The Priest's Graveyard Read Online Free PDF Page B

now, headed for a side door, I think. But my mind was on what he’d said. My angel was giving me permission
     to throw up while he held me in his arms. I wanted to cry. If anyone had been so kind to me it had been a very long time and
     the memory was long gone.
    I began to cry. The world was fading to gray and I was floating in his arms and crying.
    In fact, I must have been crying loudly, because he hushed me softly as he pulled up next to a door with a small lighted EXIT sign above it. Then he pushed through, stepped back out into the rain, glanced both ways, and headed back down the same sidewalk
     we’d been on before.
    He was retracing his steps?
    We veered around the same corner and entered the same garage we’d just left, just as the far-side door slammed shut. Cyrus’s
     men had followed our wet tracks into the garage and then back out. But now we were inside again and the ground was wet from
     many feet, so no one could follow our tracks.
    At least that’s how I remember the scene.
    He slid around a car and ran along the wall, heading deep into the parking garage, all the way to the darkest corner, where
     he set me down behind a blue truck.
    I lay on the concrete and watched him peer over the truck bed to see if anyone was following. Then he was leaning over me.
    “Okay, we’re safe for now,” he whispered. He wiped my tears away with his thumb. “Are you still with me?”
    I nodded. And I started to cry again.
    “Shh, shh…It’s going to be okay.” He carefully lifted my broken arm off the ground and straightened it. “We have to take care
     of your arm. You took another hit.”
    His tone was all matter-of-fact, like he was a medic in a war zone, but I knew he was being brave for me. Or he might have
     been in the army for all I knew back then.
    “I’m so sorry, sweetie. Can you hold on for me?”
    Nausea swept over me and I began to shiver. I suddenly felt like I was going to throw up again. I turned my head away from
     him and retched. If I hadn’t been in such a terrible state, I would have been mortified.
    The man eased my head back toward him and wiped my mouth with his sleeve. “Just hold on, I’m going to get you out of here.
     I’ll be right back.”
    He rounded the back of the truck in a crouch. I began to drift into a fog. Voices were yelling somewhere far away—but in the
     garage. They had found us?
    The monsters were rasping in my ear again. You can’t throw us up, Renee, we’re inside you and you can’t just spew us onto the ground. You’re sick on the inside, you
     filthy whore .
    It was over. My angel had left me in a puddle of my own vomit and the world was collapsing around me. The truck was my tombstone.
     It would roll over and smash me into the concrete and I would be dead. Or worse, trapped alive forever.
    A shout broke through my daze. “They’re at the back!” Wet shoes slapped the concrete.
    Then my rescuer was back, muttering angrily under his breath. He motioned for my silence and scooped me up. “Sorry, honey,
     just hold tight.”
    He flew around the truck, head low. How he got me into the backseat of another car so quickly, I still don’t know. Had he
     broken into it? But I was there on the backseat, lying facedown where he’d tossed me. My broken arm was folded under my belly.
    The door smacked my heels when he shut it.
    I heard the engine fire.
    I felt the car jerk forward.
    Bullets were smacking into the metal sheeting and my rescuer was repeating his mantra—“Hold on, hold, hold on”—as the tires
     squealed and sped up the ramp.
    Something thudded into the car. A body maybe.
    We smacked through the wood gate and peeled into the street. One more bullet hit the trunk, and then we were flying into the
     night.
    “Hold on, honey. Just hold on.”
    I mumbled the same command to myself. Hold on, Renee. Just hold on .
    The night went black.
      
    I don’t know how long I was in the back of the car. I was only barely hanging on to life and dreaming