by Mary Behre
Hannah’s heart pumping at a frantic pace, she shoved to the balls of her feet. They’d shifted positions. Now Michael blocked her path to Shelley. She stepped to her right, he followed. She jumped to the left, so did he. He wasn’t touching her anymore but his arms were spread wide and his fingers flexed.
She had two choices: try to go through him or go into the kitchen. Hoping he’d follow, she darted toward the back of the restaurant.
The slaps of his sneakers against the floor told her he’d followed.
Hannah nearly tripped over the chair he must have tossed aside when he’d come through the kitchen. Jumping over it, she threw her hands up and shoved the door wide.
The stench of gas hit her in the face before her feet touched the ground. She choked on a cough and covered her mouth with her hand. The burners hissed, flameless.
Michael must have turned them on when he arrived and since broken off the knobs. They lay scattered in pieces on the floor. Terror had her feet turning to cement when he said, “I don’t want to hurt you, Hannah.”
He stalked through the door and drew a knife from the magnetic rack near Paulie’s stove. It sang sinisterly. The sight of the large silver blade shattered whatever mental block had her frozen. Hannah backed up, determined to survive. Her lungs burning and her eyes watering from the gas filling the room, she searched for something to help her.
She spotted a wooden-handled frying pan that Michael must have thrown on the prep table during his temper tantrum. Grabbing it, she held it aloft. “Back off!”
“You’re going to hit me? Why?” His voice took on a high-pitched quality. Younger somehow. “I liked you. You were nice to me. You never called me names. You didn’t make me do things. You were a good person.”
Hannah swallowed hard. He’d switched from present tense to past tense mid-rant. As if she were already dead.
“But I have a destiny. A mission.” His voice hardened, deepened. “I save people.”
“Seriously? You just bashed my sister’s head in and you’re planning to kill me. That’s not saving people!”
Michael’s face contorted with rage. He arced the knife up and came for her.
Hannah didn’t think, just swung the pan hard. It connected with Michael’s damaged hand. He howled in pain. The knife clattered to the floor and slid under one of the prep tables. She thought he might dive for it, instead he charged her again.
He tackled her. The pan skidded across the floor and under one of the metal racks, out of reach. Hannah’s head slammed against the floor hard enough to make her see stars but she refused to die like this. She brought her knee up, driving it between his legs.
Michael emitted a high-pitched scream and rolled off her. She flipped to her belly and started to push to her feet but he grabbed one of her ankles with both hands.
Hannah’s face slapped against the floor before she rolled onto her back. She kicked Michael, pummeling his face, head, hands, shoulders, and any other part of him she could reach. She kicked until long after he’d stopped moving.
In the stillness, she lay listening to her heart thunder in her ears. The air in the room was heavy with the weight of gas. Coughing, she started to crawl on sweaty hands and shaky knees. Her eyes, lungs, and ankle burned, and her whole body ached. But she was freaking alive. Thank you, universe!
She pushed to her feet in front of Niall’s office. Michael groaned and she glanced back. She choked on a scream. He was digging a match out of one of the matchboxes the Boxing Cat kept for lighting candles.
Hannah’s pulse hammered in her throat. She’d never make it to the back door. She ran into the office, slamming the door shut and diving under the sturdy wooden desk. The door blew apart in the explosion. Heat and debris slapped at her back. It sounded like bombs dropping as storage supplies crashed down from the shelves onto the workstation above her. The desk shimmied but didn’t collapse.
In the silence that followed, all Hannah could hear was a grotesque ringing in her ears. Was she dead? Not if the tinny sound in her ears and the pain singing through her body were any indication. Thank you, God! Somehow, she was alive. Aching but definitely breathing and in one piece, amazingly enough.
She started to crawl through the smoky room. She had to get out of the building and find Shelley.
Hannah hadn’t made it far when her shirt snagged on a metal rack. She tugged herself free, then crawled toward what remained of the kitchen.
