Chapter 2
Toolie
Isat in the farthest corner of the Royal Bastards MC clubhouse, chair angled so no one could sneak up behind.
The air was humid with June and stank of sweat, old bourbon, and scorched oil.
All the things I’d call home if I had the words for it.
The neon sign over the pool table burned out last week, so the only light came from a flickering Budweiser lamp and the blue-white TV glare showing looping footage of a bar fight in Evansville, volume off.
Moab and Canon posted up beside me, flanking my six like they thought I needed the backup. Which, for once, I might.
Moab nursed a Coors, arms folded, head shaved so clean you could see veins throbbing at the temples.
He watched me with the half-smile of a man waiting to see if his dog would bite.
Canon—posture so rigid he made a wooden pew look soft—sat on my left.
He watched nothing and everything, a stillness that made you itch.
The third man, Vin, our club president, perched on the edge of a battered couch with a leather-bound notebook propped on his knees, scribbling with a fountain pen like an old-world scribe on a deadline.
Every so often, his gaze flicked to me, to my hands, then away.
Like he thought I might shatter if he stared too long.
I swirled the ice in my glass, let the whiskey coat my tongue before I swallowed. It burned less than usual. Or maybe that was me getting used to the pain.
The door opened, and Scarlette slipped in.
She always moved like she was ready to bolt or throw down, depending.
Her cropped hair caught the ceiling fan’s breeze, a flame-lick of copper.
She scanned the room, green eyes catching on me, and for a second, something twitched across her mouth.
Not a smile, not exactly. A warning, maybe.
Or a question. She sensed something was up.
Ever since she arrived from the past, she had a way of reading the men in the club.
Most hated it, but me? Na, I knew she was the only person connected to the club who could really help me now.
She made her way over, boots clicking sharp against the sticky floor. Paused just close enough for the scent of rain and cigarettes to reach us, and leaned a hip against the table. “You look like shit, Toolie.”
I grunted. “Been sleeping like shit, too.”
She rolled her eyes, but stayed. That was her way of saying she cared, or at least wanted to see how the carnage shook out.
Canon cleared his throat. “You ready?”
I didn’t answer. Instead, I watched the way Vin’s hand worked the pen, saw Moab’s fingers tap out a Morse code on his can.
None of them wanted to be here for this.
They wanted the old Toolie: steady hands, steady throttle, quick on the punch, and slow to talk about feelings.
Not this. Not me cracking apart on a Tuesday night.
“Let’s get it over with,” I muttered.
Canon nodded, stone-faced. “Start from the beginning. The part that matters.”
I clenched the glass. Cold sweat trickled from my palm, beading on the bar. “You know the beginning better than I.”
“Do it anyway.” Canon’s voice left no room.
Fine.
I leaned back, trying to remember how to breathe. “It’s not dreams. Not like that. It’s more… being somewhere else. Someone else.” I looked at Scarlette. She watched with the patience of a hanging judge.
I tried again. “When it started, I thought it was the meds. Or the head trauma. But it’s always the same.”
Vin’s pen scratched, slow and rhythmic. “Where are you?”
I closed my eyes. The room faded, replaced by gray sky and the smell of damp earth.
“A graveyard,” I said. “Always the same one.”
No one spoke. Even the TV cut to static, silent snow. This was something Vin could relate to.
“I wake up in the dirt,” I continued, voice rough. “Can’t remember how I got there. Everything’s cold. My hands—” I flexed my own, studying the calluses and the veins— “they’re not mine. Smaller. Scarred different. Someone’s crying, but I can’t move. I’m stuck.”
“Stuck how?” Moab asked.
I shrugged, but the movement made my skin crawl. “Like I’m nailed down. Like gravity’s tripled and I’m the anchor.”
Scarlette’s gaze softened, just for a second. “And then?”
“And then I start to remember.” I paused. The ice in my glass melted, leaving only the dregs. “But it’s not this life. It’s…” I searched for the word. “Old.”
