Price of Angels (Dartmoor Book 2)

by Lauren Gilley

  “No!” she screamed. “Let me go, let me go!” Tears blurred her vision. She kicked wildly, clipping at Jacob’s shins, and he cursed her.

  “Shut up, little bitch.” He threw her down into the snow.

  She rolled over –

  But he was on her already, as if he had more than two hands, trapping her wrists easily and forcing them down to the ground. His face was a twisted mask of rage. Her uncle, who’d raped her at the kitchen sink. The first time a man had come inside her body. Her blood relative.

  “Get off,” she shrieked, bucking beneath him, struggling to get her boots in his ribs. She could already feel herself tiring, the awful pull of frightened exhaustion.

  Abraham was screaming as the dog savaged him.

  Tears spilled down her cheeks. She drew in huge lungfuls of air, fighting for all she was worth, not knowing whether he meant to rape her or kill her, or bind her up with rope.

  “No!”

  Jacob put her hands together over her head, pinning them together in one hand. Blood seeped all down the outside of his sleeve as he reached into his jacket pocket. The knife glimmered dully, reflecting the silver sky along its wicked length as he withdrew it.

  He was going to slice her up. The blood would stain the snow.

  Holly gathered herself for one final resistance, and then she heard it: the eerie, yodeling howl of a wolf.

  Jacob lifted his head, looking down the trail.

  Cassius let out one gruff bark.

  No, not a wolf. A Bluetick hound.

  Help. Help was coming! Someone had found them!

  Holly rolled her head, the snow bleeding its moisture through her hair, freezing her scalp. Racing toward them were two hounds, baying for all they were worth, crying again and again. And behind them…

  “Michael!” she screamed when she saw him. “Michael!”

  And then the pain.

  Cold, so very cold, like ice spearing through her abdomen. Her breath caught, and her heart stuttered, as the awful sharp thrust of cold bit into her belly.

  And then the great spill of warmth, heat rushing inside and outside of her, pouring down her belly beneath her clothes, flooding her insides with hot liquid.

  The blood.

  He’d stabbed her.

  “Michael,” she said, as his face became clear. He was running toward them, his knife in his hand.

  “I love you,” she whispered. Oh, love, you almost made it in time. Almost.

  It was his mother’s coat. The long, plaid wool number with the nipped-in waist and the big pleats in back. His mother had always looked like a movie star in that coat. And it was his mother’s dark hair spilling across the snow. And it was Holly’s pale, green-eyed face, her lips forming his name.

  He saw the knife go in, through the layers of coat and clothes, saw the way her face blanked as the pain registered.

  The man on top of her stood, pulling the knife from her, its tip dark and dripping with her blood.

  Drip-drip-drip onto the snow.

  Michael came to a staggering halt. He’d reached them. And she was already dead.

  The hounds circled, baying in a frenzy, tails beating in the air.

  Cassius lifted his bloody muzzle in greeting. Abraham Jessup clutched at his ruined throat, his savaged belly, his clothes shredded.

  “Sammie, Bear,” Michael said, snapping his fingers, and the hounds came, sitting down beside him. Their job was done and they knew it. They were bay dogs.

  Cass was the catch dog.

  Michael aimed the tip of his own knife at Jacob Jessup, at the man’s sweaty red face. “I’m going to gut you.”

  Jessup was scared. Michael could smell the stink of fear on him. But he said, “Why? She isn’t gonna make it.”

  “Because it’ll be fun.”

  Abraham was groaning, trying to push up on his hands.

  “Cass.” The Dane came to him, head tilted at an alert angle, jaws steaming with wet blood. Michael pointed to Jacob. “Hold,” he commanded.

  Jacob tried to run, but Cass locked onto his arm, dragged him back. When Jacob tried to stab at him, Cass dodged, released and changed his grip, clamping his teeth onto the hand that held the knife. Jacob screamed and the knife fell into the snow. Blood followed, a trickling stream, steaming when it hit the snow, as Cass’s fangs punctured his flesh.

  Michael was prepared for a fight. He was prepared for the wild punch thrown from Jacob’s free hand, and he caught the man’s fist, crushed it tight in his fingers. He was prepared also for the startled, terrified rush of understanding in Jessup’s eyes. The look of a man who knows he’s about to die.