The back door had blown off its hinges. Water rained down from the sprinklers in what was left of the ceiling. Metal racks, pans and pots, and pieces of ceiling fell like hail in a summer storm. Funny, she would have expected everything to have already been on the ground. It was stupid, but she found herself staring around in morbid fascination. The shelves were twisted and bent. The workstations had taken most of the blast and were little more than shards of shrapnel embedded in what was left of the walls.
Nearby, Michael groaned and the racks shifted. She threw up her hands to shield her face from any more falling objects and had only a nanosecond to realize she’d made a fatal mistake.
Michael lay dying, his face and left arm horribly black and burned. His right arm had been ripped off in the blast. There was an oozing bloody stump where his elbow had been. His clothing had been burned away along with most of the skin on his chest. He was gurgling in agony and touching the same rack she was.
And she’d just formed a psychic link to a madman.
* * *
“YOU BETTER HIDE in there, you freak. If you ever go near another one of my boyfriends, I’ll cut off your dick,” Mona screamed as Michael hid in the bathtub.
He’d scrubbed his naked body until it was raw. He couldn’t get the blood off his skin. His gray angel was dead.
Still, Mona kept screaming, “He was my boyfriend. She killed him because of you!”
The vision swirled from the grungy white-tiled walls to his mother’s pristine little bedroom decorated in forget-me-not wallpaper. His mother’s angry, disgusted face so close to his, it resembled an evil clown with crazy eyes.
“He was mine! Mine! You had no right to take him away from me, Mother!” Mona yelled. Fat tears poured down her ugly face. She clutched at the dead body on the floor. Black blood pooled beneath the body on the once immaculate green carpeting. “It wasn’t his fault. The little freak demanded the fuck. Begged for it. And today wasn’t the first time.”
Their mother let out a howl of fury. With arms like windmills, she beat his back until he couldn’t draw breath without agony. The strikes weren’t as torturous as the vicious words pouring from her mouth, “You’re a good-for-nothing little shit. Just like your useless prick of a father. Nothing but a whore with a dick. That’s all you freaks want to do, fuck anything that moves. Now look at my carpet. It’s ruined and it’s all your fault!”
Michael was spun around. His mother held him painfully by the scruff of the neck. Her fingernails digging into his flesh as she forced him to stare into the vacant eyes of his dead lover.
He wouldn’t weep for his gray angel. Mother would only punish him more. Michael wished he could have gone with him. But not the way he’d died. The sight of the knife sticking out of the angel’s stomach was sickening. He’d suffered for hours before he finally exhaled his last breath.
His mother kept spitting vitriol at him. “You’re so foul, no one could love you. I should have had an abortion the moment I found out about you but then I would have destroyed my real baby too.” She threw him hard against her aging dresser. Michael tripped, his pinky finger catching in a broken drawer. It caught and bent backward.
Blinding pain ripped through him as the bone snapped in two places.
“Quit your squalling!” Mother said, hauling him to his feet. One look at Michael’s broken finger, and she paled. “Now look what you made me do! I killed for you and now you made me break your finger. You piece of shit.
”
Mother wrung her hands together.
“I’m sorry, Mother,” Michael said through tears he couldn’t fight any longer.
“You’re right, you’re sorry. A sorry excuse for a human being!” His mother paced back and forth, hands shaking. She swung around and slapped Michael across the face hard enough to split his lip. “Stop making all that noise! I can’t think.”
Then he begged using the only word that had ever seemed to affect her in the past, “Mercy.”
Michael bit down, blood pooled in his mouth and dribbled down his chin. Finally, the wild animal look in his mother’s eyes faded and she exhaled a long breath. Gently, she tugged Michael to her side. “You liked that boy?”
“He was mine, Mom! Do you hear me? Mine! And the whore stole him from me. Now he’s dead!” Mona yelled, leaping to her feet. She was backhanded as Michael had been and crashed to the floor. Like Michael, his sister had taken a beating when Mother had found him in bed with the gray angel and Mona still crying on the floor. Then Mother had killed his love.
