Page 16 of Price of Angels

“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.

“Now, go, baby. Out the window. Go now, please. Go get your Uncle Wynn.”

He started to argue, but she shook her head. She was crying now. There was a loud splintering sound, as the door began to give.

“I won’t let him hurt you. If you love me, all you can do is run, Michael.”

And so he ran. He shoved up the window, rolled out onto the slanted porch roof, his eyes filling with hot tears. The cold night air stung his face, caught in his lungs. On all fours, he scrambled to the corner of the roof, to the gutter and the drain pipe. He’d always been a good climber, and though his fingers were fast going numb in this frigid February air, he took a firm handhold and shimmied down the pipe, thumping down onto the crunchy grass.

He heard Mama yell, up in his bedroom.

Oh, God, Mama…

Uncle Wynn. He had to get to Uncle Wynn.

Warm golden panels of light fell from the house windows onto the frosted lawn. Michael took off at a sprint toward the main house, sucking in huge lungfuls of the bitter chill. Fast, faster, the fastest he’d ever run, gasping, reaching, heart ready to burst.

He tripped going up the porch steps, fell against the door.

“Uncle Wynn!” He beat with both fists against the wooden panel. “Uncle Wynn, help!”

There was a thundering of feet beyond the door, and then the panel swung wide, and there was Uncle Wynn, framed by lamplight, the hulking brute Caesar at his side.

“What’s the matter, boy?”

“Mama!” Michael gasped. “The men…” He couldn’t catch his breath enough to speak. “They’re hurting her–”

Uncle Wynn scowled ferociously and reached to the side, toward the umbrella stand just inside the door, drawing back with a shotgun clenched in one big square hand.

Caesar stepped through the door onto the porch, licked Michael’s face and hands with his giant pink tongue.

“It’s your daddy, isn’t it?” Uncle Wynn said. “It’s John, isn’t it?”

“Him and somebody else.”

Uncle Wynn pulled the door shut, and laid a hand briefly on top of Michael’s head. “You stay right here, little man. You stand right here, and you hold onto Caesar’s collar, like this.” He moved Michael’s hand, placed it on the leather strap around the Dane’s thick neck. “Don’t you step away from him for a second.”

To the dog, he said, “Caesar, stay. Watch.” And then he leapt down off the porch and took off at a dead run for the guest cabin, shotgun swinging as he moved. He was amazingly swift for a man who wore overalls and saggy jeans all the time. He flew across the grass, and his white t-shirt floated up the steps of the other cabin, disappearing through the door like a ghost.

Michael curled his fingers tight around Caesar’s collar, but the dog never moved, just made a high whimpering sound. Michael leaned into his sleek, warm side, feeling like he might faint, breath pluming in the cold night air. He rested his head against the great beast’s face, felt the slickness of the short black coat on his skin.

And then he heard the shotgun go off, ripping explosions of sound that shattered the night.

Michael woke and knew that he’d been dreaming. His eyes snapped open and with a jolt, he felt himself returning from his very worst nightmare – the one that had actually taken place. He lay in his own bed, in his grown man’s body, and the ceiling was dark and grainy above him. He felt the familiar softness of his sheets against his naked skin. Smelled the familiar tang of lemon Pine-Sol.

He hadn’t dreamed of his mother in a long time; it had been years since he’d returned to that awful night in his sleep, reliving the horror in aching detail. Why had he tonight?

He knew the answer, but he wasn’t going to acknowledge it. There was no sense comparing tiny frightened Holly to his long-dead, tiny frightened mother when he didn’t know the whole story there, and wasn’t likely to get it.

Extending an arm through the dark, he found his smokes and lighter on the nightstand, where he always left them. Lit one by feel, the momentary spark of the lighter illuminating the cigarette and his deeply callused hands as he cupped them around the flame. Then it was dark again, and the nicotine was going down into his lungs. It was a nasty habit, smoking, one he hadn’t picked up until he’d joined the MC. There’d been a tremor in his hands, at first, because it hadn’t mattered that he was willing to do certain things; his body betrayed some sort of untouchable inner nerves. He’d turned to cigarettes, and they’d become habit, though the tremors had long since faded into nothingness.

He smoked in the dark, eyes tracing his bedroom from memory. Through the shadows, he knew just where the mirror stood in its floor-length frame, where the lamp was on the desk, the angle of the chair at the desk, the one where he draped his cut every night. He knew both nightstands, one on either side, and the old plate he used as an ash tray – he reached for it now. The shadows were deeper in the places where the en suite bath and closet doors stood open. All the old furniture from the house his parents had shared, the first nine years of his life. The bed where he’d been conceived, not out of love, but out of animal need and marital obligation.

He couldn’t see much sense in buying a whole house full of new furniture when this stuff had been sitting in storage for years, waiting for him to grow up. And so it didn’t matter where he lived; the ghost of his parents awful, wrong life together was a spirit he couldn’t exorcise.

The alarm went off with a screech. Six. Time to start the day. He set the burning cigarette on the edge of the makeshift ashtray and sat up. Maybe if he found out what was bothering Holly, dreams of his mother would stop bothering him.

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