Page 144 of Price of Angels

“We were both freaked. So I loaded him up and we went to the ER. They explained what it was. But I had this moment…” Her eyes grew distant; she shook her head. “Here I was seventeen, pregnant as a horse, and holding hands with a nine-year-old who wasn’t mine in the waiting room. I was a Gretchen Wilson song come to life.” She smiled. “I wanted a drink that night. ‘Course, a drink or two was what had got me in that shape in the first place.”

Ava groaned. “TMI.”

Maggie laughed. “Don’t act like you don’t know the story–”

The sound of the door throwing back on its hinges caused them both to spin around.

Mercy charged into the room, his phone in one hand.

He looked at Ava. “I just talked to Michael. It’s Holly.” His voice was heavy. “He needs us.”

Walsh took a deep breath, pulling the light spice of snow down into his lungs. It was flavored with pine sap, and gray skies, and silent woodland creatures shushing through the white drifts. Michael’s uncle had a beautiful place. This trail through the woods was idyllic.

“I love the quiet,” he said, almost to himself, but Rottie glanced over as they walked together up the path.

“Yeah? You like your country hermit thing, don’t you?” he asked, smiling. “I never could figure that out, you being from London and all.”

Snow clung to their jeans and boots, weighing down their steps. The forest was hushed and secretive around them.

“I don’t like noise and crowds,” Walsh said. “Never have.”

“Hmm.”

They rounded a bend and found Michael’s carnage.

“Oh,” Rottie said. “He wasn’t kidding.”

The Jessup brothers lay a few yards apart, one face-down, the other face-up. Blood smeared the snow with red. Lots of bootprints. Bloody pawprints from the dogs. A smaller bloodstain off to the side marked the place where Holly had fallen.

Walsh frowned. “Assholes.”

They continued on, the cold seeping beneath their leather jackets. Walsh wished he hadn’t left all his rings on; the metal seemed to draw the chill, pressing it deep into the bones of his fingers.

It was another half-mile before they saw the train tracks ahead, and the figure of a man sitting awkwardly in the snow.

“Mr. Chace?” Rottie called.

The man twisted. A large, heavy older man, with a wrinkled face beneath his thatch of gray hair. He lifted an arm in greeting. “Hello!” he called.

“We’re Michael’s friends,” Rottie said as they approached.

Walsh smiled inwardly. Michael’s friends. Maybe at the end of all this, the cold son of a bitch would have transcended club brother, and become their friend.

“Here.”

Michael lifted his head and found a Styrofoam cup hovering in front of his face. Steam curled from its black contents.

Not hovering, actually. Waiting in the slender, narrow-fingered hand of someone. Ava Lécuyer, he saw, as he glanced up her sweater-clad arm to her face.

Her brown eyes were soft with sympathy, her mouth plucked to the side in a small non-smile. A friendly expression. “You have to be cold,” she explained. “And I thought…” The coffee spoke for itself. A gesture of comfort.

He was cold. His jeans and sleeves of his shirt – even beneath his jacket – had soaked through with snow. His skin was damp and clammy beneath. He hadn’t stopped to take inventory of himself until now. He hadn’t felt anything aside from the tight knot lodged in his chest. That, and crippling worry.

“Thanks.” He took the cup from her. The warmth was nice against his hands, though he had no plans to drink the stuff.

Ava turned and sat beside him, in a plastic chair that matched his own. The waiting room was a tumult of soft sounds around them: magazine pages flipping, muffled coughs, shoes whispering across the tile, low murmur of conversation at the nurse’s station.

Michael felt compelled to say something to her, but he had no idea what, and he was too consumed with thoughts of Holly to put any thought into something as trivial as chitchat. So he kept silent.

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