Page 31 of All Saints Day (Lucifer and the Saints #2)
Frank
T hat loud ringing sound, a flash of light.
Have I lost time again?
For a moment, the past is present. It’s the day after Christmas, my thirty-second birthday.
Well, not actually my thirty-second birthday—Francis Castle was born on the twenty-sixth of October, but Frank Stone was born a day after Christmas.
Partly because it was better for his undercover work to have his ‘friends’ and coworkers be largely unavailable to get closer to him with birthday gifts or celebrations—everything blending into the celebration of the winter holidays and new year’s—allowing Frank Stone to stay background noise in his own life.
In my life.
But fated mates are a funny thing. No matter how much you might stray from your course, or try to deny the truth—you’ll just keep getting pulled back into your place written into the stars, again and again.
I'm alone, sitting in the shitty little apartment the Windmill had put me up in. It’s only been about two months into my assignment, and already—I can tell something is different about Mike Duboze, my partner while I am undercover for the Windmill.
I’ve gotten ripping drunk to try to forget my real birthday, to forget the eighteen Christmases spent with my father.
Rook, the splinter of myself I’d fashioned into my greatest defense against my own mind, turned me, Francis Castle, back toward the indomitable Frank Stone—a man with no past and no real future; vengeance personified.
I’m smoking cigarettes on my freezing cold fire escape when I hear the buzzer for my apartment door sound inside.
“Who is it?” I bark into the intercom once I shimmy back inside through my kitchen window.
“Duboze!” Michael’s voice crackles back over the intercom. “Let me in; it’s fuckin’ freezing out here!”
I open the door dumbly, coming face to face with my partner, not able to do the mental arithmetic on what might bring him to my door.
Everyone on the unit knows I’m single, with no living family, and a general lack of interest in Christmas and all of its trappings.
Duboze in particular has a stunner of a girlfriend I’d met only a few days before at the department’s holiday party—Anette, a shapely Blonde, 5’10 omega and second chair flutist for the DC Philharmonic.
I had assumed he would be spending the precious days between Christmas and the new year knotting her, eating too much rich food, and catching up on bad TV.
Instead, Michael Duboze is darkening my doorstep the day after Christmas with a bottle of Jack and an unopened pack of my brand of cigarettes.
“Happy Birthday.” He gives me a wry grin and shoves past me into my apartment.
“Mike, respectfully—what the fuck are you doing here?” I growl, reaching out to grab his shoulder—but Mike just spins around and presses the pack of cigarettes into my reaching hand.
“Anette and I broke up on Christmas Eve—and you were the only other surly bastard I knew who would be alone on the day after Christmas—so I decided we should get drunk together.”
That brings me up short.
“Oh shit man, I’m sorry,” I flounder, flopping down into one of the two rickety chairs at my small kitchen table, all my angry bluster gone in an instant as I watch Mike look through my empty cabinets for glasses—finding nothing.
“Don’t be,” He laughs mirthlessly, giving up his search in favor of just opening up the bottle of Jack and taking a swig directly from the long glass bottleneck. “Just let me get blackout drunk here and pass out on your couch so that I don’t have to be alone tonight.”
When Mike looked into me with those silvery gray eyes, I think I knew—right there and then—I was just too scared to admit it to myself.
Of all the memories I’ve shredded to ribbons or hidden away from myself, this one remains—tucked to the side—but still within my reach. Later that night would be the first time Mike and I kissed—the first time we fucked; even though the first time we really made love wouldn’t be until months later.
It all started there—in that kitchen, me looking up into Mike’s face from my seat at the table.
The loud ringing in my ears makes me wince,and part of me—most of me really—knows it’s not the day after Christmas. I’m not in my shitty old undercover kitchen—but still, I can’t help myself.
“How do I fix this?” I ask Mike in my desperation.
“I don’t know if you can.” He shakes his head.
“I need to be able to fix this. I need to be able to save Louise and the others from Rook—from the Windmill.”
“How can you save the others if you can’t save yourself?” Mike asks sadly.
“Tell me how I can save myself—I’ll do it, I’ll do anything for Louise, for the Saints!”
Time blurs, ebbing and flowing forward and back.
I’m not in the kitchen with Mike anymore. I’m in some hippie-crunchy yurt only god knows where—Dennis McBride and his sea-glass green eyes glaring back at me instead of Michael with his stormy gray ones.
“Dennis—Dennis, you have to help me,” I plead, not caring how pathetic I sound.
“And how do you think I can help you, Frank?” He crosses his arms over his chest, looking down that freckle-spattered nose of his at me.
