Wild Angel

by Shari Copell

  Tage rose to his feet. “You don’t want that on your conscience, Chels. Let the legal system take care of him. I’m going outside to call an ambulance. Here.” He removed his sweatshirt and threw it at her. “Cover Nicks up with this. She’s probably froze.”

  She caught the sweatshirt and draped it gently over Nicks’s back, trying to keep it out of the blood drying there.

  “Thanks, Mom. I am cold.” Nicks began to roll onto her side, but Chelsea stopped her.

  “Don’t move. We’re going to get help for you.” She kissed her daughter on the cheek, right over a wide tear stain. My God, this girl must’ve been forged from iron to take a beating like that without screaming.

  Tage stood bare chested on the other side of Marius. She could plainly see the bullet hole in his shoulder now. Three thin rivulets of blood ran from it. “That shoulder...”

  “I know.” He nodded, flexed his arm, and grimaced. “It’s starting to hurt. I’ll have it looked at when we get to the hospital.”

  Chelsea alternately raged and rejoiced as she rode in the ambulance with Nicks. Raged because it required a second call to the police to get them to come to the abandoned garage. Rejoiced because they’d gotten both girls out alive without them.

  What would she find when she got to the hospital?

  Nicks moaned, scattering those thoughts. It was just as well. She had a feeling the news about T.J. and Stone wouldn’t be good.

  “You okay?” Chelsea asked.

  “My back feels like it’s on fire,” Nicks answered.

  “I know. We’re almost there.”

  “Where’s Daddy? And Lindsay?”

  “Following behind us in the Lexus. Daddy didn’t want to leave it in the high school parking lot, and Lindsay didn’t want him driving alone. Marius shot him in the shoulder.”

  “I know. I heard. Is he okay?”

  “I hope so. He wouldn’t let anyone touch him.”

  “How’s Lindsay?”

  “Cold and scared out of her mind, but she’s not hurt.” Not physically at least. The sight of her nearly naked daughter shivering with cold and fear filled her with rage. “Nicks, Marius didn’t... He didn’t rape her, did he?”

  “I hope not. I don’t know.” Nicks glanced up at her with clear golden-brown eyes. “How did you know where we were? I was sure no one would find us.”

  Chelsea looked around to see if anyone was listening then bent forward and whispered in her ear. “Asher. He showed up in the back seat of the Lexus while we were on our way to the hospital with T.J and Stone. Your father saw him too.”

  Nicks smiled a little. “What did he say?”

  “He told us exactly where you were. We never would’ve found you otherwise.”

  “Do you think this is what he meant by ‘careful’ and ‘watch’?”

  “I’d have to say yes. It would’ve been a whole lot easier if he’d been more specific, but I think the Powers That Be...if there are any...don’t want him talking to us. We had to practically pull the information out of him. It appeared as though someone—or something—was choking him when he was trying to talk.”

  “He saved your life once. Now he saved mine. He really does love me, doesn’t he?”

  “Of course he does, honey.” Chelsea tried not to think about what kind of father Asher would’ve been. That door was firmly closed. He’d loved Nicks enough to fight for her from beyond the grave. Love doesn’t get much stronger than that.

  “T.J and Stone...Are they dead?”

  Chelsea hesitated a moment, not sure what to say. “No, they aren’t dead.”

  At least they hadn’t been when the paramedics took them from the house. Who knew what she’d find when she got to Presby?

  “I can’t tell you anything more than that. I sent Willow and Marybeth to the hospital with them, and we went searching for you and Lindsay. Maybe that wasn’t the right choice, but I couldn’t split myself in two. If we had a chance to find the two of you, I knew I had to take it.”

  “Thank you, Mom.” And with that, her daughter’s eyes closed and she relaxed against the gurney.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  Chelsea knew the news wasn’t going to be good as soon as she turned the corner and started down the hallway toward UPMC Presby’s surgery waiting room. Marybeth was dabbing at her eyes with a tissue, and Willow was staring blindly at an ugly abstract print on the wall.

