Page 29 of Rarely Pure and Never Simple
"He won't let you touch him. Not usually, and sure as hell not now. Get a big branch or a board or something. Let him climb out on his own."
Two of the boys dragged over a fir log and shoved it into the pit. The end had barely met the bottom with a thud when Damien shot up the makeshift ladder, wide-eyed and panting. Teeth bared and fists clenched, he barely looked human as he growled at the kids closest.
"Easy, easy," Blaze said softly, including both the pocket-bike contingent and Damien. "Don't touch him. Don't get behind him. He's gotta come down first. He's a brilliant, quiet man most times. Just not like this."
He heaved himself back up onto his knees facing Damien, only four or five feet separating them. Dark eyes stared at him from the bottom of an emotional abyss.
"It's okay now. You're out. You feel the sun? The wind? Come on back, Twitchy. I don't blame you if you feel like beating something to a pulp. But how about not right now?"
Damien made a strange guttural sound in the back of his throat, half growl, half whimper. When he moved, it was too fast for anyone to react. He lunged for Blaze, teeth still bared. Blaze closed his eyes and braced for impact. Not much he could do unless he wanted to headbutt the poor guy. Impact came, but not the fist to his face that he expected. Damien's body slammed into him with a thud. His fists bunched in Blaze's shirt and he clung there, shivering.
"There you go. That works. You hang on tight as you want. Hear me?"
Damien nodded, a sign he was on his way back.
Leader kid, Toby, cleared his throat. "So. He's out. Now how about you tell us who you are and what you're doing here?"
"How about you fuck off?"
"We should just take him to the OFL," dark-haired girl insisted. "Let him figure it out."
Maybe listening quietly would have been smarter, but Blaze was pissed and his mouth got away from him. "What the fuck is an OFL?"
Toby smirked. "Our Fearless Leader. Oh, yeah. This'll be fun."
They hitched three of the pocket bikes to a mini-trailer they dragged out of the brush and helped Blaze into it. No one tried to handcuff Damien since he clung to Blaze's shirt with an iron grip and wouldn't let go. No one offered explanations, either. Had Blaze been alone, he would've found a way to fight free and run, but Damien needed him.
Damien was the client after all. The man he was here to protect.Done a pretty piss-poor job of it so far, haven't you?
His hands and face bleeding, presumably from throwing himself against the unyielding rock of his temporary prison, Damien was a filthy, shuddering mess. When he settled down again, he would hate that he had lost control. He seemed to loathe that part of himself so much that he didn't even want to look at it.
"You with me yet, Twitchy?"
"Yes." The whisper was cracked and barely there, but at least it was a human word.
"Not sure what we're going into here. These kids, they don't seem hard. Maybe a bunch of runaways from a bad state home or something. They're taking us to the head kid now. This would be the right time for paranoia, though."
Damien nodded against his chest, his hands relaxing their death grip a hair. If the circumstances had been different, Blaze might have enjoyed the ride with a handsome man resting against his chest.Weird that he's staying there.Probably dizzy.
They zipped through conifer-lined foothills, past scraggly stands of mountain laurel until they reached what seemed to be a sheer rock face. The bikes slowed but not enough to stop and zoomed toward what seemed disaster to the untrained eye. Some of the rocks had odd edges, though, bits that didn't quite match up, and Blaze knew they drove through a cut-rate projection. Damien, luckily, still had his eyes closed and didn't have a chance to freak out.
He assumed they were driving into a cavern, but on the other side of the projection the landscape opened up again into a broad canyon dotted with cabins and small, obviously inhabited caves. The bike contingent slowed as they approached a long, low building where several more youngsters came out to greet them.
"He back yet?" Toby climbed off his bike and finally took off his helmet. The kid couldn't have been more than twenty.
The redheaded girl in front of the longhouse contingent shook her head. "Not yet. He's due any minute. What's this?"
"Trespassers at the southwest catch trap. The one won't tell me a damn thing, and the other's too freaked out."
The girl approached the little prisoner cart and peered in at Damien. She reached out a hand.
"Don't touch him," Blaze snapped. "Or if you do, duck."
She blinked at him but didn't back off, letting her hand hover over Damien's head and back. "His blood pressure's too low. His heart rate's too fast. We have to get him warm before he goes into shock."
One of the bike girls nodded. "Yeah. He was scared to death of the trap. Not normal scared, trauma scared. He's got some dark issues."
Blaze stared from one to the other. "Vari kids. Are you all vari?"
