by Meg Jackson
“I thought it was pretty good, myself,” he said, grinning over at her. “But to each their own…”
She was confused for a moment, and then realized he was joking; she groaned, biting back a smile. No one had ever made her feel that way – ever. Her body still tingled all over, still felt like it was barely even touching the bed beneath her. She closed her eyes, savoring this prolonged afterglow. When Damon spoke again, his words fell softly against her ears, and she didn’t bother to stop her smile from spreading.
“There's the perfect amen. You're your own gospel. And you bring good news to me…”
“Who’s that?” she asked, still with her eyes closed.
“Patricia Spears Jones,” he said, his voice a deep rumble.
“Oh,” she said, and suddenly felt like laughing. He’d tried to make things serious. She wasn’t having it. “I hope you don’t think I’m a cheap date, by the way. I still expect to get that fancy dinner you promised.”
She opened her eyes just in time to squeal as he launched himself over her, pinning her down to the bed, wiggling his hips above hers slightly as his mouth came down to nip her neck. Amazed, she felt him growing hard again between her legs as he played his tongue along her collarbone.
“Well, I was distracted the first time,” he growled, coming back up to her ear, his words making her stomach fill with a flurry. “I didn’t get a chance to make sure you’re worth the expense.”
He bit at her ear playfully, and she laughed, pushing at his chest; her strength was nowhere near enough to move him, but he pulled away regardless. She wiggled her own hips slightly, letting her thighs part again.
“Mr. Volanis, that is extremely rude, and quite uncouth,” she said, feigning offense with a pout. But then she wrapped her arms around his neck, pulling him down again and sighing as the head of his cock slipped between her slit once more. “Which just happens to be the way I like it.”
She felt, rather than saw, the smile on his lips as he nuzzled against her neck, then gasped as he plunged forward, burying himself inside her again. And holding him close, Tricia felt something strange happen inside her. As confusing, and unexpected, and impossible as it was, she felt what she’d been craving the whole time she’d been in Kingdom.
She felt like she’d come home.
22
Damon and Tricia left Charleston behind, feeling quite bad for the maid who had to deal with their mess of bedsheets and the evidence they’d left behind. Tricia had the brilliant idea to leave their leftovers from the restaurant in the mini-fridge, along with a note and a generous tip. Hopefully the cleaning crew would enjoy the braised lamb, beet salad, and cornmeal-dusted catfish as much as Tricia and Damon had enjoyed them the night before. Damon, for one, had enjoyed the sight of Tricia in her green, silky dress more than anything put on the table before them, a fact that made her blush when he revealed it.
They stopped in Savannah, Georgia for an early lunch, strolling hand-in-hand through the plazas and parks, coins in fountains and art students posing as artists all along the streets. Damon wanted to see some of the landmarks from Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, which Tricia hadn’t seen. She didn’t even feel like she needed to see it after Damon was finished telling her about it; his eye for detail, his absorbing way of speaking, the way he captured the subtle things that made a film a film, left her feeling like she’d watched the movie unfold in her own mind.
It was as romantic a day as Tricia could imagine for herself, but something nagged at her. Something big.
She couldn’t forget the anger in Damon’s eyes when he went after the kid at the pool. This was a man who’d killed. This was a man who fought. His battered knuckles told a story – but she wanted to hear that story from his own mouth, not just the scars left behind. And she needed to know, now, where they were headed – Miami, of course, but for what? She was diving head-first into this whole thing. She needed to make sure there was water in the pool before she leapt off.
If Damon noticed this subtle change in Tricia’s attitude, he didn’t mention it or let on.
The air on the highway grew saltier and saltier as they entered Florida, palm trees like a postcard welcoming them to The Sunshine State.
“I was too young to remember living in Florida. We only stayed for a year or two, right after I was born. But my uncle worked in the everglades for a long time,” Damon said. “Had some good stories about snapping turtles and alligators. He had this little dog, Chev, who had a sixth sense for gators. He would sit on the porch with Chev and pick ‘em off with his shotgun. And my great-grandmother, she lived down here after ditching my great-grandpa. She ran off with a smuggler, during Prohibition, this Cuban bootlegger who played trumpet in a Mambo band. They’d sneak liquor in instrument cases and…”
“Damon,” Tricia said, looking out the window as though she could soften the blow that way. “I want you to tell me now.”
“Tell you what?” he asked, feigning distraction as he changed lanes. She sighed and turned to look at him.
“You’re too smart to act like you don’t know,” she said. “You don’t play games, remember?”
“I remember,” he said, and she noted the way his knuckles flexed around the steering wheel. “It’s just…it’s a hard thing to explain. It’s a hard story to tell.”
She bit her lip. If he didn’t tell her, if he didn’t want to tell her, she wasn’t going to make him; how could she? But it would also mean that he didn’t trust her. And that hurt. Because she would have trusted him with anything, including her life. He’d already saved it once.
“You don’t have to,” she said. “You don’t have to tell me anything. But I wish you would.”
He was silent for a long moment, staring at the road ahead, the sweeping tango of cars.
