Page 53 of All Saints Day
I'm alone, sitting in the shitty little apartment the Windmill had put me up in. It’s only been about two months into my assignment, and already—I can tell something is different about Mike Duboze, my partner while I am undercover for the Windmill.
I’ve gotten ripping drunk to try to forget my real birthday, to forget the eighteen Christmases spent with my father.
Rook, the splinter of myself I’d fashioned into my greatest defense against my own mind, turned me, Francis Castle, back toward the indomitable Frank Stone—a man with no past and no real future; vengeance personified.
I’m smoking cigarettes on my freezing cold fire escape when I hear the buzzer for my apartment door sound inside.
“Who is it?” I bark into the intercom once I shimmy back inside through my kitchen window.
“Duboze!” Michael’s voice crackles back over the intercom. “Let me in; it’s fuckin’ freezing out here!”
I open the door dumbly, coming face to face with my partner, not able to do the mental arithmetic on what might bring him to my door.
Everyone on the unit knows I’m single, with no living family, and a general lack of interest in Christmas and all of its trappings.
Duboze in particular has a stunner of a girlfriend I’d met only a few days before at the department’s holiday party—Anette, a shapely Blonde, 5’10 omega and second chair flutist for the DC Philharmonic.
I had assumed he would be spending the precious days between Christmas and the new year knotting her, eating too much rich food, and catching up on bad TV.
Instead, Michael Duboze is darkening my doorstep the day after Christmas with a bottle of Jack and an unopened pack of my brand of cigarettes.
“Happy Birthday.” He gives me a wry grin and shoves past me into my apartment.
“Mike, respectfully—what the fuck are you doing here?” I growl, reaching out to grab his shoulder—but Mike just spins around and presses the pack of cigarettes into my reaching hand.
“Anette and I broke up on Christmas Eve—and you were the only other surly bastard I knew who would be alone on the day after Christmas—so I decided we should get drunk together.”
That brings me up short.
“Oh shit man, I’m sorry,” I flounder, flopping down intoone of the two rickety chairs at my small kitchen table, all my angry bluster gone in an instant as I watch Mike look through my empty cabinets for glasses—finding nothing.
“Don’t be,” He laughs mirthlessly, giving up his search in favor of just opening up the bottle of Jack and taking a swig directly from the long glass bottleneck. “Just let me get blackout drunk here and pass out on your couch so that I don’t have to be alone tonight.”
When Mike looked into me with those silvery gray eyes, I think I knew—right there and then—I was just too scared to admit it to myself.
Of all the memories I’ve shredded to ribbons or hidden away from myself, this one remains—tucked to the side—but still within my reach. Later that night would be the first time Mike and I kissed—the first time we fucked; even though the first time we really made love wouldn’t be until months later.
It all started there—in that kitchen, me looking up into Mike’s face from my seat at the table.
The loud ringing in my ears makes me wince,and part of me—most of me really—knows it’s not the day after Christmas. I’m not in my shitty old undercover kitchen—but still, I can’t help myself.
“How do I fix this?” I ask Mike in my desperation.
“I don’t know if you can.” He shakes his head.
“I need to be able to fix this. I need to be able to save Louise and the others from Rook—from the Windmill.”
“How can you save the others if you can’t save yourself?” Mike asks sadly.
“Tell me how I can save myself—I’ll do it, I’ll do anything for Louise, for the Saints!”
Time blurs, ebbing and flowing forward and back.
I’m not in the kitchen with Mike anymore. I’m in some hippie-crunchy yurt only god knows where—Dennis McBride and his sea-glass green eyes glaring back at me instead of Michael with his stormy gray ones.
“Dennis—Dennis, you have to help me,” I plead, not caring how pathetic I sound.
“And how do you think I can help you, Frank?” He crosses his arms over his chest, looking down that freckle-spattered nose of his at me.
