Under the Rainbow (The Clay Lion Series Book 4) Read online

  Books by Amalie Jahn

  The Clay Lion Series

  The Clay Lion

  Tin Men

  A Straw Man

  Under the Rainbow

  (a short story prequel companion)

  The Sevens Prophecy Series

  Among the Shrouded

  Gather the Sentient

  Let Them Burn Cake!

  (A Storied Cookbook)

  Amalie Jahn

  UNDER THE

  RAINBOW

  A SHORT STORY PREQUEL COMPANION

  TO THE CLAY LION SERIES

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  Copyright © 2015 by Amalie Jahn

  License Notes

  This e-book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This e-book may not be resold or given away to other people.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any informational storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  This e-book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Kindle Edition

  A BERMLORD E-book

  First Edition, November 2015

  Typeset in Garamond

  Cover art by Amalie Jahn

  To My Fans-

  For your encouragement, enthusiasm, and patience.

  I am forever grateful.

  Prologue

  25 Years Old

  Results scrolled across the bottom of the television screen. I perched on the edge of the aluminum folding chair like some feral creature watching its helpless prey, ready to pounce. The names of newly elected and reelected incumbent legislators from every district of the surrounding counties flashed across the screen.

  “Prince William. Pulaski. Rappahannock.” I whispered the counties as they appeared, bracing myself as I leaned slightly forward in my seat.

  Finally, Richmond appeared.

  Someone behind me squeezed my shoulder as the air, which had been buzzing with electricity just moments before, collapsed around me.

  “Tough break, Phil,” Landon said, scraping the feet of his chair against the worn floorboards of my sublet apartment. He slouched beside me and cracked open what was to have been my celebratory beer, handing it to me anyway. “You’ll get ‘em next time.”

  I begrudgingly accepted the beer and took a huge gulp. There wasn’t going to be a next time.

  “I’m done,” I told him, clicking off the TV with the remote control as I stood up. “Obviously politics isn’t for me.”

  “What do you mean, you’re done?” Parker asked from the kitchen where he was helping himself to the paltry contents of my refrigerator. “I spent four solid years listening to you droning endlessly about your political aspirations. You’re going to let one loss come between you and your dreams?” He nudged the refrigerator door shut with his hip and emerged from the kitchen with the remains of last week’s take-out. “Did I miss something, because that doesn’t sound like the guy who told me freshman year how he was going to run the country someday.”

  “Shut up,” I huffed, annoyed at myself for having invited everyone over in the first place. I hadn’t considered the reality of having to face them in the event that I lost.

  Because losing had really never been an option.

  Although losing was clearly what I’d just done.

  “You’ll feel better in the morning,” Landon’s girlfriend, Kenna, consoled me, crossing the room from where she’d been sitting on the sofa to wrap me in a sisterly embrace. “Rollins didn’t beat you by a landslide. Lots of people voted for you.”

  “Yeah. If only I’d landed an endorsement that would have clinched it for me,” I replied, slipping from between her arms to minimize the awkwardness of the situation. “It’s not enough to have a decent platform or a solid work ethic. You gotta know the right people. And you idiots are the only people I know.”

  Landon shrugged off my insult. “So meet the right people between now and the next election and then knock it out of the park.”

  “And what do you propose I do to pay the rent on this hole in the wall over the next two years while I’m out carousing with the upper echelon of society?” I asked, brandishing my hands like the curator at a fine museum.

  Kenna gave my apartment a once over, pausing briefly to inspect the ever-widening water stain in the corner of the ceiling and the freezer door which was secured to the refrigerator with duct tape. “Wait tables?” she offered.

  “Bartend,” Parker called from the kitchen, a chicken leg now dangling from his mouth.

  “Sell your organs online?” Landon teased.

  His car keys were still sitting on the counter where he’d tossed them and without thinking, I scooped them up and chucked them at his head.

  “Ouch!” he cried when they connected with his left temple.

  “I think it’s time for everyone to go,” I announced. “Losing’s a solitary endeavor.”

  Without further prompting, the only three people who hadn’t yet been driven off by my over-inflated sense of ambition gathered their belongings and shuffled out the door.

  “Let us know when you’re ready to get back on the saddle,” Landon called over his shoulder from the stoop. “And I’ll see if I can get you a few hours a week at the store to help pay the bills.”

  I let the door close behind him without responding and wilted with my warming beer into the sofa I’d inherited from the college apartment we’d shared. I ran my hand across the arm rest, picking at a bit of cushioning that pushed through the fabric, knowing the only reason it had been left behind was that no one else had wanted it. Just like no one wanted me to help run their city.

  Me and the sofa – unwanted and unappreciated.

  As I sat picking at the hole, my mind wandered to the one thing I always thought about when I was alone and depressed. My mother.

