Divine Savior Read Online Free PDF Page A

take care of these two precious children? She would much rather take care of these two.
    Shade asked someone with a cell phone to call her a cab, knowing that an ambulance would terrify the poor kids. The lights and noise alone would be twice as bad in the dark night, swirling round and screaming. Besides, in this part of town, a cabbie would chance a rider not coming out, but an ambulance would not come for hours if at all. She had seen it happen time and time again.
    By the time they pulled up in front of the hospital some thirty minutes later, Brent had told her what had happened and was sobbing quietly in her arms. The ambulance attendant had backed off when Brent started screaming. The man had merely touched him to take his temperature. Becca sat still, holding her brother’s hand and sucking her thumb. Shade thought again about what horrors these children had seen in their short, short lives.
    All during the first month after she had noticed them sitting on the outside stoop of their apartment building, the children were dirty and wearing the same clothing every day. Shade didn’t know the story until she gently reached out and touched the boy. She found that they hadn’t eaten for several days and that the little girl was injured. She had been slapped. Hard, too. Moving toward them, Brent looked up at her and smiled. Shade’s heart melted immediately and she knew he had captured a large part of it.
    That afternoon, she’d come back with a large bag of hamburgers she had been able to get for free. It helped sometimes that she was nice. Sitting with them while they ate, she didn’t say a word about their injuries. Brent ate three of the burgers and Becca, he had called her, ate one.
    “ I’ll be back tomorrow. I want you to be right here, all right? I don’t think you should tell your momma. Just met me here. Can you do that?”
    Shade hated making them lie, but she had seen in their minds what sort of person their mother was. And what she did to her children on a daily basis. Shade wondered if the woman even knew that they were out with a stranger, or better yet, if she even cared.
    “ Yes, ma’am. Momma will takes her medicine and won’t hear us anyways. Me and Becca will be here. I promise.”
    She knew that Brent was too young to be responsible for a lot of the things she’d had him do, and giving his little sister a bath would be difficult for him. But Shade knew that they needed to stay clean to stay healthy. Shade had bought them both toothbrushes, bar soap, and a few other things the next day. He now kept both their faces and hands clean and was very proud that he had gotten Becca to go to the potty by herself all the time now. Again, Shade wondered how their mother could be so blind to them, not caring about the precious gifts she had been given.
    ~~~
    It was nearly two hours after they had arrived at the hospital before Shade was able to go back and see Brent. The hospital staff had let Becca go back with him, to sit on his bed and hold his hand because he had screamed and screamed until they had. The police had been called in and Shade had been questioned.
    David Wolff knew that Shade did not particularly care for the police as a whole, but there were one or two that she would tolerate. He was one of them, he thought. He wasn’t sure if she knew what he was in reality, him being a were. He had never mentioned it and he didn’t ask. He knew that she was a little different.
    “ How long have you known the kids, Shade?” David asked her.
    She wouldn’t look at him, he noticed; she kept looking at the floor. He knew that was something she did a lot when she was trying to hide something. Not that she lied, just when she didn’t want to tell him what he wanted to know.
    David liked Shade. He knew that he was one of the few people who had any information about the girl, and what he had was not very much. He also knew that despite being unemployed right now, she was a great kid. He had been on calls