Vin’s pen scratched, slow and rhythmic. “Where are you?”
I closed my eyes. The room faded, replaced by gray sky and the smell of damp earth.
“A graveyard,” I said. “Always the same one.”
No one spoke. Even the TV cut to static, silent snow. This was something Vin could relate to.
“I wake up in the dirt,” I continued, voice rough. “Can’t remember how I got there. Everything’s cold. My hands—” I flexed my own, studying the calluses and the veins— “they’re not mine. Smaller. Scarred different. Someone’s crying, but I can’t move. I’m stuck.”
“Stuck how?” Moab asked.
I shrugged, but the movement made my skin crawl. “Like I’m nailed down. Like gravity’s tripled and I’m the anchor.”
Scarlette’s gaze softened, just for a second. “And then?”
“And then I start to remember.” I paused. The ice in my glass melted, leaving only the dregs. “But it’s not this life. It’s…” I searched for the word. “Old.”
Canon exhaled, slow. “You ever recognize the graveyard?”
I hesitated. The truth wasn’t something I liked saying out loud. “Dublin.”
Scarlette arched a brow. “You ever been to Ireland, Toolie?”
“Yeah.” I said it flat. “It’s all like muscle memory.”
No one laughed, not even Vin. His hand hovered over the paper, waiting.
Moab leaned in, lowering his voice. “How do you know it’s Dublin?”
I blinked, and for a heartbeat the room blurred: green hills, black iron gates, stones with names carved in dead languages. “I can read the stones. Some in English, some not. I hear people talking, and it’s an accent I shouldn’t understand, but I do. And the name on the biggest headstone…”
My tongue went dry. I set the glass down and pressed my thumb hard against the wood grain.
Vin’s voice, barely above a whisper: “What’s the name?”
I swallowed. “O’Toole. Just like me.”
The room held its breath.
I expected someone to make a joke, break the spell. But no one did. Scarlette reached over and slid the whiskey bottle down the bar. “What else?”
“There’s a woman,” I said. “Always the same. She’s crying. Black hair, blue eyes, face like a painting.” I almost smiled, remembering the way her hands shook as she traced the headstone’s letters. “She calls me by a different name. Not Toolie. She calls me Sully or sometimes fool.”
“Does she know you?” Canon asked.
I thought about it. “She thinks she does. She talks to me like I’m there, but I’m not. I’m the ghost.”
Moab finished his beer in one long pull. “So you’re haunting your own grave?”
“Something like that.”
The words sounded stupid in the air. But I didn’t take them back.
Scarlette’s eyes narrowed. “You ever talk back?”
I shook my head. “Can’t move, can’t speak. Just watch.”
“Sounds like a past life thing,” Vin muttered. Canon shot him a look, but Vin didn’t back down. “Reincarnation. Trauma looping through time. Who the fuck knows?”
