Angelo kept glancing back at her as he walked around the church gathering his camera equipment and cleaning up the blood. Mouse never moved. When the church was finally tidy and ready for tomorrow’s tourists, he carried her out to the car. As he navigated traffic the few blocks to his flat, he stole glances at her; she looked even paler with the oncoming car lights flashing across her face, the circles under her eyes nearly bruises. But it was her stillness that bothered him most.
He balanced her weight against him as he wrestled to unlock his apartment door and then laid her on the couch. She stared at the window while he iced her ankle and wrapped her wrist. She didn’t even move to adjust her foot on the cushion or to tug at where her shirt had bunched when he laid her down. Angelo hoped tomorrow would be better.
But tomorrow was not better.
He woke to find her rocking on her side in the same near-fetal position. She was moaning.
“Mouse?” He intentionally used her name, hoping it might evoke a response from her. Her eyes jerked in his direction, and he sighed with relief. He also realized that, despite the oddness of her name, it fit her somehow. “Where does it hurt?”
“Just leave me alone,” she hissed.
He watched her sleep most of the day with a growing sense that he was in over his head. Last night’s impulse belonged in an old church with candlelight, but it felt foolish now. Her body wasn’t the only thing messed up. It was clear what she was trying to do in the church. What if she tried again? What if he found her in the bathroom, wrists slit and her life running down the drain? Despite what she said, Angelo knew something had happened to her. He should call the police. They would be able to find her family or friends. She had to belong to someone somewhere.
He grabbed her canvas bag on the floor beside the couch and shoved his hand inside to feel for a wallet or passport.
“Ah!” He snatched his hand back, a drop of blood beading in the center of his palm. As he put it to his mouth to ease the sting, he cautiously tugged at the opening of the bag to see what had cut him, imagining scissors or a knife.
A small statue of an angel lay nestled among the clothes at the bottom of the bag. He had jabbed his hand against the sharp point of its broken wing. He could see the tiny smear of his blood on the white clay.
The eeriness of last night erupted again in the middle of his apartment under the glare of the midday sun where it didn’t belong. Angelo felt violated and toyed with—but by what he didn’t know. He pulled the figure from the bag, rubbed his thumb along the rough clay and then the smooth, tarnished silver coin embedded in the heart of the angel’s chest. It looked ancient, timeless.
He looked at Mouse again, still asleep on the couch, and he slid the angel back in the bag and waited.
Mouse woke at the sound of the phone but held herself very still, not sure where she was until the pain in her shoulder and ankle summoned images of the crypt and Angelo. Sleep had cleared her head and restored at least a basic interest in her own well-being, fueling a new anxiety as she realized she was in a strange man’s apartment. Without moving, not wanting to let him know she was awake, she looked around his flat trying to get some clue about who he was. It was oddly sparse—only a few pieces of simple furniture—but there were lots of books, mostly about art and theology.
“Yes, Father. I know how important this is, you don’t have to keep—” Mouse could hear the frustration in his voice. “I have every intention of—”
She started counting his footfalls as he paced the hall and then shook herself against the habit. No amount of regimen or routine would help her now.
“As I said, she was hurt, Father. Yes, a girl . . . a woman.”
Mouse tensed as she waited to hear Angelo describe the girl he found at the church, call her by her name and make some joke about it.
“No one you know. Just a . . . a friend.”
Mouse sat up suddenly.
She could almost always predict what a person would say or do. She’d had plenty of opportunity to study human nature, and most people followed simple rules. Apparently Angelo didn’t. But Mouse didn’t have time to work out the puzzle of Angelo. It was too dangerous for him and for her.
“Well what was I supposed to do? Leave her there?” He sighed. “I thought about that but she didn’t want to go. She just needed someplace safe,” Angelo said.
Mouse hurt everywhere, but she made herself slide to the edge of the couch.
“Hey, you don’t want to do that.” He was standing at the doorway to the hall looking at her. “Father, I have to go now. I’ll call you later.”
Mouse settled back but kept her feet on the floor despite the throbbing in her ankle. She needed to get her strength back, get herself mobile so she could leave, and it would be easier if he weren’t there. “If your dad needs you, go. Seriously, I’m fine.”
Angelo looked at her, confused.
“On the phone? Your dad?”
“Ah, no. He isn’t my father; he’s a Father Father. You know, Catholic Church kind of Father?”
“Yeah, I know that kind of Father,” she mumbled. She inched to the edge of the couch again. “Look, I should get out of here,” she said abruptly. “Thanks for everything.”
Angelo knelt on the floor in front of her and put his hands on hers, gently holding her to the couch. “You’re not going anywhere.”
His touch triggered her panic again, the nerves in her skin firing hot waves up her arms. “Some people might call that kidnapping, you know. Holding someone against her will.” Something dark flashed in her eyes, and Angelo leaned back.
Mouse studied his face but she couldn’t read him, and despite her fear, she found that exciting.
“You haven’t eaten in at least twenty-four hours. More than that, I’m guessing. You’re dehydrated, weak, and so sore that breathing makes you wince. You need to rest, Mouse.”
“Why do you care?” she asked. “No one else would. You don’t know anything about me. I could be a con artist or a prostitute or . . . or a murderer.” Mouse’s jaw clenched on the last one.
“I’m sure you left a string of victims in your wake before you ran to the church.” He smiled.
“Are you really that damn naïve? You should let me go,” she said coldly.
