Life and Limb Read online

  I shot a hard glance at McCue, who gazed back in a sort of frozen consideration. I didn’t know the guy, couldn’t assess his thoughts, but it seemed that the cowboy was asking my opinion with a single arched brow.

  I could do it. He could do it—the Spock brow lift. I wondered if we shared other habits, being sort of related, in a celestial kind of way. Which sounded—uncomfortably kinky.

  It was easier to focus on a stranger than to contemplate what my—our—Grandaddy had said, even if he was sitting right there. “This is all kinds of batshit crazy,” I told McCue, watching him closely for reaction, “and you don’t even seem to be thinking twice about what bullshit we’ve just been told.”

  The cowboy shrugged, shoulders lifting the seams of his pressed denim shirt. He flicked a glance at Grandaddy, settled his focus back on me. “I’m listening to the man. That’s how you learn. Open mind, he said.” He hooked a thumb in Grandaddy’s direction. “Besides, this man’s been nothing but good to me. I owe him the courtesy of hearing him out. And if he taught you anything—and I’m betting he did—so do you.”

  I noted how the slow drawl softened, was less pronounced. And a spark in blue eyes suggested maybe McCue was taking this more seriously than I’d thought.

  Grandaddy had never, in my life, lied to me. I knew it bone-deep. I did owe the man the courtesy of hearing him out.

  But . . . not born entirely of mortal man and woman?

  Open mind was one thing. Doable. Suspension of disbelief was another. Doable. But this was just utter, complete, absolute, one-hundred percent bullshit.

  And I, who tolerates no bullshit for very good reasons, had learned that life does not always allow for open minds and suspension of disbelief no matter how much you’d like it to. I’d been out of prison a matter of days. I’d just ridden over a thousand miles. Hadn’t eaten in hours. Plus, I’d had just enough to drink, felt just enough of the alcohol to allow frustrated impulse to take over. From somewhere inside, from a crack in the wall I’d built a couple of years before, anger seeped in.

  I shoved my chair back with a scrape of wooden legs on wooden planks, offered him a brief acknowledging tilt of the head, and set my palms against the table and started to push to my feet.

  But then Grandaddy just looked at me, and I found myself somewhat vigorously reapplying ass to chair.

  It hadn’t been by choice.

  And no one had touched me.

  I sat because physically I could do nothing else.

  I stared at Grandaddy in shock. Nah—well, maybe. “Did you just . . . did you just whammy me?”

  “Have yourself another drink,” Grandaddy suggested lightly, freshening his own beer.

  I seriously considered flatly refusing. Came close. Did not. Under the circumstances—he had somehow forced me to sit my ass back down—it seemed the safest option to acquiesce. After a moment’s subtle testing of whether my limbs obeyed again, and discovering they did, I had that drink, fast and hard. I craved the burn, the buffer bought by liquor that could be dropped between what I couldn’t grasp and my own inner denials.

  Or is it inner demons?

  Just as I opened my mouth to ask a question, I became sharply aware of a new arrival at the table. At first I thought it was a cocktail waitress, then realized that no, it was someone else entirely: the ponytailed blonde I’d briefly communed with as I first entered the roadhouse.

  I sat up and took notice. All of me noticed.

  The alcove boasted one modest, muted light glowing down from the wall. It highlighted the exotic angles and planes of her face, the slant of her brown eyes. She glanced briefly at Grandaddy, at McCue, offered them a red-lipped smile, but focused her attention on me.

  “Sorry to intrude . . . well, I lie: I’m not sorry at all. But since there are no ladies with you, I thought I’d take the bull by the horns, so to speak—” She slid a sidelong, amused glance at Remi’s hat, then returned her attention to me, “—and see if you would care to dance.”

  I took a closer look than I had upon entry into the roadhouse. Tall, slim, simple red tank top, wheat-colored jeans, red boots that in no way could be considered cowboy, a doubled loop of gold chain around her throat to match hoops in her ears. In all circumstances other than those at present, I would have been happy to depart the table for the dance floor. She was most definitely my style.

  But I’d just been told I wasn’t even human.

