Page 48 of Lord Have Mercy Part Four: Big Son

Alex he hadn’t expected, though.

He’d clapped him on the shoulder. “You’re here.”

To which he’d scowled. “Of course I’m here.” Insulted.

But even after an hour of playing catch-up and drinking beer, he looked no less constipated.

“What?” Mercy asked.

Alex looked at Ava, pointedly, and said, “I think it’s past time to address what happened today.” His brows lifted in clear expectation of her agreement.

She held his gaze a long, unblinking moment, then sighed, shoulders sinking back deeper into the arm of the couch. “Yeah. I guess we–”

She stilled.

Which made Mercy still.

The way her face froze, but her eyes widened, and not a muscle in her body moved, made him sit up straighter, arms poised to curve around her and draw her into the shelter of his body.

“Baby–” he started.

Then she was a sudden flurry of movement, scrambling up and off his lap, slamming her beer bottle onto the table. It wasstill full, he noted absently, as beer sprayed up and over its lip. When she was on her feet, she bolted for the door.

Mercy went after her.

“Mercy,” Maggie called behind him, and he almost didn’t stop. Almost kept going. But the sudden, sharp crack of her voice brought him up short at the still-open door, and he glanced back over his shoulder. Her expression was a complicated mix of emotions he couldn’t decipher. “Maybe give her a minute.”

Mercy heard the words, and then he understood them. Then he said, “Uh,what?” Because since when in the history of Mercy and Ava – more firmly a single unit, MercyandAva, than ever now – had either one needed to give the other “a minute” when it came to serious topics?

He scanned the other faces in the room, and found his crew curious, and the newly-arrived crew glancing amongst themselves with a kind of shiftiness he didn’t like at all.

Maggie said, “I don’t know if–”

And Mercy turned, and walked through the door. He loved Maggie, and respected the hell out of her, but she could no longer stand between him and Ava the way she had when Ava was still a teenager.

He expected to find Ava on the porch, and when he didn’t, fear wrapped its cold fingers around his throat.

She was too smart to go wandering off into the dark; to get turned around in the dense swamp woods, or fall in the gator-infested water. But they were being hunted, and Boyle had proven, time and time again, that he had resources beyond their ken, and willingness to do whatever necessary.

“Fillette?” he called. “Ava?”

“Here,” she called, thankfully only a few paces off the porch, just beyond the reach of the hanging oil lantern. Then she made another noise, one that piqued his concern until heregistered what it was: retching. She was throwing up. Then he was concerned for another reason. “Hold on.”

Yeah right.

He pulled the lantern down off its nail and descended the porch steps, light sweeping forward in a revolving lozenge that struck first Ava’s jeans, then the forward curve of her back. She stood with feet planted wide apart in the grass, bent forward, hands braced on her knees, catching her breath in deep, audible gasps.

When he reached her, he laid a hand between her shoulders and felt her fine tremors. She dashed her forearm across her mouth, straightened, and when she turned to him, her face was sickly pale despite the flickering yellow warmth of the lantern light.

Fear tightened its fingers on him. “Shit, what are–”

“I’m pregnant,” she said, in a breathless, exhausted voice. And before he could react to that, before joy could bloom and fill him, and suffuse every part of him with that familiar wonder that had accompanied the announcement that she was pregnant with all three of their babies – theirfirstthree babies, it turned out – she added, “But that’s not why we came all the way out here.” Looking about to fall over herself, she swept her hair back off her forehead, and said, “Baby, you might wanna sit down for this.”

Fifteen

After he hung up on Ghost, Walsh felt oddly lighter. Like a man who’d washed his hands of something nasty and no longer had to worry about it.

Then he got up from the desk, walked calmly to the first available dorm, went into its bathroom, and spent ten minutes puking up his guts.

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