Making Promises (5 page)

Deacon looked at him for a second and touched his jaw with soft fingers, then grunted. He walked to the door and shouted, “Crick, get me some fucking ice!”

“Stop swearing in front of the baby, asshole!” came the reply through the door, but Shane had no doubt that Crick was doing what Deacon had asked.

Deacon walked to the porch rail and leaned his weight on it, just like Jeff had been doing earlier. “You got shot?” he asked mildly, and Shane shrugged.

“I… I was sent into a dangerous situation without backup,” he said carefully. “The Kevlar, you know… doesn’t protect you from the impact.”

“No. No, it doesn’t. Was Jeff right? Were you out to your department?”

Shane turned a deeper red, if that was even possible. “Not on purpose,” he mumbled, and Deacon turned to him with eyebrows raised to his hairline.

“Do I want to know?”

Oh God. Anything but tell this story to Deacon. Shane honestly thought he’d rather tell his father, were the fucker still alive, than Deacon, who actually sort of liked and respected him.

“Do I have to tell you?”

Deacon looked at him gently. “Look, Shane, I can’t make you.

But….” The man looked embarrassed, but since he often looked embarrassed, it suited him. “Look. You go ahead and keep that locked in your chest, that’s fine. But I’m the poster child for repression, and I gotta tell you, you need to tell someone. What we’re worried about right now is exactly what Jeff said. Does
this
department know about you, and are you in danger? Because if you’ve got other backup out there, you haven’t told us about it. And if we’re it, we need to know, right?” Shane swallowed. “I’m going to be gone next weekend. Would you feed my animals on Saturday?”

Deacon didn’t even look surprised at the abrupt change of subject.

“So we know to go get them if anything happens to you, right?”

“Yeah—Angel Marie eats a lot.”

Deacon raised his eyebrows. “Angel Marie?”

Shrug. “If I’d known Parry Angel when I named him, I would have found another name. Anyway, I’m afraid if I don’t get to him in a day or two, he’ll eat a cat.” Oh Christ. That came out weird. He knew it did, but he couldn’t help it. Angel Marie wouldn’t eat Orlando Bloom or the others on
purpose
, but the ginormous doofus wasn’t exactly discriminating in his taste, and he weighed over a hundred and fifty pounds himself. So far, Shane counted himself lucky that the Great Dane cross hadn’t eaten
Shane
for breakfast.

But Deacon didn’t bat an eyelash at that, either. Shane felt a sudden surge of out and out love for the guy. It had nothing to do with how pretty he was or that he fed Shane once a week and invited him in on the family meetings. It had to do with the fact that he never ever made Shane feel weird.

“Okay, so you show us where you live and how to feed your animals, and in return, you promise us that if things go hinky, you’ll give us a call. If you think you’re going somewhere without backup, we’ll give Jon a call and show up, simple as that.”

“Deacon, you guys aren’t cops!”

“Nope. But this is a small town. We know most of the local troublemakers, same as you. Shane, Parry Angel in there calls you her

‘Unca Shaney’—you’re not going anywhere without backup!” Shane made his face as stern as he could. “Citizen,” he said meaningfully, “you do not put yourself in danger—”

“Shove it, Perkins. We’re all licensed to carry—”

“Vigilante-ism is a crime.”

“So is discrimination. I want your word on this, Shane.” How had this spiraled out of his control like this? Shane had been in charge of his own destiny since… since… since he’d seen a bad guy taken down when he was a small child!

“Deacon! Look, this isn’t safe. You have got to know the many, many things wrong with—”

“With sending a brother into danger?” Deacon looked at him with measured eyes, and Shane had to concede. There was something in Deacon Winters—some measure of fineness, of self-possession—that made it impossible to go up against him when he was like this.

Shane grunted. Great. He finally had a family, and his big brother thought he couldn’t take care of himself. “Does Crick ever win an argument?” he asked bitterly and knew the sound of Deacon’s laugh before he made it.

“All the goddamned time. Irritating asshole.”

“Who just brought you ice!” Crick protested, shouldering his tall, broad-chested frame through the screen door. Shane wondered how long 18

he’d been listening before he took his cue line, and then he dropped the ice pack in his hand with an oath and Shane stopped wondering.

“Did you get some for yourself?” Deacon asked, picking the pack up off the ground and taking Crick’s hand in his own. Crick had come back from a two-year tour of the Gulf with souvenirs that made Shane’s surgery scars look like skinned knees from childhood. The boy—he was twenty-three, maybe—rarely complained.

“It’s numb enough,” Crick muttered. “Don’t mind me, Deacon. Ice his jaw before it swells.”

Deacon raised Crick’s twisted, scarred hand to his lips in a brief, tender show of affection that brought a lump to Shane’s throat. It was like anything, any amount of happiness, was possible in a world where that gesture could happen.

Shane stood still as Deacon applied the ice gingerly to his jaw. He knew both lovers had been EMTs at one time, and Deacon had the professional touch to prove it.

“So where are you going?” Deacon asked quietly. “When we watch your animals, where will you be?”

“Gilroy,” Shane told him. He didn’t mention the Renaissance Faire—if Deacon didn’t know he was going, he couldn’t offer money to buy Benny the stuff that Shane had planned to buy.

Deacon looked up with a wrinkled nose and a shrug, inviting more input. Gilroy was sort of a big ol’ nowhere—lots of farmland, lots of ranches, a few suburbs.

“My sister’s going to be there,” Shane told him.

“You have a sister?” Crick asked, plopping his ass down on the garden seat that rested against the wall. “Wow, you think you know a guy.”