  Tage and Lindsay were being cared for in emergency. Her husband’s bullet wound, though alarming, was not serious. It wouldn’t have mattered if it were. He’d informed the doctors in no uncertain terms they’d better do their best work right where he sat because he wasn’t spending one night in this damned hospital.

  Lindsay had a touch of hypothermia and had been given an I.V., but was otherwise fine. She’d sobbed the whole time they examined her though.

  Nicks, on the other hand, had been cleaned up and admitted immediately. Chelsea had slipped away while they were working on her to check on the rest of her family. She was informed by the front desk nurses that both T.J. and Stone were in surgery.

  She walked into the waiting room and stopped in front of Marybeth. Glancing between her and Willow, she asked, “Well?”

  Neither spoke. Willow had a hard time meeting her eyes, which wasn’t a good sign.

  “We heard you found Nicks and Lindsay,” Marybeth said in a monotone.

  “We did. And I’ll tell you all about it as soon as you fill me in on T.J and Stone.”

  Willow sighed and turned to face her. Chelsea knew she would get honesty from her best friend. “It’s not good, Chels. The knife missed T.J.’s heart by a millimeter, but nicked his aorta. He bled out on the way to the hospital and went into cardiac arrest. They brought him back, but the doctors weren’t hopeful. Stone’s skull is broken. He’s bleeding into his brain. They’re doing what they can, but it’s pretty bad.”

  The news was not unexpected, but Chelsea still felt as though her life had been kicked out from under her. She collapsed into a chair beside Marybeth, dropped her face into her hands, and began to sob.

  Chelsea stared down at her precious little boy, her devilish imp, his father’s namesake. Tage John Sorenson, Jr., otherwise known as T.J.

  There was no hope. They’d moved T.J. and Stone from surgery directly into a large private room together so the family could say their goodbyes. T.J. had been given blood but he’d gone into cardiac arrest twice more. Stone had been unresponsive from the start.

  The doctors had pronounced both of them brain dead.

  The tubes down their throats, the machines that breathed for them, the various wires that stretched across them gave hope in the cruelest way. They’d been brought in on life support in case the family wanted to donate their organs.

  It was something to think about. Chelsea couldn’t bear the thought of her bright little son being gone from the world, but maybe, if a piece of him could live on, if he could bring hope to some other family...

  No. Never. Nothing was going to ease the pain of losing him. There would never be closure for her. This was senseless.

  The room was dark and still. Grief hung in the air, so heavy it was a presence in and of itself. Her mother and father, Reese, Aimee, and Lindsay were there. Tage looked like he was a hundred years old slumped in the chair, his fingertips pressed together in front of him.

  Willow and Marybeth had gone, though Chelsea wanted them to stay. They’d told her this was family time, to call if she needed them. She wasn’t fooled. They’d gone home to grieve in private. Neither one of them liked to fall apart in front of other people.

  The only one who wasn’t there was Nicks. Chelsea had gone between her room down the hall and this one all night, though Nicks had fallen asleep over two hours ago from a heavy dose of pain medication.

  She’d taken a horrific beating at Marius’s hands. The doctors were shocked at the severity of her wounds. It made her blood run cold to think of her diminutive daughter on the receiving end of Marius’s
brutality. Though they’d found the girls alive, it still felt as though evil had won the day.

  This hideous event would forever divide their lives into before and after. Nothing would ever be the same.

  Chelsea knew she couldn’t stay in this room another minute or she’d start screaming. “I’m going down the hall to see Nicks.”

  I’m a cork in the water, Nicks thought. A leaf on the breeze. Or how about a duck? Floating... bobbing...quack!

  Sometimes, she was aware of her surroundings, knew exactly where she was and why. Then someone would come in and shoot something into her I.V., and she’d drift along slowly in a colorful dream. Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds-type scenery. Or maybe the cartoon scenes from Mary Poppins. Whatever. It was awesome.

