Sloe Ride (31 page)

At the hospital chapel

Donal: Never thought you’d be the one I’d catch praying.

Miki: I’m not praying. I’m threatening. Figured none of them out there has the balls to do it since they’ve been talking to Him since they were kids. Me, I’m new. Figured He’d hear
me
through all of their fucking noise.

“S
HE
CAN
hear ye, son.” Donal eased a chair under Quinn before his knees gave out. “She’s coming in and out of things, but the doctors say she’s here with us. Probably going to be for a while yet.”

Brigid was so tiny. So very tiny. A wee sprite, his father once called her. Once in Quinn’s memory. Right after that, she lobbed a bedroom slipper at Donal’s head.

There was an oxygen feed under his mother’s nose and tiny burns from tape over Brigid’s cheeks, but from what Quinn could see, other than the monstrous gauze patch peeking out from under her hospital gown’s neck opening, Brigid appeared to be fine. An orchestra of machines sang a merry, discordant tune along the smoked glass partition behind the bed, their noise masking most of the ambient sound drifting through the care unit.

“Shouldn’t she have—” Quinn mimicked squid legs with his fingers in front of his nose and mouth. “—stuff coming out of her face? To help her breathe?”

“Yer mum was fighting the tube. Doc said she’s doing fine, but they’ll watch for fluids,” Donal explained.

The tired in his voice concerned Quinn, and he glanced up at his father, rising slightly to get out of the chair only to be stopped by a firm hand on his shoulder.

“Sit. I’m going to be finding her doctor and see when she’s going to her own room. Ye know how she is. She’ll be wanting the lot of ye around her while she’s cooed over. We’ll be needing room for that.”

The flecks of gray at his father’s temples were nearly white, stained by the florescent panels above them. Their stark light pooled shadows into the lines radiating from Donal’s bright blue eyes and deepened the bruised-looking circles beneath his lower lashes. Strain turned Donal’s skin waxy, and he rubbed at his face, Brigid’s tiny wedding set sparkling on his little finger. The gold bands were marred with scratches, worn in from decades of marriage. Donal’s ring matched hers, nearly scrape for scrape, and Quinn realized he’d never seen those rings off of his parents’ hands—not until Donal sat vigil over his injured wife.

“I’m sorry, Da. For bringing this to your door.” The words were out before Quinn could check himself. “God in heaven, I am so—”

“I thought we already had this talk,
breac
.” Donal bent over Quinn’s back and embraced him from behind, a hard crush of strength Quinn hoped his father would never lose.

“I know. Hell, Miki and Brae beat it into me too. It’s just that… I’m… it hurts to see her here. Like this,” Quinn confessed. “It just… hurts.”

“It does, aye.” Donal’s granite-whiskey rumble poured gold on the darkness stretched over them. “But ye know yer mum. She’s going to be pampered for a few days, and then we’ll have to be fighting her to get her to rest. So don’t feel so sorry for her. Ye just be holding yer sympathy for the likes of me once I get her home and she starts chewing on us because she can’t sit still.
That’s
when ye should be coming around with yer sorries.”

Donal laid a kiss on Quinn’s temple, then headed out to the corridor, his firm strides taking him off to do battle with the hospital’s unsuspecting medical personnel.

It wasn’t as if Quinn’d never been
in
a hospital before. Growing up with seven Irish-tempered siblings meant frequent trips to the emergency room and a few bedside visits when one or another Morgan did something beyond foolish. Hell, there’d been a long stretch of hours, darkness, and tears back when he was a teenager and the world had gotten a bit too close for his liking, but Quinn’d never stared down at his own mother—still and pale—on sheets so white they hurt his eyes.

They also smelled of bleach. Acrid, nostril-burning bleach.

“Couldn’t they have used the lemon-scented kind?” The cotton was stiff beneath his fingers, an unyielding, stark prison. Tugging at the corners, Quinn pulled the top sheet free, flapping it slightly to loosen its tight fold. Satisfied, he patted down the blanket and was about to do the other side when he noticed his mother watching him, her hooded and dazed deep emerald eyes—his eyes—catching his every movement.

