Price of Angels (6 page)

              Holly shrugged and glanced away from his unforgiving stare. Yes, if it came down to her or Carly, then she was the one who’d deserved to die. She was the one with unspeakable sin attached to her name. She was the one who wouldn’t be missing out on much of anything, if she were killed. She was the one seeking out Michael. Didn’t that automatically make her the worthy candidate for death?

              “That’s what you think,” he said, the force of his gaze drilling into the side of her face. Didn’t he know this was a sensitive topic? Didn’t he have a softer voice somewhere, buried inside him? “You think it
should
have been you.”

              Holly hated lying. She detested it; it left a dark, stale taste on her tongue every time. At moments, she was forced to do it – at least that’s what she told herself; lie, or face the wrath again. Lie, or risk the pain again, like that awful time both her blackened eyes had swelled shut, when she’d been blind. In that house with them, and totally blind.

              But here, sitting with Michael, her natural aversion to falsehoods was stronger than any fear. He may have been blank-faced and insensitive, but Holly realized she wasn’t afraid of losing her eyesight as she sat with him. She wasn’t braced and ready for pain.

              So she told the truth. “Yes, I think it should have been me.”

              Michael watched her, blinking at least, hands curled over the arms of the chair, still as frozen water. Still as a wilderness predator. Waiting.

              Holly wiped at her eyes, pads of her fingers glimmering wet as they withdrew. “Carly was a good person,” she repeated. “She shouldn’t have been murdered tonight.”

              “No,” he agreed. “She got in the way of whoever’s hunting you.”

              She snapped around, breath catching in her throat, too startled to speak as she faced his unwavering calm once more. Fear shivered across all her nerve endings. How did he know?
How could he possibly know
?

              “Holly,” he said, and it was the first time he’d ever spoken her name aloud. The sound of it leaving his lips surprised her. If it surprised him, he didn’t show it, but he paused a moment. Yes, she knew, for Michael, that constituted surprise. “I can smell the fear on you from ten yards away. You’re petrified, all the time, every time I’ve ever seen you.” He said it almost gently, his voice a notch softer.

              She looked away from him again, drawing her knees up against her chest and resting her chin on them, staring across the parlor toward the leaded-glass panes of the dainty china cabinet, and the blue teacups behind them.

              “You’re afraid right now,” Michael said. “But not of me.” A note of doubt at the end, a sort of question without inflection.

              “No.” She wrapped her arms around her legs. “Not of you.”

              “Tell me who, then.”

              She wanted to. Oh, how she wanted to. That was why she’d spent every night since August chattering away at him, because she wanted to be able to tell him who she feared the most, and she wanted him to take care of it for her.

              But he’d told her no tonight. He wasn’t the kind of man she could charm with a cocked hip and a suggestive look. Michael wasn’t the sort of man a girl like her could ever befriend. If he didn’t want her body, what could she offer him? The hundred dollars folded up in the bottom of her boot? He wouldn’t do what she needed him to for so small a sum.

              “Not tonight,” she whispered. “I can’t tell you right now.” Not until she understood better why things had gone so wrong this evening.

              He took a deep breath and got to his feet, the rustling of his clothes obscene compared to his complete stillness and silence of before. “If you change your mind” – he scratched at an eyebrow with a thumbnail, a fast, human gesture, proving even the most statuesque of men had itches and pains too – “you know where I have dinner every night.”

              She nodded.

              He was halfway to the door, when she sat up. “Michael?”

              He didn’t just pause, but came to a complete stop. Not moving. Not twitching. Eyes on her face and hand at the knob, like a film someone had stopped with a press of a remote.

              She wanted, with a question on her lips and his steady gaze attached to her, to feel frightened of him. She couldn’t muster any fear, though. He was not a scary man.

              “How’d you know where I live?” she asked.

              “I asked the waitress who wasn’t dead,” he said, and opened the door and went through it.

              Holly listened to the old house settling around her. Eric’s muted music running along the floorboards. And then she got to her feet. Up both sets of stairs, as fast as she could go, through her loft, door left open behind her for the first time. She went to the window and pressed her hand to the fogged glass.

              There were taillights sliding around the corner: Michael.

              She sighed and sank down on the window ledge. Not tonight, no, but tomorrow. Then she would tell him. Somehow, she’d find some bravery between now and then.

Three

He was nine, the night the men came. The February cold pressed at the edges of the windows, came skimming in under the door to the little guest cabin where he and Mama were staying. Uncle Wynn lived way, way out, down the end of a gravel road, in a house made of split logs, with rocking chairs on its deep front porch, and colored shotgun shells littering the front lawn. Uncle Wynn himself smoked like a chimney and spent most of his time out back in the dog kennels, with his prized hounds and Great Danes. He talked to the dogs, talked to them constantly, one-sided conversations, full of questions and exclamations and lavish compliments. He let Michael come with him, to feed them, and he talked to Michael, too, only Michael didn’t figure he had to talk back most of the time. The dogs didn’t, after all.

