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“Go sit in the truck, Reilly,” he growled as he took long strides toward the sitting room, dragging her along.
Her hand tightened in his. “No. You’re outnumbered.”
“Nothing new.”
“Brother Michael,” Matthew called from the end of the hall.
Rev spun back toward him. “The words you said to me on the phone were not the truth.”
Matthew’s lips thinned out. “I thought they were, nephew. God forgive me, clearly I was wrong.”
Clearly.
Chapter Five
Rev stopped just inside the doorway, Reilly’s fingers slipping from his.
The light in the sitting room was dim, the curtains drawn. Only one small lamp in the corner lit.
Rev sucked air that held the heavy scent of impending death into his flared nostrils as he took in the hospital bed set up against the far wall. All of the simple furniture he remembered that used to be in this room was gone. The room now only consisted of a small side table and a few wooden chairs set up in a semi-circle around the bed.
He’d recognized those chairs. The ones used for visitors.
Or prayer circles.
It was hard to see the man of his childhood nightmares under the pile of white blankets. The big chested man with broad shoulders and powerful arms seemed to have disappeared. What looked like a skeleton took his place. Blankets and bones were all Rev could see.
The room smelled like sickness. Puke, shit and piss.
John Schmidt’s power was gone. Stripped from him by an evil the man couldn’t beat into submission.
Rev dug deep to see if he felt empathy or even sympathy. Nothing. He couldn’t drum up anything for his sire except loathing.
A slender woman sat by his father’s bed, her head tipped down as she read from a well-worn bible, her mouth moving but no words escaping. Her dark hair was pulled back into a tight bun like his mother’s, but she looked a lot younger than Rachel Schmidt.
Maybe even younger than Reilly.
“Patrice,” Matthew called from behind Rev, making him take an involuntary step deeper into the room.
The woman’s head lifted. Her gaze sliced over Rev, then Reilly, and finally landed on Matthew, who still stood behind them.
“Come, give my nephew some time with his father.” A hand clamped on Rev’s shoulder. “I’ll introduce you to my wife another time.”
With an obedient nod, the woman rose and Rev saw her dress fell all the way to her ankles. Not an Amish-type dress, but one similar to his mother’s, a style the women from their order wore for modesty. No cleavage or skin showing below the high neckline. The dresses always reminded him of something between what the Amish and Mennonite women wore. However, unlike the Amish and Mennonites, the women of his parents’ church did not wear any kind of head coverings—what Rev called sin sifters—except in church on Sundays.
Rev guessed that their religious order broke off from either the Amish or Mennonites a very long time ago, though he never cared enough to ask. The groups were all similar in some aspects but not exactly the same.
Even so, all of them had problems with abuse. Either with domestic violence, sexual assault, even incest. But rarely were those secrets shared outside of their community. Rarely did the pigs get involved. Those closed communities tended to handle their own problems.
Or simply sweep them under the rug.
Or accept it as God’s will.
“Hello,” Patrice said softly to each of them with a slight nod as she passed.
“Hello,” Reilly returned the greeting, glancing over her shoulder to watch them walk back down the hallway toward the kitchen. She then lifted her face to his and bugged out her green eyes.
He didn’t give a shit about Matthew or his wife. He was here for one person and one person only.
He walked through the room, turning on more lamps so his father could see him clearly. So his father would know who was here to visit him. So his father would have no doubt who it was that stood over him in his weakened state.
When Rev was done lighting the room, he moved closer to the hospital bed and glanced down at the man with the pale, paper-thin skin. His eye sockets were shadowed in dark purple, his cheeks hollowed, blue veins visible just below the skin like rivers on a map. Only a few dark strands of his formerly thick hair remained.
This was not the man Rev remembered. His father was now the shell of the man who had ruled his family and this very household. It used to be that Rev was the weak one, unable to overpower his father. How things had changed.
Reilly stepped up behind him, not quite touching him, but close enough he could feel her body heat mix with his. Making her presence and support known without words.
Since stepping into this house, she hadn’t said much. Definitely not normal for her, but then maybe she couldn’t find anything to say. She couldn’t understand the undertones of the house, of the past, of the people who had lived under this roof. Of the people who still lived under it now.