“My Donal said… ye and Rafe were fine.” She sounded raw, like she’d swallowed glass, but every inch his hard-scrabble, take-no-prisoners mother. The Gaelic was welcome, a comforting catch and song so familiar to his ears. “Then… yer arm?”

“What?” He twisted about, looking first right, then left. The turn did him in, ripping the fabric from his torn skin, and then there was blood. A lot of it, gushing from his now open wound, and he scrambled to grab tissues from the table next to his mother’s bed. She must have seen the dried trickle of blood on his arm, something he’d missed entirely. “Shite, I’m bleeding.”

“Call… doctor.” Brigid motioned toward the call button, straining to reach the module dangling from her bed’s side rails. “Need… stitches. How?”

Quinn pulled up the sleeve of Kane’s dark blue shirt, grimacing when he realized how crusted the fabric was. He’d leaned against Rafe, probably smearing blood all over him as well. Or maybe not. He frowned. It was a deep scratch—a groove, really—burned into his upper arm. “Probably sealed into the shirt when I put it on in the bathroom. I thought all the blood was yours. Well, hell.”

“Turn ’round. Let me… see,” Brigid commanded. Her wan face was nearly as bleached out as the sheets she lay on, and someone’d pulled her mane up into a queue, its wild curls spilling an auburn sunset over her pillow. Her eyes and hair were all the color she had, a frail Irish fey ghost lying too still for Quinn’s liking. “Ach, he shot
ye
. He’ll die—”

“Don’t worry about me, Mum. Probably would have been worse if I hadn’t bent down for the can next to me. I’ll have them look at it after I get kicked out.”

It was a sincere promise, but Brigid gave him a practiced side eye. If he hadn’t the reputation of avoiding any and all medical procedures, Quinn would have protested her damning and silent accusation, but Brigid had more than just cause.

Crossing his finger over his heart, he asserted, “I promise, Mum. On Harley’s head.”

“That’s… good. Promising on a… naked-ass cat,” Brigid rasped. She coughed, paling further, and Quinn nearly reached for the call button. “Stop that, ye wee naff… throat hurts.”

“Da said you could have ice chips. Do you want some, then?” He reached for a cup filled with icy slivers, then scooped a few out with his fingers. His mother took them, birdlike nibbles from his hand. She’d always seemed larger—much larger—and Quinn trembled, wondering how his tiny mother had the strength to survive being shot.

“Don’t look like that,” she scolded. “Always the guilty one. Should… have been a priest.”

“I’ve discovered I like sex too much,” Quinn confessed, mostly to see a smile on his mother’s face. Brigid laughed, gasping in pain after a second. He grabbed her hand, wincing when she dug her fingernails into his forearm. “Sorry, I just… didn’t mean to hurt you.”

“Laughing’s good. Alive then, I am.” Her lids drooped, and she fought them back. “Promise me… ye’ll stay inside… stay safe until… catch him. And Rafe… be good to him. Kick his ass if he’s a wanker.”

“I will.” Her hands were cold when Quinn touched them. Tsking, he folded his mother’s arms under her blankets, tucking them around her shoulders.

“Not the feet,” she admonished, her words burbling to sandy mumbles at the end.

“I know, Mum.” He left a kiss on her temple, thankful for the strong thump of her heartbeat beneath his lips. “Your feet get hot.”

“M’feet get hot.” Brigid sniffed, snuggling down into the bed. “Ye know….”

A shadow fell across Brigid’s bed, and Quinn turned, expecting his father.

It was Ian.

So not their father.

There were traces of Donal in Ian. Physically, he ran to the same mold used for most of the Morgan brothers, thickly muscled, tall, and a thatch of black hair that, using Donal as a guess, would be flecked with silver in their fifties. Emotionally, Ian was all Finnegan.

Ian stood uneasily at the end of Brigid’s bed, his fists punched into the pockets of his jeans and his head bowed down low enough for his chin to almost brush his chest. Smaller than Quinn—something that often surprised him—Ian still held the promise of heft to his frame, unlike Quinn’s more lean body. They were nearly ten years apart, each with different childhoods, with different sets of siblings, really, something Quinn’d never truly understood until he looked into his baby brother’s barely-out-of-teens face and saw the fear and confusion in his eyes.