Shane raised a sardonic eyebrow. Fact was, he spoke less than Deacon—they all knew it. “Haven’t seen her in years,” he said quietly.

Not since their father’s funeral, actually, but they’d kept in touch once or twice a year since. She’d sent him flowers when he’d been in the hospital, along with a letter.
Dammit, Shaney—find another job or learn to duck.

I’m way too self-involved to get all tangled up in this grief bullshit, so
you’re just going to have to live.
He’d gotten cards and the occasional calls since then, and he’d called back. She’d wanted him to come see her Making Promises

perform for the last year, and he had some time off. He figured it was time.

“What’s she doing in Gilroy?” Deacon asked. Gilroy was a good three-hour drive into, literally, the middle of Bumfuck Nowhere and Left Ass Cheek of Yemen.

Shane had to smile though, because the answer was so unlikely.

“Would you believe dancing?”

He couldn’t wait to see her in action—she’d always been beautiful when she danced.

And so they linked their hands and danced, Round in circles and in rows…

“The Mummers’ Dance”—Loreena McKennitt

SHANE had always liked driving. It was one of the reasons he’d bought the GTO. Being in his own head, blasting rock music as loud as he wanted, feeling the power of the automobile under his hands and the way it purred over the road—it was meditation, pure and simple.

Part of the journey was on a two-lane highway that wound around the brown hills that bordered the coastlands. He’d left early, so traffic was moderate, and the rumble of the pavement under the deep-grooved posi-traction wheels was soothing. Between that and Springsteen on the stereo, Shane was in his happy place by the time he pulled off at what was essentially a roadside attraction.

Casa de Fruta used to be merely a fruit stand in the middle of nowhere, but the founders had added a restaurant and some novelty shops, and the effect was charming, like finding Tom Bombadil’s house in the middle of a hazardous journey. For the last few years, the adjoining property had housed the Renaissance Faire for eight weeks in the fall, and as Shane pulled up into the dusty gravel (he paid the extra five-spot for the VIP lot) he thought again of Tom Bombadil’s house and
The Lord of the
Rings
.

Because Gilroy after a long, hot, summer was a dusty, dry, graceless hunk of land, but the Renaissance Faire turned it into a storybook with the boundless magic of humanity’s capacity for whimsy.

Shane was wearing jeans and a
The Who
T-shirt (the old bands were coming back—he’d always known they would!), but as he parked the car and made his way through the parking lot, he felt supremely selfconscious. Almost everyone else was in costume.

The costumes for the men ranged from leather pantaloons tucked into knee-high boots with a leather over-vest and a linen undershirt to basic cotton trousers (loose and floppy with a drawstring waist and ankles) and a large, blousy, big-sleeved tunic, usually with a V or tied neck. Most men had a vest on over their tunics, and
everybody
had some sort of hat—

leather, raffia, corduroy, linen. The variety of headgear materials alone was impressive, and that didn’t even include the styles. The colors ranged from loud to bright with a dash of understated and the occasional neutral, and the assortment of pieces to any given ensemble was as varied as the men themselves.

And that was just the men.

The women did all of that with a combination of skirts and laced bodices—usually with bosoms flapping out of the bodices and sometimes even with thighs showing from hoisted, banded skirts. Shane had to admit he had always enjoyed looking at a nice bosom, and at this point his dry spell had been long enough that he didn’t care which team he was batting for, he just wanted to
play.
The squishy handfuls of boobage being pushed into touchability were just as enticing as the occasional glimpse of bare chest that he saw from the young men. Anything, dammit—
anything
just as long as he knew he had the option of human touch sometime in the near future.

A happy family passed him: mom, dad, teenagers—a boy and a girl—all dressed to the nines. The more-than-plump mother was holding two grade-schoolers by the hand—also in costume. Mom’s floppy bosoms were not as graceful as those of the college-aged girls whom Shane had passed on the way from the car, but her adoring husband still made her stop so he could “fluff” them anyway.

Shane was glad his sunglasses hid his rather wistful look at Happy Ren Faire Family. He liked them—by the end of the day, the little ones would probably be exhausted and whiny, but as he watched the older boy swing his little sister in the “princess dress” up into his arms, Shane couldn’t help but think of Deacon’s little family back at home. He was part of that, he thought resolutely. He was buying his princesses—both Benny and Parry Angel and even little baby Lila—a truckload of princess 22

crap. Hell, he’d even spring for one of those Robin Hood hats for Drew.

He was going to be the indulgent uncle in that happy family if he had to spend all of that useless fucking money sitting in the bank on the Renaissance Faire alone.

His state of being perpetually horny faded, and he remembered why he was here.

He was here because he had family, and he wanted more.

He got his ticket from the will-call booth and ventured under the wooden archway, taking a program from the gleeful young women calling greetings in affected Olde Englyshe accents that were no more authentic than Shane’s jeans and T-shirt but no less charming for all of that.

It took him less than a minute to scan the program and make an abrupt left into the food court. His sister would be performing in fifteen minutes.

First he got himself a soda and something called a toad-in-a-hole (it turned out to be a sort of meat pie), and then he sat himself down on a hay bale to people-watch while he was waiting. It was worth his time.

“That’s a nice costume, isn’t it?”

Shane turned and found the mother whose family he’d been admiring grinning at him as she sat what looked to be a preschooler on her lap. Shane looked back to where he’d been focused—on a giant of a man wearing what looked to be leather armor, complete with silver (or stainless steel?) buckles and belt rings and a gigantic sword.