I’ll not be a liability to you or to Rachel. My perception is clear. I know our priorities.”
“That’s not why I’m asking,” Zac said.
“Why then? Speak plainly, man.”
“Cady and Finn shouldn’t be left right now. One of us should be with them.”
David frowned. Zac relayed the words he’d had from Finn, and the frown deepened.
“We can’t stop them if they wish to leave.”
“They wish to leave because we’re choosing Rachel. All of us. Unless someone stays here to show them otherwise.”
“Have you asked Tiana?”
Zac shoved his fingers through his hair. “One of us, David. From their perspective, Tiana’s not one of us.”
“I don’t see why it must be me.”
“You’ll have wisdom and scripture for them, and you know how to avoid wielding either like a club.”
Zac couldn’t keep him here short of hogtying the man, which wouldn’t help Cady and Finn anyway. The stubborn, straitlaced imbecile clenched his hands and walked to the window to stare outside as if the matter held no urgency.
Something stirred within Zac with a wordless prodding sensation, something he was missing, something in front of his face. He was trying to see Rachel. Trying to see Cady and Finn. He was not trying to see David.
Well, the guy was slowing him down for no reason.
And he was a friend.
Okay. See David.
“Can we accelerate this at least?” Zac said.
David turned from the window. “What?”
“Tell me why you won’t stay here and trust Simon and me to bring back the …” There it was. The clearest vision of David Galloway. “You don’t trust us.”
“Of course I do.”
“I get it now.” Zac held up a hand. “You’ve been on your own twice as long as you’ve had someone to trust. When you wanted something, needed something, you did it yourself.”
David crossed the room to sink onto the edge of a couch cushion, fisted hands between his knees. “Aye. I did.”
“And this matters to you too much to let someone else deal with it. Even fellow longevites.”
David’s mouth twitched at the name. “You could be right.”
“Well, do you want to live like that for another century, or do you want to give us a chance to prove ourselves?”
He bowed his head over his clenched hands, and slowly they opened. In the silence, his prayer seemed to pour through the room like light. When he looked up, his face still held turmoil that dug furrows around his eyes and mouth. But he nodded.
“I’m not at rest about it. But perhaps I won’t be until I’ve learned again how to do it.”
He pushed to his feet. On impulse Zac thrust his hand out, and David lifted his eyebrows as he shook it.
“You are coming back,” he said, more an order than a question.
“With the information to make you mortal again, if it exists.” And with a woman who needed a family.
“Very well.” His shoulders squared, and he gripped Zac’s hand one last time before releasing it. “I’ll remain here. And as I’m able, I’ll minister to the others.”
David would be able, Zac knew down to his gut. The question was whether Zac would be equally so for the task set before him.
Simon was sitting on the hood of Zac’s car, feet flat to the metal, watching traffic through the wrought-iron fence that, along with a low hill, separated the complex’s parking lot from the main road. Drizzle pattered his black jacket and bits of sleet collected in his hair, but he seemed unbothered. He glanced away from the passing cars as Zac approached.
“No third man?”
“I told him to try trusting someone besides himself for a change.”
Simon grunted and slid off the hood. “Guess it’s a big change for him, after all that time.”
“Yeah, but he has to learn.”
“Impressed he’s willing to.”
They nearly collided on the driver’s side of the vehicle. Simon held out one hand, palm up.
“Oh, right.” Zac tossed the keys underhanded, and his ribs seemed to shift. He pressed his lips tight.
Simon pretended not to see as he slid in behind the wheel, and Zac walked around the front end to the passenger side as upright as he could manage. Simon entered the Leahy Bed-and-Breakfast into his phone and silenced the voice directions.
As they began the drive, Zac woke his phone and opened Rachel’s profile. “I should message her.”
“Okay.”
Trying to make eye contact with Simon only worked when he wanted it to, and right now he was focused on the road with absurd doggedness. Something was brewing in his head. Well, whatever. He could stew for the next ninety minutes if he so chose.
Zac opened the app’s messenger tab. If he didn’t message her, and she was waiting … but if he did message her, and she saw it and ran again … He paused. Stilled himself. Thought. A message confirmed he’d found her profile, which he was pretty sure she wanted him to do.
Okay.
RACHEL, I KNOW THIS IS YOU. LET ME KNOW YOU’RE OKAY.
Without context he sounded rather like a stalker, but he sent it anyway. Depending on her response, he’d decide whether to tell her he was on his way to her location. He leaned back in the seat and closed his eyes.
Less than five minutes passed, and then Simon gave a grunt.
“What?” Zac didn’t open his eyes.