“You can’t let them go through with it,” I stammer out, sweat beading at my brow, rolling down between my shoulder blades as the panic grips me anew.
“Let who go through with what?” Dennis challenges, lifting his chin.
My vision doubles—Dennis and Mike stand side-by-side in the same pose before I shake it off, only Dennis standing in judgement as I blather on.
“You can’t let Louise and Quentin dose me with those suppressant melters, you can’t let Rook get ahold of either of them!” I plead desperately.
Dennis just shakes his head wearily.
“Unless you want to tell me what the Windmill’s plans for the Zeitnot virus are, there’s no way to stop that train—it’s already coming down the tracks,” he snorts dismissively.
“You don’t get it—none of you understand what you’re dealing with when it comes to the Windmill,” I protest, trying to make him see reason if none of the others will.
“C’mon Dennis, you’ve seen the corruption—don’t tell me that you didn’t think Susan Lowry was pure as the first snow before you found out.
” I press my point, and I can tell by the nearly imperceptible downturn of the corner of Dennis’ mouth—that I’ve struck a nerve.
“They must be pretty bad, considering what it did to you, Frank,” Dennis finally speaks, getting his jab in.
“Yeah—take it from a fool who knows, kid,” I snap back, we don’t have time for this kind of waffling.
“For you to have to become Rook, to have made someone that awful to hide behind to protect yourself,” Dennis shoots back.
My vision starts to swim before me, and I can hear the ringing in my ears spinning up louder and louder.
“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” I growl out. My hands want to cover my ears—to squeeze my skull until it shatters or the noise stops—whichever comes first.
“Oh but I do,” Dennis sighs sadly—pulling a chair, spinning it around backward so that he can sit facing me—leaning against the high back of the chair; a bandage peeking out from beneath the sleeve of his t-shirt.
“From the minimal stuff I can find that the Windmill didn’t scrub from the record—young Francis Castle seemed like a good kid, a sweet boy who was too soft to make it in his father’s violent family business or in the Windmill. ”
I pinch my eyes shut—images projected in clips on my minds eye; throwing up on the sidewalk outside the bar the first time I saw my old man slit a guy’s throat, my own hands slick with blood as my father lay dying in my arms, Susan Lowry teaching me how to break fingers in the most painful and frightening way possible in an interrogation on a call-girl who had been stupid enough to try to blackmail Compton, picking at the flecks of gunpowder in my hand after my first kill—like Lady Macbeth trying to wash her hands of her dirty deeds in her sleep.
Out—damned spot!
“Shut up!” Is all I can manage to blurt out—my head spinning, my grip on reality slipping away.
“You made yourself a monster to hide behind—to do the dirty work while sweet, soft Francis kept his hands clean.”
I feel the bile rising in my throat, the air in the room becoming thin, the walls closing in.
“But Rook was too dirty—too rough and tumble to go undercover at the FBI like your handlers wanted,” Dennis continues as I struggle against my bonds—animal screams rising up to try to drown out his words so that I don’t have to hear the truth.
“Now, what I can’t figure out is what carrot they dangled in front of you to keep you going forward so blindly,” Dennis ponders aloud, looking me up and down from behind the cold front of his icy rebuke.
I just shout and snarl—because it’s all I can do as the darkness inside begins to take hold.
“For whatever reason, you were their dog, you followed their orders—you had to make yourself a new face, a new mask to wear to do it, Frank Stone; not the kid who lost his father the red collar criminal at a young age, not the monster that the kid created to get vengeance for dear old dad, but someone smarter, smoother, sexier—who could fit in with the boy scouts and carry himself with power and swagger.”
“If you know so much, why don’t you just put a bullet in my brain!?” I bark, momentarily stunning Dennis into silence.
“I know you expect me to take the tough guy route—to tell you that the only reason you’re still alive is because we need information,” Dennis growls back, flexing his own alpha aura on me—Sea Salt, Thyme, Hyssop, like a clean breaking wave over the jagged rocks of my frayed nerves.
“But I’ve seen it, Frank—Francis; whoever you really are inside there.
” He jabs at my sternum with his index finger—those blue-green eyes crackling as if lit from within as he fixes me with his stare.
“I’ve seen a place where all of us can belong. ”
I shut my eyes and try not to see Michael’s blood spray as the bullet bores into his skull.
It isn’t possible. It’s a lie—all of it. Fated Mates, the Saints, Lucifer, and me—Dennis doesn’t understand. No one does.
I don’t get a happy ending.
The ringing builds louder until it drowns out everything else.
So I descend into the depths, into the madness, into the ringing darkness.