  Michael drove his knife into Jacob’s belly, in to the hilt.

  Gasp. Hiss of breath.

  Then he withdrew it, and ran it through the man’s windpipe.

  “Cass, release,” he said, and Jacob fell backward, twitching like a landed fish after he hit the snow.

  Abraham whimpered when the huge dog’s jaws closed on his shoulder. Michael knelt beside him, leaned in so he could smell the fear-sweat, so he could whisper in his ear.

  “St. Michael the archangel, defend us in battle. Be our protection against the malice and snares of the devil.”

  He drove the knife down through the back of Abraham’s neck.

  A fountain of blood sprayed down on the snow.

  A gurgling, choking sound.

  Then he collapsed.

  Michael stood. Steam rose from the blood on the knife, the blood on the snow, the sweat evaporating off the bodies as they cooled.

  Holly.

  Michael reached her in four long strides, struggling through the snow. He dropped to his knees beside her, gathered her up against his legs.

  “Holly. Holly!”

  Her eyes were closed, her lips parted, her skin waxed.

  He touched the rend in her coat, felt the sticky drying blood. He lowered his ear to her mouth, felt only the faintest rustle of breath.

  “Holly.” He cradled her, lifted her up so he held her in his lap like a sleeping child. “Holly. Holly.”

  She was dying.

  “Wynn!” Michael called, voice echoing through the trees, coming back to him in strange ripples. “Wynn! Where are you!”

  The dogs crowded around him, nosing at his shoulders, whining.

  “Wynn!”

  He couldn’t wait. There wasn’t time.

  She was dying.

  He staggered to his feet, holding her still. He shifted her, so her limp head rested against his shoulder. “Holly,” he said one more time, and then he ran.

  Twenty-Five

  “Do you miss drinking?” Maggie asked, and Ava snorted.

  “What kind of question is that?”

  “A legitimate one, I’m thinking, considering how much damn drama we’ve had around here,” her mom countered.

  They were at the clubhouse bar, having water with lemon squeezed into it. The boys were attending to things at the various Dartmoor shops, back from their business run. Mercy had said he’d escort her home before he settled in for work, and though she’d rolled her eyes, she’d waited on him. Here she sat.

  “Not really,” she answered, running a fingertip through the condensation on her glass. “I mean, I do in a general sense. Sometimes I think ‘I’m gonna have a glass of wine,’ and then remember that I can’t. But mostly I’m too worried to worry about the drinking, you know?”

  Maggie nodded. “I was a wreck when I was carrying you.”

  “You were?”

  “Oh, yeah. Once, I had Braxton Hicks while your dad was on a run. It scared me, and it scared Aidan worse. He was crying.”

  Ava smiled at the idea of her swaggering big brother in tears.

  “He put his hands on my stomach,” Maggie said, doing so herself, “and said, ‘Is the baby hurting you?’ It was precious.”

  Ava snorted. “I’m so using that against him at some point.”

  “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.

  Ava didn’t seem to mind. She leaned back against the wall, staring at the acoustic ceiling tiles, the silver sprinkler heads.

  After a moment, she said, “When Mercy was in the hospital in New Orleans, I wanted to be left alone. All I wanted to do was sit. I wanted the doctors to stop asking how I felt; I wanted Aidan to stop insisting that I eat something. All I wanted was for someone to bring me news of Mercy.”

  From the corner of his eye, he saw her head roll toward him. “But it was a good thing I didn’t get my way. A person can lose her humanity, waiting like this. So I know you probably want me to leave, but I’m going to sit right here and wait, until she’s out of surgery.”

  He nodded.

  Why else had he called Mercy, as he hovered over Holly’s lifeless body and waited for the paramedics, if not for this kind of support? It had been for Uncle Wynn, he’d reasoned. Someone had to go out in the woods and find Uncle Wynn. Someone had to round up the dogs and put them in their pens. Someone had to do something about the bodies cooling in the snow. And someone was doing all those things – the rest of his brothers.

  But Mercy and Ava had come to the hospital, and the sight of them walking down the hall toward him an hour before had taken his legs right out from under him, and he’d been sitting in this chair ever since.

  Mercy came around the corner now; his stride had been a touch uneven, since his accident last fall, and his pattern of footfalls was distinctive. He was sliding his cellphone into his cut pocket.