“Oh, nothing. You just lounge away. Never mind I was the one up all night searching and rescuing.”
Zac gave half a smirk with his eyes still closed. “Rib fractures. I win.”
Another grunt. A long quiet. Then Simon’s voice, oddly hushed. “Was thinking about that solitary camping trip when I got rained out and fell in the mudslide and broke my leg.”
“I remember.”
“Yeah.” His voice gained normal volume, plunging them into the retelling. “I was remembering it for other reasons, but then I got to thinking … must have been tough for you. The mud was awful. I remember it was all over us by the time we got back.”
Zac sat up. “You mean as a trigger.”
“Right.” Simon kept his eyes on the road.
“It wasn’t too bad as long as I kept moving.” No masks. “But yeah, I was glad to get out of it.” He grinned. “Man, I kept thinking I’d drop you. You’re a heavy cuss.”
“Nothing but muscle, brother.”
“And poor Moira, holding you down while I set that leg. Kept her eyes closed the whole time, and you weren’t even bleeding.”
“‘How have you boys lived so long and still not learned self-preservation?’” Simon’s inflection and raised pitch sounded fairly like her.
Zac gave a truncated laugh, and then his eyes were burning. He pressed his thumbs into them. “Shoot, man. What’ll we do without her?”
“It’s been less than a month.”
“But what’s happening to her? You know? Where is she, how’s she getting by?”
“She’s getting by in style and effortlessly, and you know it. You’re not worried about her physical safety. You’re worried about her state of mind.”
Simon willing to talk about someone’s state of mind. What was the world coming to? “What if she’s never the same again?”
“She won’t be.”
“Don’t give me that ‘none of us will’ crap. I’m serious.”
“So am I.”
“Well, now what?”
“I don’t know.”
Zac blinked at him, but he kept his eyes on the road. Those three words sounded as foreign from Simon as modern slang would sound from David.
“I protect people. I get justice for them. The aftermath, road to healing stuff—that’s never been my expertise.”
Zac nodded. All true. He hadn’t thought of himself as needing to heal, though. More like needing to process. To get past it. To learn from it. Of course Colm had hurt Moira, but the idea he’d also hurt Zac … it felt itchy. Wrong to dwell on, dangerous to touch.
A subject change was in order.
“Why were you thinking about a camping trip from over forty years ago?”
Simon huffed. “Tables turning and all. This time it was me out looking for your stranded butt.”
“Oh, right.”
“Literal payback.”
“Yeah. And thanks. In case I didn’t say it before.”
“You did. Of course you did. The second you were clear of the debris, you thanked Cady and me.”
“Okay.”
The quiet held a strange new edge. Beside him, Simon seemed tight and strained, the seams of him overfull of something that wanted escape. Zac sat up again and watched Simon drive.
“You don’t even remember, do you?” The edge had entered Simon’s voice. Something hard and brittle.
“Nope.”
“It took me a year to thank you. A year. I couldn’t say it at first because I’m a proud old fool, and then I forgot to say it. And then one day you noticed the limp was gone, and I realized—I still had never said it.”
“Well, did you say it then?” Zac wanted to laugh. Had this been bothering Simon for forty years?
“Yep, I did, and you said, ‘You would’ve done it for me.’ Just casual like that. Like it wasn’t anything.”
“It wasn’t, Simon. It was just what we do. Like you coming here this week and declaring a Life Buoy on me.”
“But what if you were wrong?”
“About what?”
The car sped up at least five mph. Simon merged into the left lane and passed a few cars. “That I would’ve gone after you. That I would’ve pulled you out of the mud and carried you home on my back while reliving a war.”
He made the thing sound heroic, which was ridiculous. “Look, man, you would have come for me. Heck, you did. Yesterday.”
A long sigh poured out of Simon, a partial release of the tension in the car. “I know what Colm said to you, the night you brought me back.”
Colm. Again. “Which part?”
“Moira said you asked him for help, and he refused. Told you I shouldn’t have been out there if I couldn’t handle a storm on my own.”
“Well?”
“I told Moira he had a fair point, and you could have listened to him. And she said, ‘If Zac had listened to him, you’d still be out there in the dark, in the rain, with a broken leg.’”
The man had to be going somewhere with this. He didn’t draw out a story, didn’t include details without meaning something.
Simon smacked his palm against the steering wheel. “Don’t you get it? I as much as told her Colm’s reaction made more sense than yours. I sided with the serial killer.”
Aha. Now they were getting somewhere. Zac shrugged. “You were just talking.”
Simon rubbed one hand over his face. “I thought about it a lot, the week after his death. I thought …”
“What, that you’re like him?”
