The Imaginary (The Imago Trilogy Book 2)

by J. J. Stone

  Still, she had agreed with him and until he rescinded his side of the bargain, she had to honor hers. “Sorry. This isn’t really something I should be asking my team leader.”

  James looked up at her and Ada gave him a small apologetic smile. A matching, sad half-grin lifted his mouth to one side. “We both know my speech from before doesn’t really hold much clout anymore.”

  Ada’s smile slipped. She waited for him to continue.

  “I can’t expect us to only stay co-workers if you save my life.”

  “‘Saving your life is a bit of an exaggeration …”

  The look on James’s face made her heart beam. His eyes softened, and he suddenly looked years younger as the harsh shell he’d always kept in place around her gradually began to melt away. “We shared a near-death experience. Whether you like it or not, that makes us about as close to friends as you can get in my book.”

  “You make that sound like it’s a bad thing.” Ada felt like a weight had been lifted from her. “If Dade can tolerate you, I think I should be OK.”

  James smirked at her. “Dade is better with guns, though. So I still like him more.”

  “I really am sorry about Sacramento, James.” Ada felt an overwhelming need to clear the air on this once and for all. She needed to know that he didn’t hold it against her.

  “I know you are. You won’t shut up about it.” His tone was teasing but his eyes told her that the chapter was closed.

  James readjusted his slant against the door and rolled his neck around. “My family moved to Ashburn, Virginia after I graduated high school,” he said, resuming their previous conversation. “I had heard that a good way into the FBI was to train at the Northern Virginia Criminal Justice Training Academy.” He looked down at his water bottle as a wistful glow of reminiscence crept across his face. “After I graduated, the only thing that was offered to me was a spot with the DC Transit Police.” He shrugged. “I was a kid; I figured it’d be fun.”

  Ada pulled her blanket up. “And the terrorists?”

  “I started noticing some strange activity in some of the Metro stations, so I decided to track it. Never said a word to anyone, wanted to be the big hero.” He tilted his head back against the window of the door and chuckled softly. “So, naturally, I walked right into a cell’s hideout in one of the stations that was under construction. No backup, no radio, nothing.” He trailed off for a moment and Ada could almost see the mental slideshow clipping across his eyes. “Thankfully, one of my superiors had followed me to the station and came into the room a few seconds after I did, called for backup. Not before one of the terrorists got a swipe at me, though.” He pointed at his scar again.

  “Why didn’t I ever hear about this?” Ada asked.

  “It wasn’t any well-known terrorist group. Just some pissed off security guards that had all been laid off by big corporations. It wasn’t on the news long.”

  “But you tracked them all by yourself.” Ada made sure to let her amazement transfer into her tone. “I’m guessing that’s pretty good for a rookie.”

  James shrugged, deflecting her praise like an insect. “It got me the FBI academy invite that I wanted, so it was worth it.”

  “I’m sure your parents were proud.”

  Ada watched the words float from her lips to James and sink into his skin like paper-thin daggers. He flinched, almost imperceptibly, but Ada saw the jaw clench and cheek twitch. Telltale signs that a nerve had been hit. The water bottle crinkled slim a few centimeters as his left hand slowly coiled. “My mom was, yes.”

  “What about your father?”

  His green eyes flashed with anger and she suddenly felt like she was trapped in a cage with a wild, hungry predator. She wished she could gather her words back and swallow them whole.

  “He’d been dead almost six years.”

  Ada knew intimately the emerging darkness in his tone. This reaction wasn’t borne out of grief; it came from a place of hatred.

  His lips pulled into a grim line as he continued to tighten his grip on the water bottle. The poor thing crackled with growing intensity. Ada looked away from him as she felt a stirring in her mind. Old, dark emotions were beginning to crawl out of far-off mental caverns she had created for their own personal banishment. She then did something she hadn’t done in almost a decade. She pictured her own father, what he might look like now, what kind of life prison was dealing him. Did she ever cross his mind? Did he know that his brother had raised her? Did he care about anything other than what laid inside his cell walls?

  “I’ve never told anyone about this.”

  Ada’s head cleared, and she realized that in her daydream her eyes had drifted back to James, boring directly at him. He watched her from his dark corner, studied her face. Reading her as she had read him not a minute before. He wet his lips before continuing. “Somehow I think you can relate to how it feels to loathe the thought of your father.”

  The atmosphere in the SUV shifted for the second time in their conversation. Together, they had arrived at the realization that they were rushing past their newly-agreed upon friendship and were about to cast off and plunge feet-first into something much rawer and formidable. To share an emotion so forbidden as vehemently despising a parent was a truly dark curse one did not find many others stricken with. And when you did find a fellow emotional orphan, the connection you both would inevitably create would either propel you both toward blissful healing or churn the raging rapids of the past so greatly that you both would be pulled under for the final time.

  “All too well,” Ada said, her words like a congruent shove in their backs, dispatching them into the next realm.