“I want to, Tricia,” he finally said, his voice heavy. “You’re the only person I’ve ever wanted to tell. I think maybe you could understand. I think maybe you could…”
His voice trailed off. She reached forward, covered one of his tight, battered knuckles with her hand, just gently enough to let him know she was there, that she would try, if only he would try.
“It was a long time ago,” he said, and he closed his eyes.
23
When he closed his eyes, he could remember it. Every damn detail.
He was eight – maybe nine. His exact age escaped him. Mostly because in that moment, that very first moment, the second he’d heard the scream, he’d stopped being Damon Volanis. He became someone else. Someone that would live inside his body for the rest of his life. And that person was ageless. That person had been where humans weren’t supposed to go, and had come back only to find they weren’t human anymore. They were something else.
He was coming home from the movies. He went to the movies a lot as a kid, usually alone. Cristov had too much energy to sit down for two hours at a time, and Kennick was always with his father, learning the ways of the rom baro. So Damon went by himself.
He remembered the movie, even if he didn’t remember his age. He had to sneak in, since it was rated R. It was Thinner. Based on the Stephen King story. He hadn’t been too impressed. He’d snuck into Fargo earlier that year, and nothing in the next two years would ever measure up to that. The most interesting thing about Thinner, to Damon, was that it was about his people. Gypsies. And they weren’t portrayed in the nicest of lights. It was more sympathetic than a lot of other portrayals, but it still wasn’t exactly kind.
It got tiring, seeing his culture used by Americans as a plot device, a gruesome deus ex machina. He remembered thinking, as he walked down the street, crisping fallen leaves under his sneakers, that someday he’d grow up and make a movie, too. He’d show gypsies as they really were. Beautiful and funny and full of love.
His thoughts about love and beauty were cut short as he passed the parking lot behind Turren Street. He couldn’t have told you what businesses stood in front of that parking lot. All he knew was that he was walking home f
rom the movie theater, the same route he always took home. And someone was screaming.
Out of instinct alone, he ducked. A chain-link face separated the edge of the parking lot from a ravine, muddy and polluted. He slid slightly as he moved, grabbed the links to keep himself from tumbling downwards into the rot. Whether shadows hid him or the man was too distracted, Damon didn’t know. But his eyes widened as he watched the lady slump, her scream cut short.
He realized, after his brain had caught up to itself, that it wasn’t a man at all. He was older than Damon by a handful of years, but he was still just a boy. And the boy sniffed as he watched the lady’s body creep down the side of the car, all her limbs like spaghetti. The boy looked around, then caught the women by the underarms, dragging her up again. He pulled open the car door and threw the body inside.
He killed her, Damon thought, wide-eyed. He’s a murderer. I have to go – run – tell – he’ll see me.
He looked to his right. The edge of the ravine sloped sharply down, and Damon knew that it was a good mile before the ravine opened onto the next street; it was dead-end blocks all the way down. He looked to his left. He could run across the street but;
he’ll see me, and he’ll kill me.
I can outrun him, he thought. He won’t see me in time and…
He looked forward. She wasn’t dead. He could see, just barely, the way her head pressed against the passenger side door. It was pressed to the side, and he watched her eye roll in its socket, her mouth opening and closing in soundless protest. The boy – the attacker – was just a shadowy hulk, moving and moving against the lady’s body.
She’s alive, he thought. I’ve got to get help…
He rose; leaves crackled beneath his shifting weight. The hulking shadow rose in one sharp movement, and for a horrible moment Damon saw his face through the windshield.
Did he see me? Did he see me?
The lady’s face disappeared from the window as her body was yanked underneath the shadow. A cry filled the air, high and wailing. Her hand slapped against the passenger side window as the shadow began to move above her; jerking, confusing, horrible movements. Damon didn’t know what the boy was doing to the lady. All he knew was that it was bad – bad in ways that Damon would carry with him all his life. He fought the urge to throw up. He had to do something.
A male grunt filled the air as Damon began to creep along the chain-link fence towards the street. His eyes never left the car. The hand was pounding on the passenger side, weak but persistent. She wasn’t dead. He had time. He had time to…
When his feet hit pavement, he began to run. And a voice stopped him.
“Kid,” the voice said, booming from behind. Damon turned, almost against his will.
Keep running, stupid, keep running, keep running! He willed his legs to move but they didn’t. The boy stared at him from the opposite side of the car; the lady’s hand had stilled against the window, her fingers curled slightly, as though she was grabbing at air.
“I know you,” the boy said, and suddenly he was in front of Damon, a blink of an eye and he was right there, his zipper undone and – blood. On his knuckles. “You’re one of those gypsy fucks. You go telling anyone about this, you ever tell anyone about this, you and your fuckin’ people are all dead, you hear? You tell anyone and I swear to god it’ll be your fuckin’ brother or your fuckin’ father in jail for this shit. You hear me?”
Damon squeaked. The boy rushed him, grabbed him by the neck of his shirt, lifted him until Damon’s toes were the only thing touching the ground. The boy smelled like sweat and rage and blood and fear and something else. He had blue eyes. He had black hair. A crooked nose, with a bump in it. Damon never forgot that face.
“No one but no one is going to take some shitty little gypsy boy’s word over mine, you hear?”