Canon exhaled, slow. “You ever recognize the graveyard?”
I hesitated. The truth wasn’t something I liked saying out loud. “Dublin.”
Scarlette arched a brow. “You ever been to Ireland, Toolie?”
“Yeah.” I said it flat. “It’s all like muscle memory.”
No one laughed, not even Vin. His hand hovered over the paper, waiting.
Moab leaned in, lowering his voice. “How do you know it’s Dublin?”
I blinked, and for a heartbeat the room blurred: green hills, black iron gates, stones with names carved in dead languages. “I can read the stones. Some in English, some not. I hear people talking, and it’s an accent I shouldn’t understand, but I do. And the name on the biggest headstone…”
My tongue went dry. I set the glass down and pressed my thumb hard against the wood grain.
Vin’s voice, barely above a whisper: “What’s the name?”
I swallowed. “O’Toole. Just like me.”
The room held its breath.
I expected someone to make a joke, break the spell. But no one did. Scarlette reached over and slid the whiskey bottle down the bar. “What else?”
“There’s a woman,” I said. “Always the same. She’s crying. Black hair, blue eyes, face like a painting.” I almost smiled, remembering the way her hands shook as she traced the headstone’s letters. “She calls me by a different name. Not Toolie. She calls me Sully or sometimes fool.”
“Does she know you?” Canon asked.
I thought about it. “She thinks she does. She talks to me like I’m there, but I’m not. I’m the ghost.”
Moab finished his beer in one long pull. “So you’re haunting your own grave?”
“Something like that.”
The words sounded stupid in the air. But I didn’t take them back.
Scarlette’s eyes narrowed. “You ever talk back?”
I shook my head. “Can’t move, can’t speak. Just watch.”
“Sounds like a past life thing,” Vin muttered. Canon shot him a look, but Vin didn’t back down. “Reincarnation. Trauma looping through time. Who the fuck knows?”
Canon turned to me, all judge and no jury. “Why now?”
That was the question, wasn’t it?
“I don’t know.” I glanced at my left forearm, where the shamrock tattoo was just visible beneath the sleeve. “But lately, it feels like it’s leaking into everything else.”
Silence again.
Moab ran a hand over his scalp, eyes closed. “You want to fix it, or you want to make it worse?”
I smirked, the old me slipping back in. “I just want to sleep.”
Scarlette softened, just a little. “You ever try talking to her? In the dream?”
I paused. “No. But I want to.”
Canon nodded, more to himself than anyone. “Then maybe you should.”
Vin scribbled furiously, eyes lighting up with something I couldn’t place. “If it’s Dublin, I can trace the O’Toole line. Cemetery records, old city plans. Might tell us what you’re looking for.”
Moab snorted. “Or it might be you had a concussion and your brain’s stuck in a feedback loop.”
“Either way,” I said, “I want to know.”
Canon closed his eyes, then stood up. “Then we go to the source.”
Scarlette stared at me, long and hard. “You up for it?”
I met her gaze. “Yeah.”
The decision settled over the room, final as a gravestone. We sat there, four broken machines trying to solve a mystery older than any of us. The whiskey burned clean, and for a moment, the nightmares felt a little lighter. But only for a moment.
***
The next day, I tried to shake the night off, but it clung like old blood on my knuckles.
We met at the clubhouse again—no women, no civilians, just the inner circle.
Canon had a printout of some family tree he’d found online, but I didn’t care for it.
He read it off anyway, dry as a priest’s ashes, names stacked and branched, each one ending in a date and a cold dash.
Moab kept pulling up pictures on his phone, Google-stalking Irish cemeteries and shaking his head every time the Wi-Fi died.
Scarlette sat beside me this time, close enough that our shoulders brushed. I pretended not to notice, but I did.
Vin held the notebook like it was a hostage, waiting.