“I’ll take you to hospital, but—”
“Let me call someone. A friend or—”
“I don’t have friends. I can take care of myself.”
“Under normal circumstances, I can see that. But now?” He shrugged. “You’re pretty messed up. What are you into, Mouse?”
Every time he said her name, something inside her uncoiled a little, just enough for her to want more.
Mouse put her head in her hands and stared at the floor. “Why didn’t you tell the Father about me?”
“I did.”
“Not my name. Not . . . how you found me.”
“I don’t know. I guess I thought . . . ,” he stammered. “I figured that was between you and me.”
Mouse jerked back from the closeness of his voice. “What do you want from me?”
But he couldn’t explain what made him so compelled to help her. Not yet. She would think he was crazy. “Look, Mouse. Just eat something. Rest some more.”
Mouse wanted to push him away, but she couldn’t find the strength. And last night, when she had told him her real name, when he had seen her at her worst, he had just accepted it. He hadn’t asked her questions or forced her to go to the hospital. He had done what she asked, what she needed and nothing more. Maybe she could stay long enough to catch her breath, to get her legs under her before she ran again.
“I stink,” she said.
“I’m sorry?” he asked, confused.
“I stink. I need a shower. Would you hand me my bag?”
Mouse studied the canvas bag as she opened it, and Angelo noticed.
“I started to go through it, but I didn’t.”
She looked up at him, angry and skeptical. “Why not?”
“I decided to trust you.”
Again he surprised her, and it made her furious—both his trust and the thrill she felt at not knowing what he might do or say. She knew if she gave him even a sliver of the truth she could shatter his childish trust and scare him into letting her go. Or she could make him let her go. Command him. It’s what her father would have done.
Mouse looked at Angelo, her eyes narrowed.
“What?”
“I wouldn’t if I were you,” she said.
“Wouldn’t what?”
“Trust me.”
“Why not?”
Her only response was a shrug of her shoulders and a wince of pain.
“Let me take those, and then I’ll come get you.” He grabbed the bundle of things she’d pulled from her pack. When he came back, he found her sitting on the floor a few feet from the couch and rubbing her ankle, which was healing abnormally fast like her body always did, but her ankle was still very much broken.
“Tried it on your own?”
She nodded.
“Are you stupid or just stubborn?”
Seething at her weakness and his arrogance, Mouse let him slide his arm around her waist. She didn’t breathe. He lifted her easily and sat her on the toilet beside the shower stall.
“You think you’ll be able to manage?”
“Yeah.” Mouse avoided his face. “Thanks.”
“Call when you’re ready.”
She supported her weight on the pedestal sink in front of the mirror as she stood. The reflection should have been a shock, but she was already reeling—hurt with no place to go and relying on the unexplainable kindness of some stranger. All of it was so far from any sense of what Mouse had considered normal for the past seven hundred years that she couldn’t get her footing.
She blew out a sigh. She couldn’t afford to be unsure or unstable. The power had been oddly quiet despite her emotional chaos, but she couldn’t run the risk of it slithering to life again—not while she was here with Angelo. She needed to rebuild her defenses and establish that emotionless, calculated routine, but it was so hard after what she’d done in Nashville. She was like so many addicts she’d seen over the years—she’d been seven hundred years sober, keeping her oath not to kill, but now that she’d fallen off the wagon, she had to start all over again. It would be harder this time because she knew she could fail.
Trying to swallow the aching sadness that seemed ready to choke her, she counted her hobbled steps to the shower, counted her heartbeats while the water warmed, and thought about how small her life must become once more. Her head leaning into the running water, Mouse worked to find words to fill her mind, to build her mental firewall again, but it all slipped away like the water sliding down her face. She spit the bitter taste of soap from her mouth as the water plastered her hair to her blackened shoulder.
Today was day one. Again. She took a breath. “I did not—” But the words opened the door for the sorrow to flood in, choking her. She closed her eyes and tried again. “I didn’t kill . . . Oh, God, I can’t do it anymore,” she whispered in supplication and then sank to the shower floor, sobbing.
“Mouse? Everything all right in there?” Angelo had cracked the door open. “Mouse?” He saw her huddled silhouette through the shower door and bolted across the room, visions of razorblades and bloody baths driving his panic. He pulled open the door. She shuddered as the cool air from the hall came into the shower with him. He turned the water off and wrapped her in a towel.
He knelt beside her.
“I can’t,” she whispered.
“Can’t what?”
“It doesn’t matter.” Her voice cracked. “I don’t know what to do.”
“It’ll get better.”
“You don’t know what you’re saying, Angelo.”
As she said his name for the first time, she turned to him, her green eyes wide and so dark they were almost black. He felt something inside him shift, like the switch at a railroad turnout—he had been moving along one line and now he had no idea where he was headed.
“I’m not what you think I am.” Her words came in rushes of breath.
Angelo got very still and whispered, “What are you then?”
Mouse lowered her head. She couldn’t answer him. She’d worn a costume for so long, pretended to be so many other people, that she didn’t know who she was anymore.
“Lost.” Her voice was hollow again.
“Well, luckily for you, I’m trained at finding lost sheep.”
“What?” she murmured, only half listening; she hadn’t heard the disappointment in his voice.
“I’m a Father—well, almost.”
“What?” she asked, now staring at him incredulously.
“You know, a Father Father. Catholic Church kind of Father.”