For a moment Michael had thought perhaps she had done it out of a misguided need to protect her children. Until she’d gone berserk and beaten him until he couldn’t see clearly through his swollen eyes.
Mona whimpered as she crawled back to the angel’s body. One day, he’d make that bitch beg for all those times she’d locked him up and tortured him when he’d been too weak to fight back. And he’d make her suffer for taking away his love.
“Come here.” Michael’s mother pulled him close and roughly bound the finger with a piece of torn T-shirt without bothering to straighten the damaged bone. The agony had his stomach twisting with the repressed need to vomit.
“You are never to do that nasty thing again. Not with any boy. Do you hear me? You’ll help me clean up the mess.” Mother gestured to the dead body. “Then we’ll never talk about this again. Don’t look at me like that. I did him a favor. He wasn’t right. I was merciful. I set him free from his torturous life.”
She bent over and kissed Michael between the brows. “Go and get a shovel, Michael.”
Mona still wept in the corner. Maybe their mother should have set his bitch sister free too. Pausing beside the mirrored closet, Michael stared down at her.
“What are you looking at, freak?” Mona wailed and pressed a kiss to the angel’s forehead. Red lipstick stained his skin.
And just like that, Michael knew who he really was.
Oh, he was still Michael to the world, even mostly to himself.
But somewhere inside a small part of his heart, Mercy had just been born.
And she had a mission.
CHAPTER 29
NIALL HELD ON to the chicken bar with one hand. Ryan took the corner to the restaurant so fast, Niall swore two wheels left the ground. The giant barely uttered a word, but he could’ve probably given race car driver Jimmie Johnson a run for his money.
The truck slid into the parking lot of the Cat. His place looked like it had been bombed. Niall didn’t wait for the complete stop but was out and running.
“Hannah!” he called out, racing to what had been the kitchen entrance.
Her scream pierced the parking lot and arrowed straight into his chest.
Ryan the giant grabbed him in a bear hug and pulled him to a stop. “You can’t go in there.”
“Hannah’s in there. Call the paramedics, she’s alive in there right now.” He pushed the giant away. “I’ve been in combat. Survived bombings, you can’t keep me out.”
“Where’s the gas line?” Ryan asked.
“Around the side.”
Ryan nodded, then dialed 911 and ran to shut off the gas.
In seconds, Ryan was back and talking to EMS.
Niall dug his way through what had once been his back door.
The kitchen was in shambles. Black smoke poured out and floated to the sky. Somewhere nearby, sirens erupted. He had to hurry. Digging away pieces of building, soot, and debris, he called out to Hannah. She didn’t answer.
“Do you hear anything?” Ryan asked.
“No, but Hannah’s in there somewhere.” And she’d better fucking be alive. There was no or else. No alternative. She had to be alive or he might as well have died with her.
“Fuck me,” Ryan said in what had to be the most emotional response the giant had ever uttered.
Niall turned to see what had elicited such a reaction. Shelley, her skirt torn, and holding her arm at an odd angle, stumbled into view.
“Where’s Hannah?” she asked, sliding to the ground.
As if to answer the universal question, Hannah emitted a long, piercing scream.
Niall dug faster. Ryan dropped to his knees and joined in. When they’d dug out a hole barely big enough to squeeze through, Niall stuck his head in.
Thick smoke clouded the room. Metal racks had twisted and bent at odd angles, virtually blocking entry to the kitchen.
Hannah’s pink braid stuck out from the office door. She lay on her back. “Hannah!” Niall called out, but if she heard him, she didn’t respond.
“Dig faster!” Niall said, shoving his shoulders into the tunnel they’d created. “I can see her.”
He pulled out of the hole. Together with Ryan and Shelley, who only used one arm, they dug until the space was wide enough for him to squeeze through.
Niall wriggled into the hole, keeping his eyes on Hannah. “Fuck! She’s going into a seizure. Help me get this shit out of the way!”
Niall spotted an opening in the twisted metal barely big enough to squeeze into, but it would get him straight to Hannah.