  Something shifted in James. His face lightened, despite the inky shadows still veiling him. It was as if the thought of slicing himself down the middle and splaying what lay inside for her to see was the most serene thought he’d ever experienced. She had a feeling she was one of few people he had been able to talk to about this part of his life. “My dad was a chronic drunk. Never knew him any other way.” The water bottle was now a flattened strip of plastic. James tossed it into the back. “He lost his teaching job at West Point, and after that his drinking went into overdrive. If he wasn’t nursing a bottle of something at home, he was out at a bar somewhere.”

  “Uncle Mike told me my father was the same way.” The word “father” left an unpleasant aftertaste on Ada’s tongue. “When I read up on some of the case, investigators had said that they thought drinking was one of my father’s gateways into his … urges. After I read that, I never drank again.”

  “I grew up watching my dad get wasted and told myself I’d never be like him.” James stopped and looked at her. Ada recognized a hesitancy one would expect from a child about to confess to swiping dessert before dinner. “I kept drinking to a social thing. And then when Mom died … drinking seemed like the only thing that could help me be OK again.”

  “We all deal with stuff in our own way,” Ada said, trying to sound as reassuring as she could.

  “It went way beyond dealing with it. Drinking became part of me, like it was something I needed to do more than wanted to do.” He swallowed hard. “It reached the tipping point when I showed up to work with a stomach full of whisky. I don’t even know how I got to work. I mean, I drove, but I don’t remember it. I remember, though, that I felt … free. I wasn’t sad, I wasn’t mad. I was just … existing. And it felt amazing.” He slowly rubbed his left hand across his eyes. “Dade caught me before I walked into my meeting with the team and dragged me into an empty office. Told me I needed to get a cab home and sober up.” His hand fell down and dark embarrassment emanated from his eyes. “I got mad at him. Actually went to take a swing at him. And he just called me a cab and walked me to it. Never said a word about it to my boss and has never brought it up to me.”

  Ada’s admiration for Dade tripled.
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  “When I woke up later that night in my foyer, face down not three steps from the front door, it finally hit home that I had become my father.” James glanced down at his feet. “I haven’t had a drop of alcohol since.”

  Ada didn’t say anything.

  “I could have lost my job that day. I should have.” James straightened and Ada looked at him. “I still could, if someone were to say something about it.”

  “I won’t say anything,” Ada said. She held his gaze to convey her sincerity.

  James nodded slightly and bit at the inside of his cheek. His whole body sagged as his mind undoubtedly drifted through bitter, sobering memories.

  Ada knew she needed to reroute them off the dark detour they’d taken. “So, you grew up in New York because of your dad’s teaching job.”

  James nodded, picking at the gauzy fabric of his sling. “I was fourteen when he lost his job and decided to go off the deep end. Kind of young to become the man of the house, but I didn’t really have a choice.”

  Ada had a very vivid image of a smaller version of James somberly moving through the motions an adult should have been. His mannerisms and personality flaws began to make sense.

  “My mom had to get a job, so she wasn’t home during the day. I would come home from school and make sure the house was kept up, make sure Julia—” He stopped and glanced at her, realizing his sister was another topic he’d never broached with Ada.

  Ada decided to save him the pain of rehashing that part of his life. “Brenda told me.”

  “Right.” James grinned ruefully. “Anyway, Julia acted out a lot, probably because of what was going on. So I made sure she got to school, did her homework, didn’t burn the house down.” He snorted a quick chuckle. It was a futile attempt to hide the sorrow in his face.

  “Young girls can be horrible human beings. I gave Uncle Mike hell for a few years, too,” Ada said.

  “Julia is a carbon copy of my dad. No regard for others, everyone’s a roadblock. He had his vices; she definitely has hers.” James tipped his head back against the window again. “There was one time when she was fifteen, she came home from school and ran straight up to her room. Didn’t say a word to me when she walked in, which was her first mistake.”

  Ada was glad she hadn’t had an older brother, especially one like James.

  “So I ran up the stairs after her, ‘cause I knew she was up to something, and she slammed her door in my face. I got it open before she could lock it, and I could just smell the alcohol on her. Then she ran to her bed and threw herself onto her book bag, like she was hiding it from me. So I pulled her off of it and opened it.” His hand extended out animatedly. “When I say she had everything in there, I mean everything. A drug addict’s dream buffet. When I asked where she got it from, she wouldn’t tell me. So we had a nice little bonfire in the backyard that night.” James’s lips pulled back into a snarky grin. “She didn’t talk to me for a couple of weeks after that.”

  James and Ada sat in contemplative quiet, their minds rehashing separate mind reels. Ada pulled her blanket tighter around her shoulders, causing the reflective fabric to crackle. It pulled James out of his reverie and back into the one-sided story time. “My dad died a few months after he lost his job. He got really drunk and decided to drive home in a snowstorm. Drove his car into a median going about eighty.”

  A sympathetic grunt drew out of Ada’s throat. “That’s awful.”

  “Not really. Bastard died instantly.”

  “How old were you?”