              “Your uncle’s a smart man,” Mama had told him, the day their station wagon had limped down the gravel drive and sputtered to a halt in front of the house. “Listen to him and you’ll learn a thing or two.” She’d patted Michael on the back, between his small, bird-like shoulder blades. “That’s where your wings are,” Mama always told him, smiling, passing her fingertips along the narrow bony ridges. “My little Saint Michael. The archangel.”

              Uncle Wynn was Mama’s older brother. He’d taken one look at his little sister, as they’d climbed from the station wagon, and he’d made a face Michael hadn’t understood. A deep frown, a crinkling of his brow, a glimmer like tears in his eyes. “What’s he done this time, Cami?”

              Mama had run into his arms and hugged him hard, not caring that his overalls were smeared with muddy pawprints.

              Uncle Wynn had crouched down low, so his face was level with Michael’s. “You must be Mike. Pleased to finally meet you, son.”

              “Michael,” he corrected. “I don’t go by Mike.”

              “Michael,” Uncle Wynn said with a gap-toothed grin, pushing his ball cap back and giving Michael a speculative look. “Michael it is, then. Y’all come in and get some supper.”

              Wynn had a guest cabin, very small and old and not well-insulated, but it was a safe place, Mama told him, and so they’d been staying here, at the farm, and Mama was schooling him herself because she said he couldn’t go back to school right now. They needed to be secret. Safe. Hidden away.

              “Mama,” Michael said now, as he nibbled on his pencil eraser and stared at the page of multiplication tables in front of him. “When are we going home?”

              His mother glanced up from the potato she was peeling, paring knife catching the lamplight in one slender, long-fingered hand. She tipped her head to the side as she regarded him, locks of dark hair, come loose from her ponytail, sliding down her neck, falling on her shoulders.

              “I don’t think we can go back, baby,” she said, her smile sad. She had the prettiest face, but so much of the time, it was stamped with sadness. It made Michael sad, too.

              “Are we gonna live here?” he asked, thinking that might not be a bad thing. He was starting to like Uncle Wynn, and he’d liked the dogs immediately. The biggest, a black Dane named Caesar, Uncle Wynn’s prize stud dog, slept on the living room sofa in the main house and licked Michael’s hands in greeting every time they met.

              “Would that be okay with you, if we did?” Mama asked.

              “I think so.”

              She smiled. “Your uncle says you can pick a puppy from the next litter if you want. It can be your dog. He’ll teach you how to train it.”

              He sat up straighter in his chair, excitement fluttering in his stomach. “Really?”

              She nodded. “That’s what he says. Berta’s due to whelp next month.”

              Michael smiled. Berta was a sweetie, a huge black and white Dane with silken, floppy ears. She’d been bred to Caesar. The idea of one of Caesar’s puppies to call his own, to train and raise and love – that was wonderful. He’d never had anything so nice, something he’d wanted so badly. He knew not to ask for things – Mama always said, “We can’t afford that, darlin’,” and it made her sad. Again. Always sad, poor Mama.

              “I’m sure,” Mama continued, “that you’d have to do some chores around here to cover the cost. If he keeps one, that’s eight-hundred dollars he doesn’t make from selling it.”

              “I can do chores,” he hurried to say. “I won’t mind.”

              She smiled at him, one of those dreamy smiles that told him she was drifting into her thoughts, staring at him and seeing things that weren’t. “I know you won’t, baby. You’re the best boy.”

              They both heard the crunch of feet on gravel at the same time. Both of them sat up tall in their chairs, like marionette strings had pulled them.

              “It’s Wynn,” Mama said, but her eyes widened and her nostrils flared at the edges, and her hand tightened on the potato peeler, the potato landing quietly amid the strips of peel on the table.

              The steps came closer. If it was Uncle Wynn, he wasn’t walking with his usual hearty strides, his big, swinging walk that he’d developed so he could keep up with his long-legged Danes when they went walking around the farm.

              “Stay here,” Mama said, getting to her feet.

              Michael went perfectly still, the pencil falling from his hand.
Smack
, against the table.

              Mama wore clothes that Uncle Wynn had pulled from a box in the attic, clothes she’d worn in high school, and that had been boxed up once she moved away from home; her mother had packed them up, before she’d died. White overalls with a red t-shirt beneath, her feet bare, her toenails painted a drugstore red from a bottle she’d bought on their way to the farm, when they’d stopped for snacks and a map. Her dark ponytail swung against her back as she walked to the door, potato peeler held low, down along her thigh.

              The footsteps hit the porch stairs, and moved up them. Clomp, clomp across the boards.

              “Mama,” Michael whispered.

              The knob rattled, but wouldn’t turn.

              “Michael, run,” his mother said softly. “Go upstairs, into your bedroom.”

              “But, Mama–”

              “Run, go now!”

              He climbed down from the chair…

              And the door exploded. With an awful great crash, it flew back on its hinges, dust and splinters flying.

              “Go!” Mama screamed at him, and he went, hot with panic on the inside, boiling with fear.

              He bolted from the kitchen, clambered up the stairs two at a time. Behind him he heard a man’s voice, dark with anger. And his mother’s voice, shrill and high.

              He paused, at the top of the narrow wooden stair, hand on the rail, chest heaving as he breathed. He should go back. He should help her, protect her.

