trailer park and braked in front of Pike’s place. There were some pots with half melted colorful plastic flowers out front and it looked overall like a bleak place to live. But then a window curtain twitched and Mary Pike’s anxious face peered out. She mouthed the words “Praise Jesus” and kissed her fingers before pointing them to heaven.

  “Your mom’s waiting for you,” I told Pike.

  He nodded. “Can we go to the Cactus later?”

  “Not today, buddy. I’ve got plans.”

  Pike smiled. “With Cadence?”

  “With Cadence.”

  I braced myself for a round of the ‘Are you gonna fuck her?’ game but he only gazed thoughtfully out the window.

  “I like that Cadence girl,” he said.

  “So do I.” I more than liked her. I’d never felt this way about any other girl, not even close.

  My old friend turned and stared at me. “Who did that to your face?”

  I touched the swelling beneath my eye. “It’s my fault
. I did it to myself.” Which was true, in a way. What the hell did I expect to gain from provoking Tim Stoker?

  Pike hopped out of the truck. “Put ice on it,” he said before he closed the door. “You look like shit.”

  I snorted but I knew he was right.

  Dover wasn’t around when I got home, which was good because I wasn’t eager to tell anyone the story about the beating I’d taken. I sat at the kitchen table with a package of frozen hamburgers on my face and then went to the bathroom to go check out the extent of the damage under the harsh lights. A sizeable bruise was already coloring my backside but I wasn’t concerned about that even though it hurt like the devil. The black eye was what I was worried about. There was no way I’d be able to hide this from Cadence. As soon as she saw me she would demand an explanation, especially because tonight we were going to be hanging out with her uptight teacher crowd. Besides, I had to be straight with Cadence about what happened. I needed to warn her to run for the hills if Stoker ever showed up.

  “You dumbass,” I muttered to my beaten reflection, echoing Pike’s word of choice. Maybe he’d been talking about all of us, himself and me included.

  “Not if you drag her down instead.”

  I remembered the promise I’d made to myself where Cadence was concerned.

  And now the idea that I might need to honor it was more excruciating than a hundred vicious beatings.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Cadence

  He was late. One of Tristan’s good points was punctuality. When he said he was going to show up somewhere then he followed through. So at half past six I started to get concerned and pulled out my phone to fire off a text.

  Where are you?

  The doorbell howled in answer to my question, almost like he’d been standing out there all along. I knew I was smiling when I snatched my purse and the bottle of wine and called, “I’m out of here,” to my grandfather, who’d already retreated to his bathroom with a newspaper under his arm, likely to be sequestered in his favorite place for hours.

  Tristan was staring at the ground, shoulders hunched, when I opened the door.

  “What are you looking at, a bug?” I asked when I tried to swoop in for a kiss.

  Then he raised his head and my smile vanished.

  “Oh my god, what happened?” The skin beneath his left eye was freshly bruised and swollen. “Did that crazy roommate of yours go on another bender and use you as a punching bag?”

  Dover was all right unless he was drinking heavily and fighting with his ex girlfriend. Then sometimes he forgot who his friends were. I reached out to inspect the damage to Tristan’s face.

  Tristan jerked his head, eluding my touch. “Dover had nothing to do with this.”

  A bad feeling began to crawl through my blood. “So who did?”

  He looked past me into the house. “I thought your grandfather was around.”

  “What were you doing, watching the house? He’s home. He’s just in the bathroom. Tristan, what’s going on?”

  He glanced behind him and then tried to walk through the door. “We should talk.”

  “We can talk on the way to Aura’s house. If we wait any longer we’re going to be late.”

  He shifted, plainly uneasy.

  And he was making me uneasy.

  “I don’t think we should go,” he said.

  “Why?”

  “Because it’s a bad idea. I don’t know who’s out there looking for trouble right now.”

  “Who would be looking for trouble?”

  He didn’t answer.

  I pushed past him, closed the door and stepped out into the front yard. “No one will be looking for trouble at Aura Campo’s house. And I promised I’d go so if you don’t want to come with me then you don’t have to.” Something had obviously happened to him but if he wasn’t going to cough up an explanation that made sense then I didn’t know what to do.

  He wasn’t really listening to anything I said. His eyes kept darting around as if Michael Myers might pop out from behind my grandfather’s purple sage bushes. Abruptly he wrapped an arm around me and firmly guided me to his truck, practically pushing me into the passenger seat.

  “Tristan!” I yelped because now he was scaring me. “What the hell is going on? What happened to you?” Possibilities, all of them bad, skated through my mind. Maybe this was old gang business or maybe one of his drug deals had gone sour.

  He hopped into the driver’s seat and started the engine. “Pike got himself wrapped up in something. I tried to get him out of it.”

  That wasn’t the worst thing that had occurred to me but it was bad enough.

  “So who beat you up?”