“I saw Da outside.” Ian shuffled his feet a bit, dragging his sneakers over the tile. “Thought I’d come see her, you know? Just… they won’t let us all in, but… I needed to see her.”

“Yeah, I know. Come in quick,” Quinn replied. Hooking his hand in the crook of Ian’s arm, he dragged his brother over to the chair. A quick, fierce one-armed hug, then Quinn pushed Ian down into the seat, smoothing the hair from his face. “We look enough alike. Nurse’ll think you’re still me. Just don’t cover her feet—”

“They get hot.” Ian nodded. He looked lost, more like the little boy Quinn remembered standing on the front porch waving good-bye when they all headed off to school… then to college… then to their own lives.

“She’ll wake up in a bit. It’ll be good for her to see you.” Quinn grinned at Ian’s wrinkled nose. “What? You’re her favorite.”

“You’re off in the head,” he snorted back. “We all know that’s
you
.”

“You’re the one most like her—well, of the boys.” The correction came quickly once he figured Kiki into the equation.

“Yeah, but you’re the one she sighs over,” Ian refuted. Inching the chair closer to the bed, he rested his elbows on the mattress. “Can I ask you something?”

“Sure.” Quinn rested his hip against the bed’s metal bars.

“Did they—Da and Mum—were they mad when you told them you weren’t going to be a cop?”

“I never wanted to be one.” He crouched next to Ian, bringing himself in close. “I don’t think we ever even talked about it.” Cocking his head, Quinn caught the flicker of something unsure in Ian’s expression. “Ian, let me tell you something, then. If you don’t want to wear the badge, you don’t have to. Brae doesn’t. I sure as hell don’t. Ryan’s probably going to go off and buy world domination, so she’ll not be wearing the blues. If you don’t think that it’s for you, then you shouldn’t do it.”

“Not like I can go to school. Not after you—” Ian stumbled over his words. “I know. Not a competition, but there’s so fecking many of you ahead of me. I get lost, you know? I wonder if Mum even remembers my name half the time.”

“It doesn’t matter who you are. I grew up thinking my name was Con-Ka-Quinn.” He squeezed his brother’s arm, rubbing at the spot before sighing. “Just be you.”

“Easier said than done,” Ian grumbled. “I don’t know who
me
is.”

“I’ll tell you a truth, brother mine—no one ever really knows who their
me
is.” Quinn took one last look at his mother, then stood, the tear on his arm wrenched apart when his shirt rode over the muscle. “Mum made me promise to see a doctor. So I’d better be going before she tears my face off.”

“Hey, Quinn,” Ian called out to Quinn just as he reached the break in the glass partitions separating Brigid from the rest of the ICU ward. He turned, and Ian gave him a wry smile. “I’m sorry I was an asshole to you. Back there. I just get… scared and angry. I mean it, though. I am sorry. I just don’t think.”

“Then you lash out.” It was a common trait among them, especially when they were younger. “It’s just a bit of Mum stuck in our teeth.”

“Hah.” Ian grinned. “Not Da?”

“Nope,” Quinn shot back, winking at his younger brother. “The bit of Da is when you apologize because you mean it.”

“H
OW
LONG
is he going to be in there? Quinn, I mean.” Inspector Browne nodded toward the double doors Quinn’d disappeared through. “Because now’s the time to do any talking we need to be doing, and I don’t want to get him involved in this if we don’t have to.”

Brownie was a throwback to Rafe’s childhood, possessing a semi-uncle status among the Morgans and their satellites—namely Sionn and Rafe—and now Riley’s senior partner. He was slimmer than Rafe remembered, his lackluster gray suit hanging on his shoulders as if he were a little boy playing dress up in his father’s clothes. A bout of appendicitis was to credit his weight loss, that and a hard-nosed wife who’d laid down the law about sweets. The man’d reminded Rafe of a basset hound before he’d trimmed up. If anything, the loss of twenty pounds only added to his jowls, making Browne look like he was one step away from starring in a movie with a Scottie named Jock.