Stumptown Spirits

by E. J. Russell

  That’s the answer. Get him drunk and let him pass out somewhere, and Logan would be off the clock. “Come on, Stone.”

  Max perked up like a puppy at the hint of a treat. “Where are we going? Are you taking me to a gay club?”

  “Jesus. No. Get over it.”

  “A regular club?”

  “Absolutely not. We’ll go to Stumptown Spirits. I’ll drink a large number of beers. You can take notes.” And with any luck, Logan could channel all the alcohol down Max’s throat and offload him in time to spend the night with Riley. “Light rail stop’s this way.”

  “Public transportation? Why not a taxi?”

  Logan was so not getting in a cab with this guy. Walking around with him was claustrophobic enough. “You’ll love it. Trust me. Full of potential fans to impress. Plus,” he pointed at the signpost at the MAX rail stop, “it’s named after you.”

  That turned the trick. Christmas, birthday, and lottery win, right there on the guy’s face.

  “Awesome,” Max breathed, and let Logan buy his ticket.

  Once they arrived at the stop around the corner from Stumptown Spirits, Logan had to pry Max off the train. He herded him inside the bar and into a corner booth, waving at Heather along the way.

  “There. Sit. I’ll be back in a minute.”

  Max stood up. “I’ll come too.”

  “You really want to take notes on how I piss?”

  Max pursed his lips as if he were actually considering the possibility, but Heather arrived just then, and Max perked up at having someone of the female persuasion to convince of his awesomeness.

  On his way down the hall, Logan ran into Bert emerging from his office, the Yellow Pages clutched in his hands, and a more than usually grim expression on his cadaverous face.

  “What’re you doing here? I thought you were off doing your fancy important errands.”

  “I did ’em. Now I’m doing the jack-shit errand instead.”

  “Thought I saw you down by that mission before.”

  Logan’s eyebrows drew together. “It’s a homeless shelter, not a mission, but yeah, I was there. What’s it to you?”

  “That what was so important? The stuff you had to take care of? Preaching to the hobos?”

  “First, since it’s not a mission, no preaching involved. Second, I wasn’t in it, I was on the street where it’s located. Third, they’re not hobos.”

  “Bah. Worthless bums. They should get a job, like everybody else. Stop sponging off the rest of us.”

  “You know, Bert, sometimes a guy just has a little hard luck. You shouldn’t judge.”

  “In my day, men knew how to work. Didn’t whine. Didn’t shirk.” He whacked the phone directory like an evangelist thumping a Bible. “Didn’t pretend they were doing something important when they were doing nothing but prancing around like a damn peacock.”

  “I’m pretty sure no prancing is involved at the shelter, Bert.”

  Bert’s eyes turned flat and cold. “So why were you there? See someone, maybe?”

  “I saw a lot of guys there. Not a single one was prancing. Shivering, yes. Starving, sure. Prancing, not so much.”

  Logan walked on toward the restroom.

  “No man can change his destiny.” Bert’s voice echoed oddly in the hall.

  “That so? Then you shouldn’t rag on the homeless guys. But right now? My destiny awaits in the john.”

  “Hmmphm.”

  Logan pushed open the door. “Yeah. Couldn’t have said it better myself,” he muttered.

  His hands full of earth-friendly bags, and his neck prickled by the needles of the big-ass pine branch under his arm, Riley shoved his door closed with one foot. He dumped everything on the bed and regarded the impressive pile, fists propped on his hips.

  What were the chances he could convince Julie to put all this on the HttM expense account? His Production Bitch salary didn’t ordinarily run to semiprecious stones and rare herbs, but Marguerite’s “procedures”—a little bit Celtic, a little bit Wiccan, with a splash of Vodoun thrown in for kicks and giggles—had included a selection of both. The goth clerk at the Pagan Emporium had been fascinated by the fusion of rituals—and more than happy to upsell.

  Riley had taken all her suggestions, just to be sure. He might be down the equivalent of a month’s pay, but screw money. If it kept Logan safe, he’d shell out his entire savings.