              She’d told him to run, though. And he wanted to do what she’d asked. He wanted to make her happy.

              But she wasn’t happy now. She was shrieking. And there were at least two masculine voices, maybe three.

              Help her, he should help her. He should throw himself in front of her and defend her.

              He hadn’t helped her back at home, though, had he? He’d crawled beneath the bed, like she’d told him to do, and he’d listened to his father come into the room, had listened to the sound of Mama being slapped, the sharp strike of Daddy’s palm against her face. He’d heard the arguing, the cursing, the awful names his father called his mother. And then, as Mama sobbed, the mattress flexed and creaked above his head, and his father panted like a dog and cursed some more.

              He hadn’t helped her when Daddy dumped his dinner over her head, because she’d made something he didn’t like. Artichoke hearts in the pasta. Fuck that, Daddy said, and poured the whole plate over Mama’s head. Michael ducked down under the table, at his mother’s urging, and listened to her face take slap after slap.

              How many times had John McCall beat his wife? And how many times had Michael hidden and done nothing? Too many times to count.

              As he stood at the top of the stairs, Michael felt the beginnings of an awful anger. An anger unlike anything he’d ever felt before. Schoolyard fights, unfair teachers – none of it could touch this, the black rage that started somewhere in the region of his heart and spread outward in cold, staggering flushes. It felt like if he looked at his hands, he’d seen the anger blooming beneath his skin, like bruises. And not just anger, there was hate there too. Blistering hate.

              John wasn’t a big man, but Camilla was so very little. “Like a little fairy,” Uncle Wynn had said of her, smile brimming with affection, as his little sister danced across the living room of the main house last night. She was tiny and fragile and soft, and she helped Michael find cool bugs to put in Mason jars for show-and-tell, and she trimmed his hair at a kitchen chair, pads of her fingers light as snowflakes on his scalp. She cooked for him and read him stories and said, “I love you more than anything,” every night when she tucked him into bed.

              And John had beat her. Over and over. Her own husband, the father of her child.

              Michael didn’t care what kind of sin it was: he
hated
his father. And he wasn’t going to hide one more time.

              He turned and started back down the stairs, toward the tumultuous din of voices below.

              Just as his mother started up them.

              Mama stumbled into view, clutching for the rail, big-eyed and breathless, pale white with nerves. Her hair had fallen, waving dark sheets across her shoulders, strands clinging to the perspiration on her forehead, the silver cross around her neck swinging.

              “Michael!” Her voice was high, frightened, desperate. There were sounds and shouts behind her. She’d escaped, but they were coming after her. “Go, baby, run! Your room, your room!” She ran toward him, stumbling up the steps, flailing for the rail as she came.

              The sight of her like that burned into his mind. It terrified him. And so he let the anger and hate shrivel down, and he obeyed her, spinning and running for his room.

              There were two tiny bedrooms in the guest cabin, one on either side of the stairs. Michael darted into his, the little closet-sized space with its single bed and writing desk pressed up against the window. He had a view of the farm from up here, all bathed in moonlight, rimmed in frost. Just outside his window was the shingled roof of the front porch. He’d climbed out onto it three days before, and shimmied down the drain pipe to the grass below, just to see if he could.

              Mama came in behind him, slammed the door, locked it, and dragged the desk chair over to wedge beneath the knob.

              Feet thundered up the stairs. The men were coming.

              Mama turned to him, caught him by the narrow shoulders, and leaned down so their faces were level. She had tears in her pretty eyes. Her lips trembled as she spoke. “Michael, listen to me, and listen to me good, okay?”

              He nodded, even though her fingers were biting into him, wanting to do anything to please her, give her even that fractional peace.

              “I named you after Saint Michael. Do you know what that means? I named you after the archangel. The angel who put the devil in the pit.” Her voice was hurried, the words snapping lightning fast. “I wanted you to have a good, strong name. A name for protecting people. A name against evil.”

              Evil – that was John McCall.

              “I want you to remember that,” Mama said. “I want you to remember what are you, always. Don’t ever forget it.”

              “I won’t, Mama, but–”

              “Here.” She let go of him and fumbled at the clasp of her silver cross, finally getting it open. “I want you to take this.” She picked up one of his hands, pressed the cross – warm from her skin – into his palm, closed his fingers around it and squeezed. “I want you to wear it every day, and remember that you’re my archangel. Will you do that for me, baby? Promise me.”

              “I promise.” He felt the burn of tears in his eyes and throat. “Mama, why are you saying this?”

              “Because your daddy’s coming.”

              There was a tremendous bang on the other side of the door. “Camilla!” someone roared. “Open this goddamned door!”

              “Michael.” Mama caught him by the face, her smooth hands gentle against his cheeks. Her eyes bored into his. “I love you more than anything. You are the best thing that ever happened to me.”

              He didn’t want her to say this. Didn’t want her to seem so final, as the men tried to beat down the door.

              “Wherever life takes you, I want you to remember how special you are. Okay? Promise me that, too. That you won’t forget. You are my special, wonderful, angel boy.” She kissed his forehead, and her lips were wet with the tears that streamed down her cheeks. “I love you,” she whispered, and then she released him, stepped back.