Chapter 14 #2
“Safe passage, and knowing you did the right thing,” I offer.
“Is that a guarantee?” Walker asks. “Because your resident ‘roid-head seems to have other ideas.”
“Angel?” I ask.
“You get us out, you’re free to go,” Angel snaps. “I think we established that already.”
“Did we?” Walker asks, tapping his chin and squinting up through the branches. “I can’t recall. Was that before or after you tried to kill me?”
“After,” Angel grits out.
“Okay,” Walker says. “I’ll take you somewhere safe for the night.”
“Thank you,” Mercy says, visibly relaxing.
“After you apologize for being such a dick,” he says to Angel, never taking his eyes from the bigger man. “Or what was it you said? Beg? Grovel?”
“I’d sooner die,” Angel snaps.
“No sweat off my back,” Walker says, pushing away from the tree. “I’ll go sleep in a warm bed back there and take the boat back in the morning. Way more comfortable than wandering around in the woods all night in the cold.”
“Wait,” I say, holding up a hand.
“Let him go,” Angel says. “We have Nate’s number. He can guide us.”
“Except we don’t have service,” I remind him.
“I’m not groveling to a fucking Disciple,” Angel swears. “I’ll take my chances.”
“Now or never,” Walker offers, backing away with his arms spread. “Come on, tough guy. Show me what you got besides muscles.”
“I have a gun,” Angel says, drawing his piece. “Stay, or I shoot.”
“Aww, but your girl might want to see you grovel,” Walker says. “Don’t you want to show her how well you can apologize when you’re wrong? Not to mention you’ll be doing it to save her, not just cover your own ass.”
“I’m assuming you did that to his face?” Mercy asks. “What for?”
“Because he was pissed that my estranged uncle took you,” Walker says. “He took it out on little old me, even though I haven’t talked to the guy in a decade. He knew it too. Just wanted someone to punch.”
“Hm,” Mercy says. “Sounds like an apology might be in order.”
“Are you fucking serious?” Angel asks.
Mercy gives a devilish little smile. “I mean, if he’s saving our lives… Seems like an apology is the least he could ask for.”
“You’re getting off on this,” Angel says, sounding dismayed.
Mercy shrugs. “You’ve done some pretty mean things to me too. And somehow, you always get off without so much as a simple, ‘I’m sorry.’ Maybe it’s time.”
“I already apologized to him,” Angel grits out. “And I’m sorry I didn’t tell you there were cameras on us the first time I fucked you.”
“Whoa,” Walker says. “And you’re with him anyway, even though he never even apologized? Damn. I thought I got away with a lot.”
“You sure get away with running your mouth,” Saint mutters.
“I come from a long line of attorneys,” Walker says, flashing a grin, his teeth ghostly in the darkness. “It runs in the family.”
“Thank you,” Mercy says to Angel. She rests a hand on his arm. “Now put up your gun and apologize to our guide for being so rude.”
Angel tucks his pistol in at the small of his back. “There. Happy now?”
“Please?” Mercy asks, standing on tiptoes to skim her lips against his throat. “For me?”
“Sorry,” he grunts.
I watch in amazement. I’m not the only person who holds power over these brutal boys. I’m not even the one who holds most power.
Walker laughs. “Good enough. That wasn’t so hard, was it? Now let’s go.”
He turns and lopes off through the woods.
The others look to me, and I make a split second decision and follow.
I don’t know anything about the island except that it has a lighthouse, the asylum, and a small boat dock.
We’re now making our way in the opposite direction from that, but since Walker said they’d be watching the dock, and no one else knows their way around, it seems the best course of action.
I’m beginning to rethink my assessment of him by the time we reach the far side of the island. A decrepit mansion sits off to the left, while to the right, the island curves around toward the open sea. Directly in front of us, a steep incline leads down to the rocky shoreline.
“There’s a place we can hang out while the tide is low,” Walker says, leading us toward the edge.
We scramble down the slope and follow him along the beach.
Above the sound of the surf, we can hear water churning and sloshing, and when we come around a turn, the hideout comes into view—a small inlet carved into the rock face by the waves over millennia, forming an overhang.
The sand inside is wet, and I can’t help but think it looks like a good place to get trapped.
“Are you sure this is safe?” I ask.
“Oh, no, it’s not safe at all,” Walker says. “That’s why it’s the last place they’ll look. Stay a minute too long, and the tide will close this up and push you back every time you try to swim out. At least a couple people have died here, or so the legends go.”
“And you know about it, how?” Mercy asks, glancing around at the shadowy enclosure.
“Used to come looking for bones here as a kid,” Walker says. “It was forbidden by our parents, of course, which made it all the more alluring.”
His words draw my eyes to Mercy. Truer ones have never been spoken. She’s the forbidden fruit, the greatest temptation I’ve ever known. She’s everything I want, and the one thing I can’t have—a student.
Knowing she’d let me have her only makes it worse, makes the yearning painful in its exquisite impossibility.
As she sits down on the sand, making herself comfortable after the long walk, I wonder how I’m going to survive the next three years of seeing her at Thorncrown, possibly having her in my classes, in my confessional.