  “Fourteen. Julia was twelve.” James cautiously slipped a nail under the bandage running across his forehead and scratched. “Mom wanted to keep us in New York because we had grown up there and that was where all of our friends were. So we waited to move until I graduated high school, and then all three of us headed to Virginia.”

  Ada thought back to the conversation she had had with Brenda back in Seattle. That felt like a lifetime ago. She knew about James’s mother, but didn’t have the heart to broach the subject. If he wanted her to know about it, he would tell her.

  A small, incessant voice in the back of her mind repeated that it was her turn to play open book. It had been years since she had spoken about anything relating to her parents or life before Uncle Mike. Now that she had spent this time with the FBI and this case, those raw-edged emotional daggers that had sunk in every time her past had surfaced were now about as intimidating as toothpicks. Part of her still couldn’t believe how effortlessly she could look into the mental catalog of her memories and start flipping through everything. Maybe now was the time to test out her new-found strength.

  “My gun phobia goes a little deeper than I let on.” Ada ducked her head down and sheepishly looked up at James through her lashes. He was watching her with a completely expressionless face, overtly analyzing her. “When I thought about that gun killing someone, it wasn’t the killing part that bothered me.” Her eyes slipped the car into a hazy blur as her mind wandered. “It was that I would be a killer. Like my father.”

  “It’s an understandable fear.” James stiffly bent his left leg and wrapped his left arm around it.

  “I was always afraid that I had something wrong with me. Like my father had a disease that had made him kill, and I had it living inside of me, waiting for some switch to flip in my brain.” She shook her head. “I’ve done research. I know about all genetic and biological triggers.”

  James laughed softly. “Of course you did.”

  “I’m analytical. It helps,” Ada shot back.

  “I wasn’t being mean,” James said, looking her square in the eye. “I just wouldn’t expect anything less from you.”

  Ada scrunched her nose. “I am kind of a nerd, aren’t I?”

  James folded his lips into his mouth and raised his left shoulder.

  The water bottle James had tossed into the back seat sprang back into shape, cutting through the quiet din of the car with a spine-tingling crack. Ada let out a yelp and James twitched just enough to nudge his swollen shoulder. “Dammit!” he grunted and wrapped his left hand gently around his right bicep.

  Ada twisted around her seat and grabbed the medical kit from the floor near the pedals. She pulled out the rapidly diminishing bottle of pain relievers and dumped four into her hand. “Open,” she said to James as she took another water bottle from their stockpile and left her seat. She went down on her knees in the space between the passenger seat and the middle seat and waited for him to open his eyes.

  James relaxed his heavy wince enough to see where she was. She held up her cupped hand with the pills and raised her eyebrows at him. James’s mouth opened and he tipped his head back slightly. Ada carefully brought her hand to his mouth and deposited the pills inside. She then unscrewed the water bottle and pressed the mouth of it against his parted lips. He nodded and she tipped some water into his mouth. He downed everything in one rough swallow and turned away from the bottle.

  “I think there’s a heat pack in there, too, if you think that might work better.” Ada recapped the water bottle and stayed kneeling beside him. She watched as he laid his head gingerly against the junction of the seat and the door.

  “I just need a minute.”

  “OK.” Ada maneuvered back to the front of the car and resumed her post in the driver seat.

  A few silent minutes crept by. James’s breathing grew shallow and slow as his pain subsided. His left leg relaxed back down to the seat and his left hand fell away from his injured arm. Ada tipped her right side against the seat and peeked at James from behind the shelter of the headrest. In his pre-slumber state, all the lines and furrows of his face had smoothed. A healthy five o’clock shadow had sprouted across his jaw and partly down his neck. There’s our way to tell time, her mind thought, beard length.

  “What else did Brenda tell you?” James’s voice was as mell
ow as his body. It sliced gently through the silence in the car.

  “About what?”

  “Me.”

  Ada ducked her head further behind the headrest. She wasn’t entirely sure what he was asking. “Not much.”

  A pause. “Did she tell you my mom died a few years ago?”

  Ada’s heart sunk. “Yes.” When he didn’t say anything, she tried to lessen the blow. “She didn’t say anything about what happened.”

  “Cause she doesn’t know.” Another pause. “No one does.”

  Ada leaned forward and saw that James had opened his eyes but not moved. “You don’t have to tell me, James. Really.”

  “It’s not anything scandalous.” He looked sideways at her. “She was hit by a drunk driver on Christmas Eve, on her way to mass.” He shook his head sadly. “I had told her to wait for me to get to Ashburn before she went, but then I got held up in Quantico. So she ended up walking to the church by herself.”

  “That’s terrible,” Ada said.

  “They never found the person who hit her. I looked for months.”

  “When was this?”

  “About a year after I became lead agent with the BAU.” His eyes slipped closed again. “Julia had already run off, so I had to make all the arrangements. I ended up burying Mom in Ashburn. It’s the only place that was ever a happy home for any of us.”

  “Uncle Mike fought to have my mother buried in Seattle. My grandparents wouldn’t have it, though, so she’s buried in Ohio.”