A Line in the Sand Read online

  A LINE IN

  THE SAND

  A JESSE JAMES DAWSON NOVEL

  K.A. STEWART

  Published by Pirate Ninja Press at Smashwords

  Copyright © 2016 K.A. Stewart

  All rights reserved.

  Cover design by Robin Ludwig Design, Inc.

  www.gobookcoverdesign.com

  Table of Contents

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Coming Soon

  Other Titles by K.A. Stewart

  About the Author

  Because now is all we get…

  Acknowledgements

  As always, this book would not be what it is without a group of very hard-working people who get no payment and never as much credit as they deserve. So, without further ado, I give you my beta-slaves, Alice Loweecey, Lori Diederich, Will Sisco, Dr. Gita Bransteitter, Jenn Wolfe, Janet Yantes and Caron Woods. In addition to that kickass team, I have my own support group, consisting of the Purgatorians, without whom I would not be so sane, and Scott and Aislynn Stewart, without whom I would not be so crazy. Thanks to everyone for sticking with me all these years.

  Chapter 1

  Once upon a time…

  If there is one thing I’ve learned from television and movies, it’s that everybody has an origin story. Be you hero or villain, there is a moment, one shining moment where you are bitten by a radioactive spider, or splashed with toxic chemicals, or maybe just slapped down one too many times. Something changes in you from that point on, something that makes you into the person you will be for the rest of your life.

  For me, most people would think that it was the moment I chose to challenge a demon over my little brother’s soul. They would be wrong. I mean sure, that was a momentous event. But my feet had been set on that path years before by three people who could not have been more different from each other.

  The first was a man named Thaddeus Carter. He was a county court judge who just happened to preside over the jurisdiction where my youthful indiscretions got me arrested and hauled before his bench.

  The cops were done with me. The school was done with me. It was even possible that my father, dressed in the only nice suit he owned and standing beside me with a stoic look on his face, was as done with me as a parent can get.

  I hadn’t been an easy child. Full of anger and energy with no way to burn it off in our little one-horse town. Like so many of my friends, I looked to drugs for some escape from the ungodly monotony of our daily existence. At fifteen, I’d tried pretty much everything we small-town boys could get our hands on, and it was only a miracle of fate that I hadn’t come to harm in the process. We skipped school, we drank and smoked and occasionally borrowed an unattended vehicle without permission. Once, I crashed a stolen riding lawn mower. True story. My only saving grace was that I hadn’t been caught before.

  Somehow, despite all of that, Judge Carter saw something in me worth saving. To this day, I don’t know what or how. He perched honest-to-god pince-nez glasses on the end of his long beaky nose, and stared down at me, seeing a person who could be greater than what he’d shown so far.

  The owner of the business I’d helped vandalize was livid when the judge passed down his sentence. Probation until I was eighteen, and mandatory martial arts classes at the only dojo in town. He made it very clear that if I stepped out of line even once, the only thing that waited for me was time in the juvenile detention center the next county over.

  He retired not long after handing down my punishment, and it was years later that I realized that I was the reason he’d been encouraged to step down. Alternative sentences weren’t big in that big little town back then, and not everyone agreed with his assessment of me.

  Regardless of small town politics, to which I was oblivious at that age, I was bundled up and appropriately delivered to my first karate class the very next week. I’d never been to the run-down building where someone had started a tenacious little dojo. I knew that at one time, the building had been a pharmacy, sometime back in nineteen-dickety-two, and that the shadier side of our society had sometimes used the vacant building for their own ends.

  Then, Carl Bledsoe had arrived and purchased the structure almost before he’d purchased his house. I remember what a stir the Bledsoes caused upon their arrival, the one and only African-American family in the whole town. Even more exotic, they had moved there from New York, Carl’s wife Theresa taking on a job in Kansas City despite the hour commute each way. New York was far enough away back then that it may as well have been Mars, and we watched these new faces like they were celebrities, bound to display strange and disturbing big-city habits if we just kept an eye on them. I remember the oldest boy, a year or two younger than me, being challenged on the playground when we were both still young enough to care about things like recess. He dropped two bigger boys before the teachers intervened, and while he was the one who got sent to the office, no one bothered Noah Bledsoe again.

  Somehow, my drug-baked brain had never connected that boy’s fighting skills with the fact that his father was a martial arts instructor. I wasn’t firing on all cylinders, back then.

  So my father walked me to the door of the school, giving me a push inside with a stern look that promised all kinds of hell to pay if I screwed this up. He didn’t even come inside with me, instead electing to sit in the car and read (and probably waiting to see if I was going to make a break for it out the back).

  The building had been gutted down to the cement brick walls and exposed air ducts and pipes running across the ceiling. Everything had been painted a bright white, and words had been painstakingly stenciled on the walls in a variety of bright colors. I didn’t even bother to read them, already writing them off as some kind of snobby nonsense, and I scowled at the sea of tiny faces that turned to face me. The class was taking up one set of red mats on the floor, their shoes neatly stored in little cubbies off to the side.