  Logan probably wouldn’t thank him—might, in fact, hate him for the rest of their lives—but Riley didn’t buy into Logan’s apparent belief that Trent was more important than everyone else who might ever come in contact with the ghost war, including Logan himself. Riley planned to do everything he could to level the playing field for all the victims. If he skewed things slightly in favor of Logan? Sue him. He was still in love, dang it.

  He stuffed the pine branch and silver censer on its three-foot chain into his locker-sized closet. Somehow, he had to justify the need to sweep the whole Witch’s Castle site and all the paths leading to it with the branch. That would probably go over as well as explaining why he had to traipse around the clearing, swinging a pierced silver orb smoking with potentially toxic herbs. Think about that later.

  He plopped onto the bed and pawed through the supplies, laying out the herb packets in a neat row, labels clearly visible. Wouldn’t do to confuse the catnip with the Scotch broom, or the ferns with the foxglove. Foxglove. Jeez. Considering all the red tape he had to slog through to get it—registry, references, address, fingerprints, for heaven’s sake—buying a gun would have been easier. The clerk had apologized, but explained it was a CYA move after one of their customers had gotten creative with the ingredients and tried to kill his mother-in-law.

  He located the little charm bag (“Unbleached muslin, dried in the sun on the summer solstice! Stitched with sterling silver needles! Gluten free!”) and dropped in a pinch of verbena, mint, and meadowsweet. Then St. John’s wort. A couple of rowan twigs. A rough turquoise the size of his pinkie fingernail.

  “Flat stone, flat stone, where the heck is that flat stone?” He found the tiny disk under the bag of sea salt, and studied the sketch of the double-headed axe he had to paint on the stone. The clerk told him that paint made with natural dyes would be most effective, but he could draw the thing with a Sharpie if necessary.

  God. A Sharpie? Now there was an authentic ingredient. “I’m sure the druids used them every day and twice on Samhain,” he muttered. Could any of this possibly make a difference?

  Stop it. All his research confirmed that will and belief were the most important ingredients of all, the primary activators. If he expected to succeed, he couldn’t afford to allow so much as a scrap of doubt to creep in.

  Fine. He’d believe, and he sure as hell willed this to freaking work. But it would be useless without an anchor.

  Think. Think. What would tie Logan to this world?

  Before Max had towed Logan out of the hotel, he’d forced Logan into a Haunted to the Max crew fleece, so Logan’s leather jacket hung on the back of Riley’s chair. Although Logan had never been overly attached to most of his clothing, he’d had the jacket for as long as Riley had known him. However, he’d probably notice if it went missing. Besides, Riley could hardly stuff it into a fragile bag the size of a child’s fist.

  Glancing over his shoulder as if his furtive movements might be caught on a hidden camera, Riley eased Logan’s jacket off the chair, and draped the soft leather across his lap. For a moment, he simply stroked its supple surface. The scent of leather had been part of his life with Logan, from their first night together.

  After Logan had left, the barest whiff of leather had set off that plummet in Riley’s stomach, the same one he’d experienced when he’d realized that Logan had taken off, that he’d never smell the intoxicating aroma of leather-and-Logan again.

  Now the scent was comforting. Even—he shifted on the bed, tugging at his inseam—arousing.

  He didn’t know how he’d bear it if Logan left him
a second time, but he could bear it even less if Logan no longer existed in the world at all. If putting the ghost war and Trent out of reach for good meant that Logan would hate Riley forever, then he’d find a way to deal.

  But if Logan left afterward, this time Riley would know the reason why, and that he’d made a deliberate choice.

  He checked the jacket pockets: Harley keys, a folded paper with an address in Logan’s familiar scrawl, a knock-off of a Swiss Army knife, a pair of riding gloves. Nothing that felt anchor-ish to Riley. After all, if Logan could chuck his Ducati, he’d have no trouble dumping the Harley, let alone any of the other stuff.

  Riley folded back the lapels and searched the lining. Aha. The inside zippered pocket contained a definite lump. He eased it open and reached inside. Cold metal. A little rough. A chain? He drew it out, its serpentine links gleaming in the anemic glow of the desk lamp. Logan had never been a jewelry kind of guy. Had he changed that much in five months? Riley pulled the chain all the way free, and there they were.