  I was not so drunk as to be dismissive of a woman, particularly an attractive one. I’d been in prison awhile. Instead, I smiled up at her from my chair, reached out a hand, took hers into it, leaned forward and pressed my lips against the back of it. “What are you drinking?”

  Something flickered in her eyes. But she simply cracked her glass down against the table and said, “Whatever you’re having.”

  I was markedly aware of how both Grandaddy and the cowboy watched us. McCue’s crooked smile was slight as he drank tequila, but unquestionably present. Grandaddy merely waited, expression bland. I knew that look.

  I ignored them both and poured two fingers’ worth of scotch into her glass. “Let’s look forward to a refill,” I promised. “Later.”

  Without breaking eye contact she scooped up the tumbler, knocked back the scotch, then turned and walked away from the alcove. The ponytail swung like silk against her red-sheathed spine.

  “Huh,” McCue said, with a world of complexities in that syllable. “Here we are in a cowboy bar, and it’s the biker who draws the attention of a woman like that.”

  I offered a slow, broadening smile; the earth felt firmer beneath my feet. This dance, I knew. “Shit happens.”

  Remi grinned back, saluted me with a quick tilt of his head, then focused again on our grandfather. “So, Grandaddy . . . you were sayin’ something about us bein’—heavenly matter.”

  My amusement fled with that, as did lingering thoughts about the woman. Remi McCue seemed much too open to the bullshit, even if it was a man we’d known all of our lives saying it. Maybe the cowboy was batshit crazy, too.

  “Of heavenly matter,” Grandaddy clarified. “Of is not it.”

  And sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.

  Loose and lazy from the liquor, I sat back in the chair, slumping with one leg stuck out. I briefly considered trying to leave again, dismissed it even as I rubbed my brow; the last time hadn’t worked out so well. And Grandaddy had that look on his face.

  Infernal, that look. Dammit.

  So. Okay. I’d play along. “But I’m still me?” I hooked a thumb in McCue’s direction. “And he’s still—him?”

  “Of course.” Grandaddy’s tone suggested possibly I was an idiot. “You’re flesh, blood, bone, brain, like everyone in this room. The fundamental difference in you both lies at a much deeper level. It’s not physical. It’s essence.”

  “Essence,” McCue echoed blankly.

  “When our kind is born,” Grandaddy explained, “we are made of matter, of essence. Celestial energy, if you will. We do not have bodies. We’re not human. But many of us are intended to exist on earth, and to do so we need hosts. In certain instances when a human newborn fails to thrive, or is too ill to live and the parents pray for intercession . . . well, heaven intercedes. And the newborns survive because the dying soul is replaced with the living spark born of heaven.” He smiled. “Yes, you are indeed Gabriel Jeremiah Harlan, older brother of Matthew, who was born in the perfectly ordinary human way to Will and Elizabeth Harlan; and you are Remiel Isaiah McCue, younger brother of Lucas, born to Jack and Clare McCue in the perfectly ordinary human way. You didn’t arrive in a clap of thunder, or spring fully formed from Zeus’s brow. Your flesh is human. Your bones. It’s just that your souls are not.”

  Struck again into silence, I noted the live band was, once more, really very loud, as if increasing whenever Grandaddy laid his weird bullshit on us. So was the crack of cu
e ball at the break, a scattering of stripes and solids. All sound seemed filtered directly into my brain, filled it up. There was no room for anything more. Certainly not the ability to suspend my disbelief and simply accept what we’d been told.

  “Well, hell . . .” McCue said after a moment, seemingly at a loss.

  “Not exactly,” Grandaddy said with nuanced clarity. “Do you remember—and now, finally, I mean you to remember—when I said to you both, on separate occasions, that we would have a talk, but you wouldn’t remember it until one day when I’d call the memory up in you? That you’d know who you are, what you’re meant to be, and what you’re intended to do?”

  The memory, now bidden, came sharp: Yes, I did recall Grandaddy had said that, and apparently so did McCue, because he nodded as well. But I didn’t remember what the topic of the talk was, just that we’d had one.

  I shared a brief glance with the cowboy, then looked back at the man who claimed that he was after all our grandfather of sorts—but somehow wasn’t, you know, human. Minor detail.