  He grunted at the question. “Nobody ‘beat me up’, Cadence. I threw some hits and so did they.”

  “They?”

  “Stoker and the Rojas brothers.”

  I felt like I was being fed one crumb at a time. “I don’t even know who the hell they are.”

  Tristan sighed and slowly drove out of my grandfather’s neighborhood. “They’re dangerous motherfuckers. Steer clear of them.”

  “Okay, fine. I won’t go partying with Stoker and the Rojas brothers. Make a left and then a right. Aura said it’s the last house on the left on Turbine. Number forty six.”

  The street was already pretty packed with vehicles and I recognized most of them from the Emblem High parking lot. I spotted Rod Ward’s gleaming silver pickup and wondered if showing up here with Tristan was foolish.

  We had to park four houses down and I took his hand as we strolled slowly to Aura’s, Tristan practically dragging his feet.

  “We’re going to discuss this more later,” I said to him.

  He looked toward Aura’s house where patio lights glowed and laughter boomed.

  “Sure we will,” he said and I wasn’t sure if that was an agreement or if he was just trying to get me to shut up for the moment. That was the thing about Tristan. He wasn’t quiet or remotely shy. He could utter the most outrageously intimate things that ever burned a girl’s ears. But sometimes out of nowhere I was met with a stiff wall of resistance and there was no breaching it.

  I tried to get a better look at him. “Did you get hit anywhere else besides your face?”

  “Yup.”

  I squeezed his hand. “Does anything hurt?”

  He was staring at the ground again. “No.”

  We were at Aura’s front door now and I could hear Ward’s booming voice on the other side.

  “They’ll ask you what happened to you,” I warned.

  “Yeah,” he muttered, reaching for the doorbell. “I’m sure they will.”

  Aura was all smiles when she opened the door, graciously accepting the bottle of wine. She must have noticed Tristan’s black eye but had the kindness not to say anything, receiving him with so much genuine politeness anyone would assume he was as welcome as any other guest.

  Emblem High was a small high school in a small town. Tristan had once been a student of many of my colleagues and they greeted him with reactions that were all over the map, ranging from wary smiles to open confusion. A few raised eyebrows made it clear not all their memories of Tristan were fond ones but I gave Tristan credit for remaining quietly respectful as we made the rounds on Aura’s back patio.

  “I guess you heard what happened after the game last night,” Allen Loredo said when we happened to be sampling the stuffed mushroom tray at the same time. “Just kills me to see how so many of these kids end up. If they don’t make it out of here half the time they wind up dealing or gangbanging and headed for hard time in the damn prison up the road.”

  Aura had joined us and a pained look crossed her face as she glanced at Tristan, obviously aware that he fit the description of the Emblem High alumni Loredo was complaining about. Tristan, however, wasn’t paying any attention to Loredo or to Aura. Instead Tristan’s narrowed eyes were focused on Rod Ward, who was standing beside the fire pit and waving his beer in the air while he carried on
about some questionable referee calls.

  I’d made the wrong choice tonight. When Tristan arrived at my door with a black eye and obvious anxiety I should have called this off. Aura would have understood if I told her something had come up. I didn’t want to be here right now anymore than he did. I wanted to talk to Tristan. I wanted to hold him and urge him to tell me about all the things that troubled him no matter how ugly they were. I wanted to let him know that I wasn’t easily chased off in spite of Stoker and the Rojas brothers, whoever they were, that I cared about him so very much and that tonight I was hurting because he was hurting.

  Aura nudged me out of my thoughts. “I was talking to Kevin before you got here and wanted to give you a heads up about something.”

  Kevin Bertram was the principal. My contact with him had been limited so far. His hands were more than full since the role of vice principal remained vacant after the role’s long time occupant retired last year. Whenever I saw him he was red-faced and harried, tie askew, dyspeptic expression on his face as he marched through the halls of Emblem High, lurching from one emergency to another. Right now he was sitting on the edge of a bench beside the unlit fire pit and checking his watch while a blonde woman I assumed was Mrs. Bertram scowled at him and pushed her glass of wine in his face.

  “What is it?” I asked Aura, not really in a frame of mind to care about any news from Kevin Bertram.

  Aura’s husband stepped out onto the back patio wearing an apron that said Trophy Husband and announced that the beef stroganoff would be ready shortly.

  Aura blew him a kiss. “He used to have a restaurant in Grande,” she explained to me. “He misses cooking for large groups every night.” Then she remembered she had something she wanted share and gripped my elbow. “So anyway, Kevin is completely overwhelmed by all the fights lately at school. He’s got more suspensions than he can deal with and he’s under pressure from the school board. The shooting in the parking lot after the game sealed his decision. He’s going to make an announcement on Monday that he’s canceling most of the extra curricular activities until further notice. Including the homecoming dance.”