  The rings.

  His heart beat in his ears, and he whimpered as he lowered them onto one shaking palm.

  When he’d discovered the rings in Eugene, he hadn’t taken the time to look at them closely. He’d felt too much like a kid who’d stumbled across a carefully hidden Christmas present and who didn’t want to spoil any more of the surprise.

  Now, he picked up each ring, the chain sliding smoothly through their centers. The wide bands, white gold—or maybe platinum, for all he knew—lay heavy in his hand for such small things. Did their meaning make them weightier in his mind?

  Etched inside the larger of the two was a Celtic knot, worked around his name as if binding it to the ring. The smaller one—his own—had the same design around Logan’s name.

  Tears prickled Riley’s eyes, but he took a deep breath and blinked them away.

  This was the answer. He could feel it. The notion that he could be Logan’s anchor . . . Tears threatened again, damn it. He yanked off his glasses and pressed the heels of his hands against his eyes, the rings clutched in his fist, the chain softly bumping his cheek.

  Which one would be the correct choice for the bag? Logan’s ring had Riley’s name on it . . . but it felt off. It represented Logan and his possessive streak. But his own ring. That felt right. Logan wouldn’t stay for himself, but he might—just might—stay for Riley.

  He muttered an apology as he unstrung the ring, then reclasped the chain, and dropped it back into the pocket with Logan’s ring alone.

  If his plan succeeded, Riley would be able to hand the missing ring back to Logan personally.

  If everything went to hell, Logan wouldn’t miss it anyway.

  Christ, the only thing more annoying than Max Stone sober was Max Stone drunk off his ass.

  It didn’t help that for the first half of his bender, Max had turned hyper-entertainer. He’d ingratiated himself to a platoon of similarly soused frat boys and cadged an invitation to a party. Since Max refused to go without Logan’s dubious protection, they’d both ended up jammed into a cramped apartment down by the Amtrak station until the last potential fan had passed out.

  By the time Logan, stone-cold sober and totally pissed off, hauled the idiot back to the hotel and up four flights of stairs to his room—because, plastered or not, Max flatly refused to take the elevator, for which Logan had nobody but himself to blame—the sky behind Mount Hood had already pinked with dawn.

  He took the elevator down to Riley’s floor, palming the key card Riley had slipped him earlier. As he silently opened the door, the idea of Riley waiting for him, rumpled and sleepy, heavy-eyed and willing, sent wake-up messages to his dick despite a solid thirty-something sleepless hours.

  He eased the door shut behind him and crept past the bathroom and around the corner of the short entry, blinking in the dim light from the window.

  The bed was empty.

  He rubbed his gritty eyes and looked again. Nothing. He switched on the desk lamp. Still empty. The bathroom door stood open, and unless Riley had folded himself in half and hidden in the dresser drawers, there was no place in this room where he could be.

  Logan checked under the bed, just in case. Then the locker-sized closet for good measure, but all its space was taken up by a fricking pine tree. What the hell?

  “Damn it.” Riley had always been an early riser, but he’d had a late night last night too. Maybe he had a breakfast meeting this morning? One of those interminable production marathons?

  Logan smacked the desk with his fist and the screen of the open laptop quavered to life, displaying a shit-ton of overlapping documents and browser windows. Riley used to post his to-do list on his laptop. Maybe he hadn’t lost the habit.

  Logan sat in the chair, only intending to look for clues to Riley’s whereabouts, but two words on the top document caught his eye.

  Marguerite Windflower.

  “Christ, Riley, what are you doing?” he murmured, and maximized the document.

  As Logan skimmed it—weird lists and URLs and notations in Riley’s odd shorthand—he realized Riley had no intention of staying out of harm’s way. In fact, he obviously had an entirely different game plan than they’d discussed.

  Scrolling through notes from interviews Riley had conducted with potential witnesses and anecdotal information from Portland residents, including Logan himself, Bert, and Heather, he oughtn’t feel the icy wash of betrayal scudding through his veins, yet he did.