  “I’m sorry, Mom,” I sighed, tears welling in my eyes. “I can’t believe I let you down already.”

  Chapter One

  15 Years Old

  I found her at the kitchen table, quietly weeping over the growing stack of envelopes I’d been collecting from the mailbox over several weeks. Baseball practice was cancelled thanks to an unexpected rain storm, and I could tell by the way she averted her eyes as I came through the door that she hadn’t been expecting me.

  “You’re home early,” she said, shuffling the papers into piles as if to distract me from her tear-streaked cheeks.

  The last time I’d seen her cry was the night my father left us a decade before, and even then it was only in the shadows, when she thought I wasn’t looking.

  “So are you,” I countered, settling myself beside her on one of the three remaining chairs at our table, which had room enough for four but was only ever set for two. “The fields were too wet to play on so Coach sent us home. What’s your excuse?”

  Tears welled up in her eyes, and I forced myself not to look away. I was teasing, hoping to lighten her mood, not knowing there was a legitimate reason she wasn’t still at work.

  “Mom? What is it?” I asked when she didn’t respond.

  She shook her head, burying her face in her hands. Her shoulders slumped, and I waited for her to go
on.

  “I wasn’t ready to tell you,” she said at last. “But it seems as if now, after what happened today…” She trailed off. “I guess I don’t have a choice.”

  My adolescent mind raced with thoughts of all the things which might be upsetting to her. I had no idea what made adults cry. War? Famine? Taxes?

  “They let me go today. At the store. Said I’ve been taking off too much time. Apparently they need someone ‘more reliable.’”

  This was news to me. I had no idea she hadn’t been going into work, and it struck me as hypocritical after she’d barraged me with an hour long lecture about responsibility when I’d skipped school with my friends at the beginning of the school year. Suddenly I didn’t feel so sorry for her. What a phony, I thought. No wonder they fired you.

  “Why’d you take off?” I asked nonchalantly, not caring so much about the reason for her dismissal as I was about how I was going to come up with the money to pay for my phone now that she was unemployed.

  She slid a stack of mail in my direction but remained silent. The return address on the top envelope read Syntant Laboratories.

  “I don’t understand. Did you interview for a job there?” I asked.

  She flipped the top envelope off the pile to reveal a second envelope. This one was from Thurston Radiology. When I glanced up she returned my gaze with quiet anticipation, as if Thurston Radiology should mean something to me, which of course, it did not.

  I plucked another envelope from the stack.

  “Dr. Hibbard?” I said, letting the bill slip through my fingers as an image of the overweight man with a greying crew cut popped into my head. Although he’d treated me for pink eye and strep throat, among various other childhood illnesses over the years, I couldn’t imagine why my mother had been to see him.

  “Are you sick?” I asked simply.

  To avoid my question, she busied herself, restacking the bills into the piles she’d been creating when I’d arrived. I repeated myself, only this time there was a firmness to my voice which commanded her attention.

  “I found a lump, Phillip. In my breast. They’re telling me I’m going to be fine, and I believe them. But I’ve missed a lot of work, with appointments and all, and because I work less than 40 hours a week I don’t have full insurance benefits which means I also don’t qualify for disability. I guess now that I’ve been fired, all we have are pathetic government health benefits.” She bowed her head, rolling her neck from side to side. “I just don’t know how we’re going to pay all these medical bills.”

  I reached across the table for her hand, feeling like a jerk for the internal dialogue I’d been having with myself. My mom was sick. There was a chance she could die. And it dawned on me, as I scanned the buried surface of the table, that in addition to the bills that were already sitting between us, there would be far more bills to come for the treatments to ensure her survival.

  I couldn’t allow myself to dwell on it.

  “I’ll quit baseball. Get a job after school,” I blurted in an attempt to say something to make her feel less desperate.

  She squeezed my hand. It was warm and I could feel the blood pulsing through her veins. Hers were not the hands of a dying woman. “That’s nonsense,” she told me resolutely. “Your job is to do well in school. Go to college. Build a life for yourself. My job…” Her voice drifted off. “My job is to take care of everything else.”

  When I looked at her then, it was as if I was seeing her for the first time in my life, not as my keeper, but for who she really was. For who she always had been. A mother who’d sacrificed everything for me. Who built a life out of nothing for the two of us, with a roof over our heads and food on our plates. During the shift work years, there were days I barely saw her, but my lunch was always packed and my homework always checked. Every decision she’d made was for my benefit, not hers, protecting me from the harsh reality of the world.

  My mother, who had never taken a handout and had always made it through life on her own terms, was now at the mercy of a healthcare system which could refuse her treatment or impoverish her, if she didn’t die first. A system so broken that no one, throughout decades of legislation, had stumbled upon a way to fix it.