The boy shook Damon.
“Do you fucking understand? You point the finger at me, you little shit, and you’ll be visiting your fucking family through prison bars. And I’ll come after everyone else you love. You hear me, you little shit? DO YOU HEAR ME?”
“Yes,” Damon wailed, his hands doing futile battle with the boy’s fist around the collar of his shirt, wanting to be gone, wanting to be away from that stench, that awful smell, those horrible eyes, the boy’s spit landing on Damon’s cheeks, the whole horrid moment when the lady was hurting, when someone needed help, and all he did…all he could do…
was cry.
Damon ran, not even realizing that the boy had released him. He was a long way from where the gypsies called home. He couldn’t run the whole way.
But he could cry the whole way.
And he did.
And that was the last time Damon Volanis cried a single tear.
Men would beat him far worse than that kid yanking him upward by the collar of his shirt. Women would scream their anger at him, louder than the lady in that car. He would run harder and faster than he had that afternoon, the crisp October air stinging his lungs. His grandmother would die. His father would die. His uncle would die. He would betrayed by someone in his own kumpania. He would watch his brothers find love while his heart festered and boiled, alone in its shell of ribs. He would fight men, beat them until they gasped. He would kill a man. But he would never cry again.
24
Tricia gazed at Damon’s profile. His eyes were steady on the road before them, his hands not too tight on the steering wheel. He’d told the story like he was reciting a college essay, all the emotion subdued by carefully chosen words. But he didn’t need to tell the story with dramatics for Tricia to understand how deeply the incident had affected him; how something had changed in him that day, and that something was somehow connected to this trip.
“You were so young,” she said. “What could you have done?”
“I could have gone forward,” he said. “I could have gone to the police.”
Yes, you could have, Tricia thought. But at what cost? And what eight-year-old boy knows the right thing to do in a situation like that?
“Did you ever see him again?” she asked, not wanting to move too quickly into the darker stuff.
“I did,” Damon said, nodding slightly. “A few times. On the street. He lived near our trailer park. He never really seemed to see me, though. And we didn’t stick around long after that, anyway. When something bad happens in a city where you have gypsies, it doesn’t take much for gossip to get real sour real quick.”
Tricia nodded, remembering how Kingdom had reacted when the gypsies first arrived. Everyone had assumed they were up to no good. Thirty years ago, a young girl’s death had been blamed on the gypsies, even though they were cleared of all charges. Present day hadn’t shown much of a change in that sort of attitude.
“And then I saw him once more,” Damon said, clearing his throat. “About ten, eleven years ago. I was just getting into fighting, maybe a few years in. That’s why I got into fighting. I got into it because of him. I always felt…I just needed something to make me feel strong, to make me feel like I was in control. And fighting did that.”
Tricia thought about that, thought it made sense. The most productive thing she’d done in her time away was kickboxing classes. She understood Damon’s passion for fighting better than most. When someone takes away your power, you’ll spend a long time and a lot of energy trying to get it back.
“I saw him at a fight in Massachusetts. Outside of Boston. He was spectating at the time, but I found out later that he was involved in the rings, too. He had ten years on me, so we were never thrown in together.”
“That’s a hell of a coincidence,” Tricia mused softly. “I mean, the both of you ending up in underground fighting? And seeing him at that fight?”
“Maybe,” Damon shrugged. “Or maybe I knew a big guy like that, whose principle interests were hurting innocent people, might end up a fighter. Subconsciously, you know. Or maybe it was fate.”
Tricia fought to contain her own cynical opinion on fate. This wasn’t the ti
me or the place for that.
“So did you get to fight him?” she asked instead. He shook his head.
“We moved again after the Massachusetts fight. I tried to keep tabs on him, but he slipped in and out of the scene. And most guys won’t put two men with ten years between ‘em against each other. Odds are too skewed to one side. I left some money in some pockets up and down the coast. I’ve been waiting a long time for that to pay off.”
Tricia wasn’t stupid. She didn’t need to take long to figure out that she was about to get an answer to the question he’d been avoiding ever since they left Kingdom behind.
“And are you done waiting?” she asked, the question more of a statement.
“I am,” he said. “He’s broke, and he’s desperate. He’ll fight anyone. I don’t know if he knows that a man named Damon’s been looking for him, but he agreed to the fight once he found out the size of the paycheck.”
“You don’t think he knows you’ve got this vendetta?” Tricia asked, brow furrowed.
“I never told anyone why I wanted to fight him. And I paid well enough that most guys should have known to keep their mouths shut. Frankly, it doesn’t matter. If he doesn’t know now, he’ll know soon enough. The thing that matters is that it’s going to happen. I’m going to give that guy every inch of hell he gave that woman, with some extra thrown in for myself.”
“And then you think you’ll be all fixed up,” Tricia said, gazing out the window, feeling unsettled. Her tone betrayed her attempt to look stoic.
“I don’t know,” Damon said. “I’ve always hoped so. But I take it you don’t think it’ll work that way.”
Tricia sighed, looked back at him. Strong and handsome and smart and so damn sturdy; but just human, after all. Just like her. Just like this guy.
When she didn’t respond, he kept talking.