  If those kids had come up to my waist, I’d have been amazed. Tiny little beings, all dressed up in their sharp white gis with their little white belts tied firmly around their waists. Six years old, the tallest of them, if that. There was another kid, closer to my age maybe, leading them through their exercises. He looked about as scrawny as I was, with fewer inches of height and more red in his hair than blond, and his wire-rimmed glasses were thick as Coke bottles. He wasn’t anyone I knew from school, and I had to wonder what town they’d trucked him in from. His gi was also pure white, but his belt was brown, and when he demanded their attention again, the munchkins all turned back and set themselves to work again. A dozen little voices yelled “Kiyai!” in unison, punctuating their fierce little punches.

  “You gotta be fucking kidding me,” I muttered, but I kept it low, mindful that my continued freedom was dependent on this guy telling the judge that I was reporting as ordered.

  “You must be Jesse.” The deep voice startled me, and I stuffed my hands in my pockets and slouched harder to hide my flinch. I hadn’t noticed the big man occupying the other set of empty mats, and I tried really hard to pretend that I wasn’t intimidated by the sheer size of him.

  Granted, I was a spindly thing myself, but Carl Bledsoe’s thighs had to be as big around as my waist. He wore white gi pants and a black tank top, showi
ng off the obscene amount of muscles across his chest and arms. He hadn’t bothered with a belt to denote his rank. His black hair was cropped close, military style, and I could just make out the dark shades of some indistinct tattoo on his left biceps. His bare feet made no sound on the mat, and I couldn’t help but think that he could stomp on my head and have room leftover. He gave me a smile, and I tried not to stare at how blindingly white his teeth were against his dark skin. (Hey, I hadn’t been exposed to a lot of the world yet. And I was dumb.)

  “I’m Carl Bledsoe. When you’re here in this dojo, you can call me Sensei.” He offered his massive hand, and I stubbornly kept mine in my pockets. After a moment, he gave me an amused quirk of his brow that only served to make my latent anger simmer hotter. I hated him already. “So, you’re looking like you’re pretty tough already. You probably don’t need all of that foolishness, right?” He gestured toward the white-belt class.

  I shrugged, keeping my eyes on something distant, and thought he should be happy he got that much out of me.

  “Okay, fine. So how about you go a few rounds with me and we’ll see where you’re at.”

  That got me to look up, eyes going wide. “Are you out of your mind?!”

  He grinned, expecting that reaction. “What, you don’t think you can handle me? All right. How about Kevin there?” He nodded to the teenager currently instructing the little ones in a pattern for blocking. “He’s more your size.”

  I eyed the brown-belted kid, and decided yeah, I could probably beat him. I’d scrapped with some pretty big kids in my time, and I never really lost, per se. “Sure. Okay. I don’t have any clothes, though. Y’know, the uniform.”

  “You don’t need one, if you don’t want to have one. Though I’d recommend coming in sweats and a t-shirt from now on, instead of your jeans. Easier to move.” Carl motioned for his student teacher to come over. The younger students, as if on cue, all melted down into cross-legged positions, their hands resting primly on their knees. A few of them grinned, turning in their seats so they could watch what was happening.

  “Kevin, this is Jesse. He’s going to be joining us as a new student. We need to test him to see what belt to start him at. Okay? He’s not wearing a cup or headgear, so watch your shots.”

  “Hai, sensei.” The bespectacled boy bowed from his hips, arms clapped firmly to his sides.

  At Carl’s gesture, I kicked my sneakers off and we found places facing each other on the empty mat, Kevin giving me the same bow he’d just given his teacher. After a moment, I bowed back, feeling like a world-class jackass, and hoping that no one outside this place had seen me. That formality exchanged, the smaller boy fell into what I would learn was a fighting stance, his weight balanced lightly on the balls of his feet. He held his fists up in front of his chest, and I had to smirk. The curled hands were tiny, his wrists skinny to the point of frail, and he gave me a smile behind his thick lenses that I didn’t return. I was going to destroy this little nerd, and then maybe they’d leave me the fuck alone.

  I waited for what seemed like forever for him to do something. Instead, he continued to bounce on his toes, still giving me that same friendly smile, and I finally lost my patience. With a snarl, I lunged forward, swinging with all my might for his face, only to find out too late that he wasn’t there anymore. I pitched forward, my balance careening me across the mat, and I was lucky to keep my feet. Turning to look behind me, there stood Kevin, still smiling, still bouncing, and completely untouched. So what did I do, but go at him again.

  Four times I charged the kid, never managing to make a single point of contact. Not once did he try to strike me back, always greeting me with his cheerful grin when I’d spin to locate him once again. “Stand still and fight, you little creep!”

  Kevin glanced at his sensei, who gave a nod, and the kid shrugged his scrawny shoulders. “Okay.”

  My next charge ended with me again staggering for footing, only this time I was rewarded with two light taps to my ribs as I passed him by. There was no mistaking the message. If he’d wanted to hit me hard, he could have. It would have hurt. The lack of pain only seemed to make me angrier. The next time I went at him, he didn’t dodge. Instead, he slapped my punch aside like it was an annoying mosquito, and jabbed me in the stomach. Again, it wasn’t hard enough to hurt. Before I could round on him again, his foot lashed out and caught me on the thigh, shoving me off balance and sending me staggering in the opposite direction.