  “No word?” he asked, and Ava shook her head.

  He sat down on the other side of his wife, stretching his bad leg before him. “She’ll be alright,” he said. “I’ve seen guys bounce back from a lot worse.”

  They’d also all seen Andre die of a belly wound just a few months ago.

  Michael lifted the cup to his lips, breathed in the sharp smell of the coffee, let its warmth fan across his face.

  Holly was probably cold, he thought. Blood loss made you cold, and she was never dressed warmly enough anyway. This hospital was like a meat locker. And she was naked under harsh lights on an operating table right now; had to be freezing.

  He wanted to pull her beneath all the layers of quilts on her bed and tuck her against his chest, slide one of his legs between hers. He wanted to feel her shivering subside, the goosebumps soothing, as their body heat warmed the little cocoon of blankets.

  He wanted to take her soft face in his hands and tell her how sorry he was that he’d come too late.

  He wanted to lay the heads of her tormenters at her feet.

  He wanted to see her smile, listen to her breathe, and know that she was alive.

  Oh, God…

  The double doors across from them swung open and a doctor emerged, white coat open and billowing over mint scrubs, hair confined by a scrub cap, paper mask dangling around her neck.

  “Mrs. Lécuyer?” she said, eyes going to Ava. “Your sister’s out of surgery.” That was the story they’d told the staff, so one of them would be allowed to see her in the ICU afterward. Ava had thought it up, while Michael gaped like a fish at the nurse and couldn’t form words.

  Ava had said, “Excuse me, I’m her sister, can you tell me what’s going on?”

  “How is she?” Ava asked now, straightening in her chair.

  Michael tensed, his stomach knotting.

  “She’s stable,” the doctor said. “No major organs were hit…”

  It all turned to white noise, after that. Michael sagged back against the wall, the breath going out of his lungs. Exhaustion slammed into him. The struggle, the stabbing, the miles he’d run, alone, and then again with Holly in his arms – he wanted to sleep for a year. Crawl with her under the covers and never come back out.

  He felt a touch at his wrist, Ava’s cool fingers squeezing him. “My sister’s husband,” she was saying.

  When Michael looked at her, she gave him a little nod.

  “Oh, okay,” the doctor said. “You can see
her now if you’d like,” she told him. “Follow me.”

  He looked back once, as he slipped through the doors, at the picture of Mercy and Ava together in the hard plastic chairs. Mercy slid an arm across Ava’s shoulders and she leaned into his side, deflating, a hand rising to rest on his chest.

  The ferocious thirty-five-year-old Cajun extractor, and his twenty-two-year-old wife.

  He saw them differently now, through the lens of Holly leaning into him and loving him. He saw the brilliant halo around them for what it was: union. That perfect blending of acceptance, sympathy, empathy, understanding and physical need that coalesced into glue, until there was only the union between them, and both were powerless to describe it.

  He turned away and followed the doctor.

  Leaning heavily on his crutches, the rubber tips thump-thumping across the tile, Wynn made his way around the curtain to the ICU bed where Holly lay hooked to every sort of machine imaginable, clear tubes snaking from the tender white insides of her arms to half a dozen IV bags on silver poles. She was such a small thing, and the bed swallowed her, the gown and pillows and blankets frothed around her, her hair fanning across the pillow, so she looked like a mermaid in the surf.

  Michael had a chair beside her, his attention riveted to her face. She slept, motionless as death, and yet he couldn’t have looked more fascinated, his brow crinkled, as if he concentrated fiercely.

  He glanced up at the sound of Wynn’s entry, and Wynn didn’t miss the way his hand fluttered down toward his calf a moment, a knee-jerk reach for the knife in his boot. He settled, though, when he saw who it was. He started to stand.

  “Uncle Wynn–” An urgent, guilt-ridden whisper.

  “Sit.” Wynn waved him back now. “I’m fine. Don’t you worry about me, just a little broken leg. How’s our girl?”

  Michael sighed, sagging back into his chair. His gaze returned to Holly; his throat worked as he swallowed. “The doc said she’d sleep a while yet. Said surgery went well.”

  “She’ll be alright then?”

  Michael nodded.

  “Thank God.” He released a sigh of his own.