Canon gestured at me. “If there’s more, now’s the time.”
I stared at the water ring left by my glass, watched it seep into the ancient wood. Every instinct said to lie, to play it off as a head injury, but I couldn’t. Not after last night, not with them looking at me like they cared if I lived or went full ghost.
So I started.
“I see it at night, mostly.” My voice didn’t sound like mine—too thin, too raw. “Sometimes when I close my eyes. It’s always raining, or about to. Cold. The kind of cold that gets inside your teeth.”
Moab grunted. “That tracks. Ireland’s a wet shithole.”
“Let him talk,” Scarlette said, and I almost smiled.
“It’s the same graveyard, but sometimes it’s not a graveyard at all.
Sometimes it’s a hill, or a field, or a dark stone house with a thatch roof and a chimney coughing black smoke.
I know the path to the door like I’ve walked it every day of my life, but when I try to open it, my hands go right through. ”
Vin scribbled, head bowed.
“There’s fighting. Lots of it.” My jaw ached just talking about it.
“Muskets, pikes, swords. You hear the noise before you see the men—boots pounding, metal on bone, screams in two languages. There’s fire sometimes, but it’s the smoke that sticks with me.
Peat, blood, wood, all of it mixed. I can taste it even now. ”
I paused. Scarlette laid a hand on my forearm, feather-light. The shamrock ink seemed to shiver under her touch.
“I’m a soldier. Not a good one.” I let that hang a second. “I think I die in every vision. Usually stabbed, sometimes shot, once drowned. But it’s never quick. I feel every second.”
Canon’s eyebrows pulled together. “You remember any names? Places? Dates?”
“Not exactly.” I dug a thumb into my palm, grounding myself. “Just the images of people. She, the woman I see, says ‘my love’ more than anything else.”
Moab looked at Canon. “Historical cross-check?”
Canon shook his head. “Sounds like the Seventeenth century, most likely. Irish Catholic. Would’ve fought Cromwell’s bastards, maybe died at Drogheda or Wexford. But the records are—”
Vin cut in, uncharacteristically loud. “Sparse. They’re sparse.” He looked up, eyes shining. “But the pattern fits. Cycle of violence, trauma echoing down the bloodline.”
I tried to laugh, but it came out as a cough. “Maybe I’m just a cliché.”
“No,” Scarlette said. Her hand stayed. “You’re not.”
The silence came back, heavy as a casket.
Canon finally spoke. “What do you want us to do?”
I didn’t answer right away. Instead, I let myself remember it all: the taste of mud, the rush of fear before the end, the woman’s voice singing me back. “I want to know who she was. And why she keeps coming back.”
No one mocked me. Not even Moab, who just nodded like he got it.
Vin flipped back a page in his notebook. “Maybe you need to go. See it for yourself.”
I almost told him he was crazy. Almost. But the pull in my chest was a chain, and I didn’t want to be free of it.
“Dublin,” I said.
“Dublin,” they echoed.
Scarlette squeezed my arm, then let go. “We’re coming with you. All of us.”
Canon smiled, barely. “Road trip, then.”
The tension broke a little. Moab got up and grabbed a fresh round, sliding a beer to me instead of whiskey. “Can’t have you blacking out on the plane.”
I took it, hand unsteady. The others saw, but nobody called it out.
We drank in companionable silence, the kind that means something got settled.
Later, alone in my room, I stared at the ceiling and tried to conjure the graveyard again. This time, the vision came easy. The stones slick with rain. The iron gate was cold against my skin. The woman—Catherine, her name whispered in a language older than the one I spoke—waited for me.
She smiled, sad and knowing, and touched my face.
I wanted to tell her I was coming, but the words stuck in my throat.
I opened my eyes and found my hand clenched tight around the beer can, crushing it flat. For once, I let it go.
In two days, we’d go to Ireland. Maybe find a piece of what I’d lost.
Or maybe just put the ghosts to bed for good.