  That brought me face to face with the grinning class of white belts, and I was sure there was mockery in those beaming little faces. My vision was a haze of red when I spun again, and I remember roaring as I dropped my shoulders and charged, intending to take my irritating opponent to the ground with me.

  The next thing I knew, I was blinking up at the bare dojo ceiling, gasping for the air that had been forcefully evicted from my lungs. I had a vague memory of traveling through the air, at some point being totally upside down, but no real idea how I’d gotten into that position before I crashed down full force on the padded mat beneath me. Carl Bledsoe’s dark face moved into my field of vision, and he looked me over for injuries for a moment before hauling me to my feet with one massive hand.

  “I want you to take a few things away from this experience,” he informed me, and I didn’t have enough breath to argue about it. He held up one finger. “First, you cannot let anger rule your actions. It makes you sloppy, and it makes you stupid.” The second finger went up. “Second, you must learn patience. Often times, simply waiting will force an opponent to do something dumb.” He raised the third finger. “And third, remember that the size of your opponent has nothing to do with their ability to beat you, if you ignore the first two things.”

  I leaned my hands on my knees, bent over and wheezing, but managed a nod. From the corner of my eye, I caught a glimpse of a white shape, and it resolved itself into Kevin, the boy showing the first glimpses of uncertainty on his face. He offered his hand to me, to shake, to show there were no hard feelings, but I could see that he fully expected me to slap it away. I had to wonder if he had many friends, that he was so worried about what I, a total stranger, thought. I didn’t shake his hand. I couldn’t, that day. I wasn’t yet the person that I would be later. But I did nod and give him a weak thumbs-up, which he seemed just as happy with.

  It would be cool if that was my turning point, the point where I suddenly set my feet on the straight and narrow. It wasn’t. I dutifully showed up at the dojo for my twice-weekly court-ordered lessons (in a white gi, with my white belt), but I wasn’t just going to cave in and toe the line. Sensei Bledsoe quickly learned to teach me one-on-one, with Kevin’s occasional help. My propensity to spew foul language every time I turned around made my presence a bit too scandalous for the younger classes. So I spent Tuesday and Thursday evenings drilling forms and movements into my unbelievably thick skull.

  On the nights when I was feeling particularly disruptive, either Kevin or Carl would let me take a run at them again. I never landed a punch, but there came a moment when I realized I was actually getting closer. It so startled me that I forgot my footwork and Kevin’s counter strike landed squarely on my nose, bloodying it but good. Instead of lashing out at him in retaliation, I actually busted out laughing, doing my damnedest not to get blood all over our neat white uniforms. Sensei quickly appeared with a towel, and tended to my busted face with quiet efficiency, but I caught the hint of a smile at the corners of his mouth. That was the night, I think, that I first started to give a shit.

  I took classes with Carl Bledsoe and Kevin for four years, well past the ending date of my probation. In fact, my last lesson was on the day I moved away for college, traveling all the way across the state (it was actually just an hour, but it seemed like another planet). My ribs still ached where Kevin had managed to tag me in our last good-natured bout. It was all right, though, because I’d nailed him too, and we’d laughed about it afterwards.

  I was headed for the big city with colle
ge on my mind but no real plan, and he was leaving in another week for some engineering program on the East Coast. In the time I’d spent learning with, and from, him, Kevin and I had become friends. We promised to email, but we didn’t as often as we should have. I mean, we were nineteen year old boys. We were still mostly idiots.

  Halfway through my freshman year, I got word that my friend and long-time sparring partner had been killed in a car accident – drunk driver coming out of nowhere. I made the interminable journey (still just an hour) back to my hometown, and Sensei and I stood next to each other at Kevin’s funeral, both of us bowing solemnly to the casket before it was lowered into the giant hole in the ground. That was the day I learned that giving a shit hurt like hell. I’d never lost anyone before, especially not someone who was my age, who should have been going off to college himself and living life for decades to come.

  I could feel myself wanting to slip into old habits, the siren song of oblivion calling to me. Anything was better than this, someone young and vibrant who was now just a bunch of nothing in the cold ground. I knew where my old crowd still hung out. Hell, most of them were probably still stoned off their asses in the same basements right where I’d left them years ago.

  As we left the grave site, Carl’s hand closed around my shoulder, still able to make me feel small even though I’d gained quite a few inches since our first meeting. “Tell me about college. Tell me about this girl.”

  It helped. Just the simple act of relating to him the new experiences, the new people I’d encountered so far away from my small hometown. The pretty dark-haired girl with flashing green eyes who’d actually agreed to go out to a movie with this scrawny little blond kid from Podunk, Missouri. Instead of seeking out drugs and drowning out painful feelings, we talked all night on the Bledsoes’ front porch, despite the bitter cold of a winter that refused to let go. We talked about me, to start, just catching up on the months I’d been away, but then it became about Kevin. Things we remembered, things we regretted. Things we’d do in the future, just so that we wouldn’t forget the painfully skinny kid with the big smile and outrageously thick glasses.