  Sometimes her mother was at her bedside. Sometimes her father. She felt Lindsay kiss her cheek once. Grandma and Grandpa Whitaker. Reese had tears running down his face when he came to see her, the first time she’d ever seen him cry as an adult.

  It was only in her dreams that Stone came to her, those dark eyes full of love as he held her close. She liked those times the best.

  Fully awake now, she lay on her stomach in the dark room and listened to the hospital noises. Call bells rang at the nurses’ station. The soft, comforting murmur of voices as the various personnel checked charts or talked on the phone. She was eye level with her I.V. pole so she stared at the numbers on the display for a while, wondering what they all meant.

  “You awake?” Her mother’s voice floated down to her.

  “I’m awake.”

  Chelsea pulled the chair up beside the bed and moved the I.V. pole. “How’re you feeling?”

  “Like a puzzle. Like I’ve been broken and glued back together in tiny pieces, and some of them are missing. But the stuff they give me in my I.V. is the best. My back really doesn’t hurt so bad right now.”

  “That’s good.”

  “I’m tired of being on my stomach.”

  “I bet you are. But I think it might hurt if you tried to lay on your back.”

  “I know. I told the nurses they needed to find a way to suspend me in midair.”

  Chelsea touched her cheek. “The doctors said there would be scarring. They put some type of medical fabric over your back to help reduce the scars. And the cut on your neck took seven stitches to close.”

  “I don’t care about scars. Or stitches.”

  “Okay. Just wanted you to know.”

  “T.J. and Stone? Are they out of surgery?”

  “You know the cops will probably want to talk to you tomorrow. For a long time, I think.”

  “I want to tell them everything. Marius needs to spend the rest of his life locked up in prison. Remember Trisha Glace, the girl that went missing? He killed her. Her blood is on the floor under the table I was handcuffed to.”

  “My God, are you sure?”

  “He told me he killed her. Said she lasted the longest, and that sounds to me like there’ve been others. He’s a sick bastard, and I—”

  Her mother laid a hand on Nicks’s head. “Okay, calm down or they’ll shoot you full of drugs again.”

  “I don’t want drugs right now. I want to talk to you.”

  “Yeah, I want to talk to you too.”

  “It’s not good, is it? Stone and T.J. They’re not going to make it, are they?”

  Her mother was silent for several long moments. The heavy sigh told Nicks everything she needed to know. She was going to lose them.

  “I don’t think so, baby,” her mother whispered, still petting her head. “The doctors said their injuries are not survivable.”

  “How could he do that, Mom? Hurt a little boy like that? What kind of asshole do you have to be to hurt a child?” Nicks’s pounded her fists into the mattress.

  “A big one, sweetheart. I’m sorry.”

  “And Stone.” She stared at her mother through the safety rail of the bed. “How am I going to live without Stone? No one will ever get me like he did. I love him so much, Mom.”

  “Shhh. I know, honey.” Her mother’s eyes glazed with tears. “I wish I could say something to make you feel better. This is going to be raw and painful for a long time. For all of us.”

  “Can I see them? Will you take me to them?” Nicks wanted to kiss Stone one last time. To touch him and hold him. She wanted to make a memory she could keep until she died too. And T.J. Her partner in crime. Dying would frighten him. He would want his big sister to hug him so he wasn’t afraid.

  “You bet I will. But not tonight. Sleep for a while. I’ll make sure no decisions are made until you can say goodbye to both of them.”

  Dr. Roscoe, the physician in charge of T.J. and Stone, stopped Chelsea in the hall as she was leaving Nicks’s room. He held a clipboard and pen in his hands.

  “I know there’s never a good time to bring this up, Mrs. Sorenson, but I need to ask about organ donation for your son. I’m trying to track down next of kin for Mr. Jensen, or someone who can make decisions on his behalf, but haven’t been successful yet.”

  Chelsea felt as though she were going to explode. Sign a piece of paper to end her child’s life? It was inconceivable, but would have to be done at some point. “Are you sure about... things?”

  “Brain death? Yes, I’m afraid so. The sooner we can harvest the organs, the sooner we can save another child’s life.”

