Page 13 of Price of Angels

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.

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