  “Now is the time,” Grandaddy said, “and I’ll call it up in you—but it will be done gradually. The learning curve is steep.”

  I asked, wanting to be very certain that the alcohol, for all I desired its buffer under the circumstances, was not completely altering comprehension, “Heaven heaven? Heaven?”

  Grandaddy silently lifted his hand in the air and pointed an eloquent forefinger upward.

  Christ on a cracker. Or, so to speak. I scrubbed a hand over my face, trying to massage comprehension into a brain that preferred denial. Learning curve? How about utter craptastic bullpucky. “But—why?” I asked, trying for a neutral tone. “You’re saying people just pray because their babies are dying, and all this little newborn heavenly matter gets stuffed down their gullets?”

  Remi McCue laughed. “Now ain’t that poetic?”

  “We need human hosts,” Grandaddy said, “but we don’t take them. We’re of heaven, not hell. We don’t possess people. We answer prayers.”

  I cast him a skeptical glance, brows raised. “Every single prayer?”

  Grandaddy’s regret was sincere. “I wish it were otherwise, but that’s not possible. There is a plan, you see . . . there’s a grand design, but it’s chaotic, not straight-line. Rather like evolution, it hops around, divides, ties itself into Celtic knotwork. To effect that design, to untie those knots, certain things are done. Certain things are allowed to be undone. Some prayers are answered, some are not.” His eyes softened. “It’s not always fair, what is undertaken, what gets set aside. We make difficult choices that are often incomprehensible to humans.”

  McCue’s tone was overtly casual, yet I heard an edge. “But you need babies.”

  Grandaddy nodded. “Yes, we need human hosts. Adults generally don’t ask or desire to be—inhabited. Naturally they don’t want to give up their souls, to have them be replaced with another. But desperate parents with dying infants do pray for heaven to save their children, and newborn souls are merest threads that all too easily break.” He spread his hands on the table, palm-down. “So, as they fray to the edge of breaking—and they do break all on their own; we force nothing—those threads are replaced with new. It’s a matter of reciprocity. The babies survive, grow to healthy adulthood, and most bring great joy to their parents—when otherwise they die within an hour, a day, a week, and cause much grief and desolation.” His eyes were brilliant even in soft light. “That is heaven’s mercy, to give those parents a child. Then, at need, when those children are grown and on their own, we call on them.”

  I tapped the fingers of my left hand against the tabletop and glanced at the cowboy. “What was that you said earlier? About licking a calf?”

  Rabbit hole time. Through the looking glass.

  Grandaddy had said we wouldn’t believe him. Damn straight.

  I squinted into the bottom of my empty tumbler, noting a thin amber glaze of whiskey dregs. Maybe it would be easier to digest all of this if I was drunk off my ass.

  McCue looked thoughtful as he drank more tequila, then absently tipped the tumbler on edge and rolled it in slow circles against the tabletop. He ventured a question. “So, we two had our so-called heavenly matter stored in dying babies, which saved them; and then we grew up like normal kids doing perfectly normal things . . . and now you need us?”

  “Heaven does, yes,” Grandaddy agreed. “But there are other reasons. You turned twenty-eight human years old a second past midnight, the both of you. It is of significance.”

  McCue frowned, but I shook my head decisively, certain of this much. “My birthday isn’t for another week.”

  Grandaddy’s brows twitched in dry amusement. “That’s what you were told, yes. It is untrue. You were ‘born,’ as much as we ever are, in different states, to different families, but on the same day at the same hour and within seconds of one another. That’s rare, especially for us—no one can gauge the instant heavenly matter coalesces into a soul—and it binds you.” He shifted in his seat, leaning forward to compel our attention. “You are twenty-eight. Two, and eight. The numeral 2 governs certain attributes: harmony and rivalry, but also partnership and communication, shared ideals. As for the 8—” he closed one hand around the beer mug, raised it, “—it represents other elements: you are armed to lead, to direct. These things are what heaven needs of you both.”

  I caught back a blurt of laughter, but could not control skepticism. “Biblical numerology.” I shook my head. “But aren’t there other bits of heavenly matter out there? Other heaven-made babies now grown to adulthood? Not just us, right?”