I tell myself it will go away over time, that the temptation will fade, but it does nothing to dispel my desire.
Neither does telling myself that I’m far too old for her, or that it would be too imbalanced, unethical, and uncomfortable for the other men she’s with.
They take their places around her, and I step away, sinking onto a slick stone ledge.
Moonlight shimmers over the churning water sloshing against the rocky shore, and further out, in a line reflected across the surface as the crescent descends toward the mainland in the distance.
The long hike kept us warm, but now that we’re still, the damp chill in the air sinks into my bones.
I shiver, glancing at the group that I will never belong to.
Angel pulls Mercy into his side, and Saint takes his place on her other side.
Heath sits beside Saint, leaning on his shoulder, eyes closed in exhaustion or contentment or a mixture of the two.
Walker stands at the water’s edge, watching the tide recede as the night stretches, that long, solemn hour before dawn.
After a time, he turns back, glancing from the group at the center of the cave, to me at one edge, to the empty side across from me.
He takes a step toward me, giving me the opportunity to decline the company.
When I give the slightest nod, he comes to join me on the lip of stone jutting out from the wall.
“What’s on your mind, Daddy Dante?”
“You’ll make a good priest,” I tell him. “I wasn’t sure, when you asked about joining the ministry. But you read people well, and you take everything in stride.”
“Thanks, man,” he says. “But I’m not sure if that’s what I want to do anymore.”
“If you’re uncertain, it’s not your calling.”
“Yeah, that’s kinda why I left seminary school,” he says. “I’m not sure I belong there. I’m not sure I belong anywhere.”
“You seem to have belonged here at one time.”
“Yeah, we came here when I was a kid,” he says. “But my mom had a falling out with the family when she found out some of the shady things they were doing. Not like what y’all think they’re doing, but like, adoption-for-profit type thing. It didn’t sit right with her.”
“Or you, I’m guessing,” I say. “You’re here helping us, after all.”
“How’d you know this is what you wanted to do?” he asks. “That the priesthood was where you belonged?”
“I’m not sure I did,” I admit. “It was a family thing for me. My father was a priest.”
“He must have been a good one, if you wanted to do the same thing. I definitely don’t want to follow in my dad’s footsteps.”
“No, he wasn’t a good one,” I say, taking off my glasses to wipe the lenses on the hem of my shirt. “So, in that way, I guess I did follow in his footsteps.”
“Ah, come on, you’re not so bad,” he says. “Just because you want to bang Mercy? That means you’re a man, not that you’re a bad priest.”
“Why would you think that?” I ask, carefully replacing my glasses.
“Oh, you know, just because you were watching the other guys nail her like Pontius Pilate nailed Jesus to the cross,” he says, cracking a smile.
“You’re right,” I say, not correcting his error. “Desire makes me human. It’s acting on those desires that makes me a bad priest. Maybe it’s not my calling either.”
“Damn,” he says. “I guess we’re both having a crisis of faith.”
“Yes,” I say. “I think I’ve been having one most of my life.
Watching the entire community celebrate and revere my father, the man who wore the face of my father in public, and knowing the man behind the face in private was an entirely different person, could make even the most devout Catholic question the church. ”
“That’s rough,” he says. “So… A good priest and a bad father?”
“Something like that,” I say.
“Was your mom around at least?”
I nod. “She wasn’t spared his rage either. She took the brunt of it. And the kicker is, the one time I was able to defend her, the one time I stood up to him that made a difference, after watching him go after her for years and being too scared or too weak to protect her…”
I break off, shaking my head. That was the last time he ever laid a finger on her. I can still feel it. The thud of the car, the body on the hood… I can still feel it, and I’m still not sorry. That’s what makes me a bad priest, a bad man.
Thou shalt not kill.
“What?” Walker presses. “You protected her, and he beat you instead?”
“Oh, he did that plenty,” I said. “But the one time I put a stop to it, she hated me for it. She didn’t want protecting. She took his side.”
“Maybe she thought he’d take it out on you, that you’d make it worse for yourself.”
“Maybe.” I shake my head. “No. It wasn’t that.
It’s like she saw what the community saw, even though she knew better.
She still believed he was that man because she wanted to believe it.
And I couldn’t. I couldn’t believe something I knew to be untrue.
There are things in the church like that.
But a priest doesn’t get to make that judgment. ”
“And yet, you do.”
“And yet, I do.”
We sit in silence for a long while, as the moon disappears, and the sky begins to lighten to the darkest midnight blue, and the stars fade.
“Should we get going?” Walker asks, standing and brushing off the seat of his pants. “Looks like the tide’s coming in, and we don’t want to be here for that.”
“Good idea,” I say, standing too. “We can make it to the dock and keep watch to make sure no guards are looking for us there before we board a boat.”
Mercy twists around from where she’s sitting huddled together with her boys. “I was thinking about that,” she says. “I can’t do it.”
“What can’t you do, lamb?” I ask, watching her in the scant light, her hair tumbling around her shoulders, eyes luminous, as ethereal and untouchable as a goddess.
“I can’t leave the island with you,” she says. “I’m going back.”