Chapter 37
CHAPTER 37
DAMIEN
Dear Damien,
I’ll probably be back before you wake up, but if not, I went to the church to see if Father Sullivan knows anything. Be home soon.
I went to Dublin to find Darby’s uncle. He knows who killed us, but he won’t live much longer, so I have to speak to him before we leave for America.
I’m so sorry.
I know you don’t believe me, or maybe you just don’t want to, but we’re here for a reason, Damien. I can feel it. We’re supposed to set things right, and I can’t do that until I find out what happened.
Please don’t worry. I’ll be back tonight with answers, and then we can decide what to do next. Together.
I promise.
Love,
Clover
P.S. There’s food on the counter from the neighbor.
T he decades-old paper practically turned to dust in my fist …
Just before I punched that fist through the closest fucking wall.
The room spun.
My head spun.
And bile seared the back of my throat as I stumbled outside and dry-heaved from the depths of my miserable guts.
The last time I’d woken up and she was gone, I’d had to kill a dozen armed Russians and take another bullet to save her.
Now, she was headed into the eye of the storm, and I didn’t have a fucking clue where she was going or how much of a head start she’d gotten.
And this time, it was my fucking fault.
If I had just told her what she wanted to know, admitted to her what I’d seen in the lake, what I knew in my fucking soul to be true, she’d be on a train to Shannon right now with her head on my shoulder instead of Dublin with a fucking target on her back.
Movement in my peripheral vision caused my head to snap to the left and my hands to ball into fists.
An older woman was standing near the fence, watching me as she pretended to pick tomatoes. She’d been so still and quiet that I’d had no idea she was even there, but the moment our eyes met, she became a flurry of sound and movement. Flailing hands muffled a high-pitched yelp as she stumbled backward, away from me and toward the house.
P.S. There’s food on the counter from the neighbor.
The neighbor.
Five seconds later, my fist—still covered in plaster dust—was pounding on the front door of a farmhouse that was painted the same shade of purple as the spots on the sheep in its pasture.
The curtains on the window next to the door fluttered before a female voice exclaimed, “Go away!” from inside the house.
“Hello!” I shouted back, dropping my fist. “My name is Damien Hughes. I believe you spoke to my …”
My what? My soulmate? My immortal beloved? My entire reason for fucking living?
“My wife earlier.”
“I know who ya are,” she snarled, her voice loud and clear through the drafty, weather-beaten door. “Be gone, Devil!”
“Did she say where in Dublin she was going? Please … I have to find her.” It took all my strength not to put my fist through her fucking door as well.
“She prob’ly went back to the spirit world, where she belongs. Where ya both belong! Get off my porch, demon, before I call Father Sullivan!”
“If you know something, please tell me! You don’t understand how much danger she’s in.”
“I didn’t want to believe it when I saw Miss Darby. She seemed so … alive . But you … I’d know those eyes anywhere. Death incarnate—that’s what you are. Always were, always will be.”
“Look out the window again!” I shouted, turning to face the curtains she’d just drawn.
“And why would I do that? You’re prob’ly gonna try to steal my soul through the glass.”
“Because I can prove to you that I’m not a ghost or a demon or the goddamn Devil himself. Just look out the window. Please!”
Lifting the bottom of Kellen’s shirt halfway up my torso, I waited a full minute before the curtains finally fluttered again, which was followed by a gasp so loud I could hear it outside.
“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, that’s a nasty gash.”
“Ya can’t injure a ghost, ma’am. I’m alive. I swear it.”
Nora accepted my explanation with a single nod. “So what the hell happened to ya?”
“The same thing that’s gonna happen to Clover if you don’t tell me exactly where she went.”
Four hours on a train, alone, with zero distractions from my dark fucking thoughts and worst-case scenarios was a punishment worse than death.
And I would fucking know.
Every town and village I passed through looked normal, other than the crushing swells of people crowding the platforms of the trains headed toward Shannon. The buildings and houses were still intact. There were no tanks lining the streets or drones dotting the skies.
Not until I got to the capital.
The smoke was what caught my eye first. It hovered over the city in black and gray tendrils, like a ghost reluctantly leaving a corpse.
And the closer I got to the city center, the more corpselike it became.
Buildings that had once been the backdrop of my childhood were now frail, twisted skeletons, leaking sparks from their severed veins. Their brick exteriors had been reduced to heaping piles of rubble and ash that completely buried the sidewalks and streets. Every car was a gray metal can, dented and hollowed out and smoking from its melted tires. In fact, everything in the entire fucking city was gray, other than the bright orange fires burning among the wreckage.
I couldn’t see the fighting from my window, but I could hear it, even over the rumble of the train and the rushing of blood in my ears. Gunshots, machine-gun blasts, and small explosions rattled the windows and vibrated through my chest, each one causing my back to go more rigid and my fingers to squeeze the armrests even tighter. The plastic groaned and cracked in my hands before I finally stood and paced the aisle, looking out every window for an auburn-haired girl or a sign pointing me to St. Patrick’s Psychiatric Hospital.
As much as I wanted to mourn for my city, for the home that I’d dreamed of returning to for the last five years, the only thing I gave a shit about as I pulled into Heuston Station was finding Clo and getting the fuck out of there.
I bolted off the train the second the doors began to open and sprinted for the nearest exit, slowing to a walk as soon as I noticed a cluster of Russian soldiers gathered around a laptop. A drone flew in through the open exit doors, docking on one of several charging pads strewn all over the floor.
Fuck.
I hadn’t even considered the drones.
They were allowing people to evacuate now, so I assumed these drones were being used for combat, but I knew if one of those soldiers saw a gorgeous redhead walking alone on their laptop screen, they’d switch their device back to Prisoner of War mode real fucking quick.
The only thing that kept me from losing my shit was the fact that she wasn’t naked in the middle of that group of men right now. If the drones had found her, these guys would have made damn sure they got a taste before sending her to the nearest encampment.
Or maybe they already had. She did have a two-hour head start.
Fuck.
The smoke that filled my lungs and burned my eyes as I slipped outside was a welcome distraction from the spiraling thoughts in my mind. Keeping to the shadows, I quickly assessed the situation on Steeven’s Lane.
After seeing the destruction from the train, I expected to walk straight into a wall of rubble as soon as I left the station, but that part of Dublin was surprisingly untouched. The Russians probably didn’t want to risk destroying anything that might be of importance to them later, like transportation hubs or water and sanitation stations or …
Hospitals.
Turning to the right, I ran as quickly and as quietly as my starving, injured body possibly could, listening for drones, suppressing the agonizing urge to cough. My eyes swept across the terrain, scanning for anyone with dark red hair, but there was no one on the street. The fighting sounded close, maybe a kilometer or two away, but it was far enough that it gave me hope.
St. Patrick’s Psychiatric Hospital was just up ahead, bordered on all sides by a four-meter-tall stone wall. I remembered it from when I was a kid. It was the kind of place they didn’t want people escaping from, and if Clo made it inside, it was probably the safest place in the entire city.
My wounds screamed, and adrenaline surged as I pushed myself to run faster, less concerned with being heard or seen now that I knew where the enemy was and my destination was in sight.
As soon as I saw that the metal gate in the wall was wide open, I felt myself exhale in relief.
Just before an errant rocket brought my entire world crashing down.