  “I’m sorry, but you’ll have to wait another day or two. I promised the daughter in that room she would have a chance to say goodbye to them. I’m not going to break that promise. And I’m going to give her all the time she needs to do it. She’s been through enough hell in the past two weeks.”

  By the time Chelsea got back to T.J.’s room, it was one o’clock in the morning. Her parents had taken their other three children home with them to get some rest.

  The silence was deafening as she dropped into a recliner beside Tage. She could see he was awake, but his eyes held an unusual hopelessness. He stared forward, focused on nothing. She knew his brain was speeding ahead, contemplating a very different future without the two people who lay in the beds near them.

  “You okay?” she whispered.

  “I’ll never be okay again, Chelsea.”

  Her heart broke for her husband. He loved his children so fiercely. “I know. If only I could rewind to yesterday.”

  “Did you tell Nicks?”

  “Yes.”

  “And?”

  “She’s so drugged up right now, I’m not sure it registered. I told her no decisions would be made until she could say goodbye.”

  “Goddamnit it all to hell! She shouldn’t have to say goodbye to a seven-year-old boy and a twenty-four-year-old man!”

  “Shh! I know. I keep thinking how unfair this is. But no one said life was fair.”

  “Fuck fair,” he snarled. “It’s my job to protect all of you. It’s my job to make sure all of you are safe. That bastard broke into my house. He killed one of my sons and nearly killed two of my daughters. How am I supposed to make that right in my mind, Chelsea? I failed. I failed all of you.”

  “Did you know Marius was going to do that?”

  He shifted in the chair. “Of course not. If I would’ve—”

  “You’d have done something about it. Look, I don’t know every man on the planet, but I’m betting not many of them love their families the way you do. Hindsight is twenty-twenty.”

  He pounded his fists on the arms of the chair. “How can you be so accepting of all this? I want to tear the world apart with my bare hands!”

  “That’s a horrible thing to say to me, Tage Sorenson! I don’t accept this! But I know there will be a time in the future when I’ll have to find peace. I don’t know where and I don’t know how. I guess I’ll have to dig deep and see what I’m made of. We still have four children to raise. I refuse to give them only half a mother. I will never forget T.J. and Stone, but the best way to honor them is to live a good and happy life. If I don’t, Marius wins. He’s taken my son a
nd the love of my daughter’s life. I won’t let him take another thing from me.”

  Tage choked on a sob. “I’m sorry. I’m just so fucking angry about all of this.” After a moment, he reached over and took her hand in his. “You are the love of my life. God, you’re the most amazing woman. My inspiration. My hero.”

  She turned to look at T.J. “I don’t feel like a hero. I’m pretty much a hollowed-out shell of a human being right now.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  The next morning, Nicks spent two hours telling her story to the cops. They’d talked to Lindsay alone first—she guessed to make sure their stories matched. No worries about that. But only Lindsay knew what happened in the house before she and Stone got there.

  Apparently, Marius had tried to rape her sister, but he’d stopped when he heard the Mustang in the driveway. Thank God she’d been spared that, at least. He’d hastily handcuffed Lindsay, dragged her downstairs, and waited for someone to come in.

  Nicks wondered what would’ve happened if she’d gone in first. If only Stone had been behind her, he might have had a chance. But Marius had the pistol. He might’ve shot Stone instead. And really, what difference did it make? Dead was dead.

  The “what-ifs” of the situation made her heart race in an adrenaline rush. She couldn’t change what happened. She could never fix it. Telling the cops only made her more aware of how capricious were the whims of fate. Ten, fifteen minutes earlier might’ve been enough to stop Marius.

  If...if...if... If it wouldn’t have been Halloween they’d have known who stood at the door. If she wouldn’t have been at Stone’s place, she could’ve slammed the door in his face.

  She shook her head as her heart took off again. Thinking that way changed nothing.

  Nicks lay on her side now, propped up all around with pillows. Her bones were stiff from being on her stomach for so long. Turning her had hurt almost as bad as the beating.