“Ryan, can you hold this up?” Niall pointed to the snaking wire rack.
Around him, metal shifted over, then up, giving him room to army crawl toward her. Ash and debris floated around him like sooty snowflakes, but he kept going.
At the edges of his mind, Afghanistan resurfaced. Other screams. Other walls caving in. Others dying around him.
Not this fucking time. Hannah was right in front of him. Right there. He’d be goddamned fucked if he let her die now.
The opening swam in his vision. His throat tightened. His heart pounded painfully against his ribs, but he kept going. Shards of broken metal snagged his clothes, scraped his shoulders, his skin. The metal enclosure seemed to grow tighter and still he kept going deeper into the tunnel toward her. With each inch gained, more of Hannah’s face came into view. She was awake. Her eyes were wide, vacant. Her mouth open in a silent cry. Tears tracked down the sides of her face, saturating her hair.
“Hannah, I’m coming,” he said, gaining another two inches. “Hold on, love. Just hold on. Do you hear me?”
The metal overhead shook and screeched as if about to tumble. Niall kept his gaze focused on Hannah and held his breath.
“Got it. Keep going,” Ryan called from somewhere above.
Niall wriggled a hand forward and touched Hannah’s cold, clammy hand. “I’m here, love. Can you hear me?”
She didn’t answer. Her body vibrated as if she were being shocked.
The metal. Ryan was touching it. God, it had to be sending her into sensory overload.
“Ryan, prop up the shelf with your shoulder but don’t let your skin touch it. You’re connected to her. Break the connection.” Niall searched for injury. Her ankle bled freely. A few inches above that a thin spike speared her pant leg. He wanted to yank it but was afraid of causing more damage.
“I’m out,” Ryan called back.
Behind him sirens roared, signaling the arrival of EMS.
Hannah still shook and wept, her eyes still vacant.
“Do you see Michael?” Niall swiveled his head, but only saw crisscrossing metal. “Is he touching the racks?”
“I don’t know. I can’t search for him without letting go here,” Ryan answered.
&
nbsp; Dev’s voice boomed. “Status.”
An explosion of voices and sirens filled the air, drowning out Ryan and Dev’s conversation. Niall was alone with Hannah beneath the twisted metal. Both of them were trapped, but she was lost. Lost in visions and he couldn’t help her.
Or could he?
“Hang on, Hannah, I’m coming for you.” Niall clutched her hand in one of his, then reached for the metal bar piercing her leg. “God, let this work. Hear me, my fairy queen. Hear me. I love you.”
* * *
MERCY’S SCREAMS WERE relentless. Her whole life alone. Locked in one closet or another. Forced to be nothing. Forced to live in a world that was too cruel to notice the weak. She’d shown them all. Mom, Mona, everyone. It had taken years, but she’d shown them she wasn’t worthless. She was Mercy.
“Hannah! Hear me, my fairy queen!”
Mercy spun around in the mist that clung to her like a silken dress.
Niall lay on the ground, pinned beneath Iggy and Danny. Their broken bodies bloodied and Iggy’s lips moving.
The world tilted. She wasn’t Mercy. She was looking at Mercy.
She was Niall.
But that didn’t make sense. Niall was still talking to her. How could she be Niall?
“Hannah! You’ve got to come back. Fight the vision, dammit! Where’s my stubborn fairy queen right now?” Niall said.
He lay on the floor of the destroyed kitchen. Twisted racks coiled with black soot bent around him. Ash and pieces of ceiling tiles falling.
The image changed and he was back under the dead bodies again. Blood fell on his face like teardrops.
Back in the cage that had once been a kitchen. Sirens screaming.
“Goddamnit, woman! Fight the vision. Take mine instead. See me loving you. See us in the Cat. See me marrying you. See me looking at you. Fight the vision. You’re Hannah Halloran. Say it! Say it, damn you.”
Mercy screamed and the faces of every man she’d killed filled her mind. Mother killing the gray angel. Then a parade of men Mother had killed starting with Father.