“God forbid.” He passed his palm over his mouth. “I mean that, Zac. If there’s a God, I’d want Him to strike me dead before He let me become another Colm.”
“There is a God. And you’re—shoot, Simon, you’re worlds different from Colm. Can’t believe you need someone to tell you that.”
“We’ve all got darkness, man.”
“You’ve never deliberately brought harm to an innocent person. Never. I don’t care that you got some grim pleasure in tackling a guy to the concrete and kicking the gun out of his hand before he could shoot a bunch of mortals with it. I don’t care that part of you misses law enforcement and hasn’t found a rush to match it in all this time. None of that equals psychopath, Simon.”
“I hope you’re right.”
“He brought home souvenirs.”
Simon stared at Zac a second longer than was safe while traveling at eighty mph.
“Yeah,” Zac said. “Shot glasses, bought in souvenir shops from every place he made a kill. I found them in his apartment.”
“Where are they now?”
“Some landfill, I guess.”
Simon grimaced.
“If you try to talk to me about evidence—”
“No. We couldn’t have identified them from that alone.”
They were quiet a few minutes. Simon’s shoulders rose and fell a few times, long, cleansing breaths that seemed to settle him back into himself, to relieve the strain that had been building in him.
“You were actually worried about this,” Zac said.
“There are things you don’t know about me, Zac.”
“But a shelf of trophies from the places you’ve murdered mortals isn’t one of them.”
“No.”
“And you’ve never taken innocent life.”
“Well, the wars.”
“In the wars, we did our best. We tried to protect the innocent. When we failed, we mourned.”
“Yeah.”
“You’ve never looked at a helpless civilian and lusted for that person’s life.”
“Never.”
“Well, there you go.”
Simon shot him a sidelong glance, shook his head, but his mouth twitched at the corners. Then he sobered. “So many things he said to me. Like they’re all echoing back at the same time.”
“Yep.”
“I’ve been wondering if any of it was true. His life in Fisher Lake, his blacksmith shop, his wife, and then Rose after her—what were those things to him? Cover? Toys?”
“I don’t know.” Zac gazed out the window at the patchy clouds. “We never will, I guess.”
A small voice rose inside him. Needing to know. Ready to know. He cleared his throat. “He told me once … a long time ago. I mean a long time, maybe the twenties.” He had to clear his throat again. A lump of tears rose in it, ancient tears that had been swallowed so many times they’d become petrified somewhere in his gut. Now they began to melt. “He told me you couldn’t stand me. But you did, for Moira. Since Moira wanted to keep me around.”
Simon was silent.
Crap. Okay. The last few weeks had made Zac hope, given Colm had turned out to be pathological …
“Buddy, I can’t believe you thought …”
The hope inside lifted its crushed head.
“I don’t stay in touch with people I can’t stand.” Simon’s voice had hardened. “I don’t share a table with them at Thanksgiving. I don’t answer phone calls from them in the dead of night. And I don’t go out climbing dunes all night looking for their pathetic accident-prone—”
“Yeah, okay.”
“You never challenged him on it.”
“No.” And that was on Zac. “I figured I managed to grow on you over the years, at least a little.”
Simon huffed. “Can’t believe this stuff’s been lurking all this time. He messed with both of us.”
“I think you messed with you, man.”
“No, I’m talking about— He told me you talked about going off with Moira someplace. Cutting ties. When I said you’d never talked that way around me, he said of course not, I was a cop, and you knew I’d track you down. I told Colm he was full of crap, and he never brought it up again. But I wondered about it for a few months, maybe a year. Until it didn’t happen.”
“Because I never said it.”
“He wanted us ill at ease with each other.”
“What are we, high school girls?”
“Well …” Simon’s mouth tipped up. “He succeeded, at least partly.”
“But why bother?”
“Maybe it was a game. Or maybe he found it easier to fool us separately.”
Zac propped his head in his hands as it throbbed afresh. “Right. Well. If you still need evidence you’re nothing like him, there’s some more.”
“Hmm. Yeah.”
“You know, I told David he was the one that kept us together. The glue of us. That we might drift apart forever without him.”
“Where’d you get an idiotic idea like that?”
“What I’m trying to tell you. It was something else Colm said, fairly often over the years. It was the place he saw himself.”
“Or wanted you to see him.”
“Or that.”
Quiet settled around them again, but it held a restfulness now. A shedding of old things. Simon checked his phone map, and Zac checked for a response from Rachel. Nothing.
“Anything else?” Zac said. “I mean, while we’re at it.”
Simon grunted. “Moira would be proud.”
“Fact.”
Someday soon, they would tell her about it.