  “Of course. And we’re calling—we’ve been calling—upon them all, and will continue to,” Grandaddy replied. “Other souls, other birthdays, other numbers. Today it was you. Tomorrow, others.”

  McCue’s laugh rode a choppy gust of breath. “In other words, you’re saying we’re not fish, and this isn’t a mass spawning.”

  Grandaddy’s brows rose briefly. “Colorful but accurate. No, in fact we skew the other way. Fewer, rather than greater numbers. That’s why it was so unusual that the two of you were born almost simultaneously, and why we believe you may be of significance. But we don’t promise you a rose garden because of it; in fact, there is danger in it for you, because now you’ll be tracked. Targeted. You need to know this.”

  Grandaddy said it all very casually, without the weight of portentousness, of pretension. Which meant it was important, because I had learned to read him years before, much as I could: simple statements often meant more than others.

  I cleared my throat. “Tracked how, and why?”

  “By hell. For hell.” Grandaddy downed more beer. “To simplify, the best way might be to say you have beacons inside you—”

  Despite the booze, I felt sluggish alarm kindle. “Now we have beacons as well as essence?”

  “—or internal GPS units, if you’d prefer, and at 12:01 last night—or, more accurately, this morning—they began the process of coming online.”

  I leaned down and smacked my forehead into a palm in disbelief; Grandaddy could be inexorable, once on a conversational path, and I had learned to stay out of his way.

  “And to keep the metaphor consistent,” he continued, “that means anyone with the right kind of receiver will be able to track you. Including hell.”

  I didn’t even bother pouring myself a drink this time. I simply picked up the bottle and began to chug.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Under the noise of the bar, McCue’s tone was intent. “In this case, a beacon, this GPS unit, is a light? Or maybe a shining soul?”

  “You could put it that way,” Grandaddy agreed.

  “Uh-huh.” The cowboy smiled. “I guess Nana really could see under my skin.”

  “She had the Sight,” Grandaddy confirmed. “And I believe she had an inkling of who I might be. Or what I might be.” H
is brows twitched together briefly, as if he recalled something slightly less than pleasant. “I told you, we don’t possess. But there are times we have to massage memories. I can’t very well be everyone’s actual grandfather . . . old family friend works nicely, but the adults must be guided to that understanding.” Blue eyes flicked to McCue. “Your Nana saw more deeply than most.”

  McCue smiled. “Well, she said my soul shone brightly enough for two people. So maybe she sensed something about me, too.” He looked at me, assessed briefly, raised his brows. “Of course if he keeps drinkin’ like that, he may just drown all his light.” He leaned forward, grasped the bottle in my hand, yanked it away and thumped it down upon the table out of my reach. “Uisge beatha like that is meant to be savored, not guzzled like it’s horse piss. That’s a dishonor to fine whiskey.”

  I squinted at him, startled the Texas cowboy pronounced the Gaelic correctly: ooishkay-bah. The booze was running in me, and the question just slipped out as I flicked a glance at his hat. “You know about uisge beatha?”

  “Whiskey,” McCue said. “Water of life. Aqua vitae. Yeah, I know all kinds o’ shit. I was a Rhodes Scholar. Attended Oxford University and everything.” He resettled his hat, smiled slow. Something in his tone suggested he’d found offense in my blurted question. “That would be Oxford, England, by the way. I may be just a redneck country boy to you, but I’m a damn smart redneck country boy.”

  Apparently I’d gotten under his skin. Equally apparently there was steel reinforcement underlying his good ol’ boyness. “I do know what a Rhodes Scholar is,” I pointed out. “I’ve got a Master’s in folklore.”

  “Doctorate trumps Master’s.” The cowboy resettled in his chair and said cheerily, “Comparative Religion. And are you always this much of an a-hole to people you’ve just met?”

  Well, after prison, yeah, probably I was. Especially being halfway to drunk. But why I was an a-hole wasn’t any of his business.

  I opened my mouth to answer, but Grandaddy cut me off. “You boys done pissing? Or do you want to keep whipping it out and measuring? I know I said rivalry goes with the birthday territory, but right now there’s no time for this mano a mano malarkey.”