  Holy fucking hell. His grandfather’s entire story, including Joseph Geddes’s disappearance and its aftermath, was laid out from stem to stern. So was his own nightmare with Trent. Riley had tracked lives both before and after that night—his grandfather’s fall from war hero to suspected murderer and lunatic; the pathetic deaths and disappearance of Geddes’s wife and kids; Trent’s trajectory from naive New England preppie to daredevil legend tripper; Logan’s boring, pathetic existence before that night, and train wreck of a life afterward.

  Logan’s belly cramped with nausea. How could Riley bear to look at him when he knew the whole truth about Logan’s miserable past?

  Names, events, timelines—it was all here. He’d overlaid events and times and people in a funky flow chart under headings like Persephone, Eurydice, Tam Lin, and a dozen others, complete with connecting arrows and annotations.

  Christ. How many hours of work did this represent? When had he had time to do it? Logan clenched his fist around the mouse until the plastic creaked under his fingers. He clicked on the Marguerite document again.

  Two different banishment rituals. That’s what the fucking pine branch is for.

  Riley had promised, hadn’t he? Promised to let Logan do the right thing. Yeah, Logan had made a couple of promises too, or at least implied them. But Trent’s rescue trumped those promises—trumped everything except Riley’s safety.

  Pain lanced through his chest. Riley was incredibly passionate about his research. If Logan somehow managed to walk away from the war tomorrow night—an extremely unlikely event—would Riley forgive him for what he was about to do?

  Didn’t matter. If it kept Riley safe, it was the only possible path.

  He deleted each document, a roiling pit widening in his belly with each click of the mouse. He wiped the browser history until nothing remained but the screen wallpaper.

  The breath left his lungs at the sucker punch of that picture. The two of them on the one day he’d said to hell with his father’s rants and strictures about publicly acceptable behavior, and let his feelings for Riley out in the open.

  Christ, it had felt so fucking good. Not to hide. Not to worry about who might see, who might judge. To be able to touch Riley whenever he wanted—and he’d wanted, a lot. And Riley—he’d had that look, as if Logan were some kind of fricking hero.

  He should have known he’d have to pay for that happiness eventually. After what he’d done, Riley would never look at him that way again.

  The keycard snicked in the lock. Logan sl
apped the laptop closed and leaped to his feet.

  Riley elbowed the door open, carrying two extra-large to-go cups. His hair was just as rumpled and his eyes as heavy-lidded as Logan had fantasized, but the cause was obviously not sleep but lack of it. They probably both resembled refugees from a forties noir mystery.

  “Logan.” Riley smiled at him, lines of weariness etched at the corners of his eyes. He held up one of the cups. “I brought you your favorite hazelnut latte, in case Max eventually released you from servitude.” He kissed Logan, a quick press of lips, which Logan steeled himself against and didn’t return.

  Riley pulled back, confusion in his eyes, and set the cups on the desk. “What’s the matter?”

  “You promised me. You promised you’d put Trent’s rescue first.”

  “I’m pretty sure I said nothing of the kind.”

  Logan took a deep breath through his nose. “Damn it, Riley. You’ll fuck everything up. Ruin the plan—”

  “What plan is that? Our plan? Or one of your own?”

  “Please. Spare me the mock outrage.”

  Riley blinked, his face crumpling with hurt. Christ, Conner, the least you could do is scale back on the disgusted tone.

  Logan carded his hands through his hair. “Sorry. It’s just— Don’t try to make me the only one with an agenda here.”

  “Tell me something.” Riley’s eyes glistened with a sheen of tears or fury. Logan couldn’t tell, and one was as bad as the other. “Did you ever seriously consider that I might discover another option?”

  “I don’t doubt you could, probably a dozen different ones, given time. But we don’t have time. It has to be now, this year. If we miss the seven-year window—”

  “Stop fixating on the cycle. That may not be the only factor; in fact, I’m pretty sure it’s not.”

  “But we know it happened at least twice.”

  “Two is not a statistically significant result. For all we know, it could be the goddamn margin of error.” Riley clenched his fists at his sides. “For God’s sake, Logan. Sacrificing yourself in Trent’s place is not a plan. It’s a misguided, guilt-driven death wish, and it sucks.”