  “That’s crazy, Mom,” I said finally. “Because while you’re taking care of everything else, who’s gonna take care of you?”

  Chapter Two

  16 Years Old

  I heard the sound of the water sizzling on the burner a split second before I turned to see my pot of rice boiling over. Again.

  “Damn it,” I cursed under my breath, lunging for the handle and burning myself in the process.

  “Do you need any help in there?” my mother called weakly from her nest on the couch in the family room where she’d been perched for several days following her latest round of chemotherapy.

  I assured her I was fine and that I had the dinner preparations under control, but the reality was I had absolutely no idea what I was doing. Having never spent a day in my life inside a kitchen before her diagnosis, there was a good chance we’d be dining on cold cereal for the third night in a row. If she was going to beat cancer, what she needed was a wholesome, homemade meal. Instead, what she was getting was pasty rice and frozen chicken nuggets warmed in the toaster oven. I tried not to think about our lack of nutrition while attempting to clean off the charred burner with a damp towel.

  As I waited for the timer to go off on the nuggets, I hoisted myself onto the counter to flip through the day’s mail. There was the requisite Tuesday grocery circular, an “I’m thinking about you but really glad I’m not the one with cancer” card from our neighbor Jenna, and nine medical bills.

  Short of filing for bankruptcy, I had no idea how we were ever going to pay them.

  I considered the possibility of selling plasma.

  The toaster oven dinged, and after checking to be sure the nuggets were cooked somewhere between lukewarm and rubber, I slid them onto mismatched plates alongside two heaping scoops of rice. Balancing the plates in one hand, I grabbed a bottle of barbeque sauce from the fridge, and headed into the family room to serve dinner to my ailing mother.

  The woman nestled under the worn afghan was almost unrecognizable to me. Her characteristically rosy complexion was replaced by the pallor of a convalescent, with hollowed eyes and a thinning frame. I didn’t know what was killing her faster – the cancer or the poisonous treatment she pumped voluntarily through her veins.

  “This looks fabulous,” she gushed as I set the plate on her tray table alongside the stack of outdated magazines and daily pill organizer.

  I laughed feebly and collapsed beside her on the couch. “It looks like crap. For the first time in my life I wish schools still taught Home Economics, like in the old days.”

  Despite her bedraggled state, she smiled, dipping her first nugget into the sauce. “I think Home Ec was still around when my great-great grandmother was in school. Can you imagine baking biscuits in class instead of studying physics?”

  I forced down a forkful of rice. “I’d gladly give up physics for a class that taught me how to make something edible.”

  “It’s not so bad,” she said.

  What’s not so bad? I thought. The food or our situation? Because from where I was sitting, they were both pretty horrible.

  Although her prognosis was favorable, my mother had been unable to work for almost six months. Luckily, a large portion of her treatment had taken place during the summer while I was on break, allowing me to work two full-time jobs to help supplement the shortfall. Unfortunately, between the mortgage, food, and car payment, I barely covered our living expenses, much less put a dent in the soaring medical bills. The towering stack continued to occupy its own corner of the table, eyeing me surreptitiously from the kitchen as its apex grew.

  With my junior year of high school just around the corner, I had already come to terms with what needed to be done. I just didn’t know how I was going to break the news to my mother. There was no doubt
my plan would be met with resistance, but I was resolved.

  She pushed her rice around her plate like a preschooler, as if the simple act of manipulating her fork would convince me she was eating. I couldn’t blame her for not wanting it though. Dinner was gross.

  “You want some applesauce?” I asked, rising from the sofa. “I promise I won’t do anything to it first. We can just eat it out of the jar with a spoon.”

  She shook her head. “You go ahead. I’m just not hungry is all. Because of the medicine.”

  I narrowed my eyes at her.

  “It’s true,” she insisted. “You could have brought a French chef in here to prepare a gourmet meal, and I still wouldn’t have eaten it.”

  As sincere as she seemed, I couldn’t help but feel responsible for her weakening physique. She needed nourishment to recover. I returned from the kitchen with the jar of applesauce and poured a dollop on her plate.

  She glared up at me.

  “Eat,” I told her. “And while you’re eating, I need you to listen to what I have to say.”

  She picked up her spoon and obediently slid the applesauce between her chapped lips. I fiddled to replace the jar’s lid before eventually settling in beside her.

  “I had a conversation with Brad, the owner of the moving company today. He said he’s got plenty of jobs coming up and can keep me on for at least the next six months if I want to keep working.”

  “Will he let you just show up after school at the end of the work day like that?” she interrupted.

  I stared across the room at a portrait of my grandparents hanging on the far wall above the bookshelf, which was teeming with my mother’s treasured knick-knacks from the year she backpacked across Europe. The year she met my father.

  She had lived life on her own terms and taken risks. Why shouldn’t I? Especially if it meant protecting our future.