Especially since Damien hated being cold, and the chance of him being caught on a piece of steel-edged polyethylene and hurling himself down a frozen mountain was about as good as a Norwegian Blue waking up from its nap.
Despite the intense physical therapy he’d been given after he woke up from his Sleeping Beauty phase, he was winded. All the muscle mass in the world meant nothing if his lungs weren’t cooperating. Worse still, his chest was beginning to hurt, his repaired heart pounding hard to keep up with the demands he was putting on it. His stamina was shit, and his body was in pain because of it.
The alternative was to turn around and give himself back over to his wardens, kissing off any chance of having a normal life ever again.
“Fuck that,” Damien huffed, then yelped, sliding across a patch of damp grasses. “I’m going to fucking break my neck out here. Then that fucker won’t need to shoot me.”
The thought of dying out in the middle of the snow-dusted boonies forced Damien to his feet. He couldn’t do that. Not when he had too many damned questions needing answers.
“Sinjun. Go find Sinjun, you stupid fuck. Everything will be okay once you find him.” He remembered his best friend. He knew they’d lost the other two members of their band in the accident. There’d been a hazy moment when he’d surfaced out of the darkness he’d been plunged into and heard someone say Dave and Johnny died.
He ran until he couldn’t breathe anymore, and finally, Damien had to stop. Finding a thick pine tree to lean against, he let himself breathe.
Damien could only remember their existence and some fragments of things they’d done together. Everything else had been wiped out under the steel frame of the limo popping his skull open. There were gaps in his mind, long expanses of nothingness Damien couldn’t fill with any whisper of a memory. He knew Miki St. John liked to eat the insides out of a char siu bao before nibbling on the white bread exterior and what a twelve-bar blues progression was—he could even finger one out on a broom handle, since they’d not allowed him access to a guitar—but couldn’t tell anyone what he’d been for any Halloween. Damien didn’t know when his birthday was, but he’d been able to instantly recognize the opening bars of “Rude Mood” playing on a radio at the nurses’ station.
Everything made him cry. The loss of who he’d been was nothing compared to the sudden disappearance of the friends he’d come to call his brothers. At least Miki was still alive. He knew in his gut Miki was still alive. The oh-so-brief glance at an unattended computer console proved it. He’d paid for it with a two-week stint in solitary, but it gave Damien enough to focus on. Even if the article didn’t have any pictures and he couldn’t fully remember what Miki looked like.
Stamping some feeling back into his legs, he began heading down a long hill, half sliding along on the slick meadowland. His knees were beginning to hurt from slamming into large rocks when he’d fall, and his palms throbbed, making him suspect he’d scraped them raw in places.
“Sure, don’t take care of your hands,” he snorted. “You’re only a guitarist.”
Hands could heal, Damien consoled himself. Running harder was more important. Especially since it sounded like a pack of howling dogs were now competing with the fire engines and ambulances. He tried not to think of anything else—Miki, Jerome’s shot-split skull—nothing but putting one foot in front of the other was more important. Getting warm again definitely was on the agenda as well.
The road was a surprise, and Damien blinked when he hit the stretch of black ribbon curving through the hills. He’d been concentrating on climbing a deep ditch when his fingers touched the rough asphalt. Nearly crying in relief, Damien almost kissed the oily tarred surface in glee, but a flash of red lights coming up over the hill made him duck back down again.
A fire truck screamed past him, a whir of lights, noise, and exhaust stink flying by fast enough to ruffle the hair lying across his forehead. He waited until the dust settled back onto the road before standing up, and if his breath wasn’t already suffering, it would have been taken away by the sight of Skywood’s long halls buried under a wall of flames.
From what Damien could see, the retreat was engulfed, its brick walls crumbling down from its perch on the high hills. The towering evergreens surrounding the grounds were crackling and popping from the heat, spirals of sparks rising up from their burning branches.