None came.
Bat lifted his cut and crouched to check out the bottle. He nudged it over with his boot, and growled, “There’s a fuckin’ note inside. It’s a goddamn warnin’.”
“What does it say, Mr. Stephens?” Grandpa demanded regally as he swept down the pews to Bat’s side, chin held high without one flicker of fear in his Lafayette blue eyes.
Bat snapped his black gaze up and over to us. “Romans 5:19 ‘For just as through the disobedience of the one man the many were made sinners, so also through the obedience of the one man the many will be made righteous.’”
As if summoned by his words, the crash and shatter began again, this time from a window on the opposite side of the church.
Seth rushed to try to extinguish the flaming bottle with his suit jacket, but it immediately caught fire. A moment later, another one was launched through the other window and landed beside Bat.
“Get out!” he hollered as he fell over the bottle with his leather jacket to put out the flame.
“Come on,” Loulou ordered, dragging me by the hand as she bent to pick up Shaw and fix him on her hip.
He went willingly, Steele already up in Tempest’s arms and Amelia bringing up the rear with Cleo, who looked utterly terrified.
Grandpa was ushering the spooked crowd down the hall to the side entrance, which was blessedly not blocked off. Ransom, of all people, was holding it open for everyone.
“Priest made me wait outside,” he explained as we rushed past in a semi-organized stampede.
Of course, he did.
I didn’t have time to dwell on that, though. Immediately, we got to work organizing the chaos, making sure no one was hurt. Kodiak was also there, his massive black and silver bike in the lot, his big body disappearing around the corner just as we spilled outside.
Hunting down the arsonist, no doubt.
I had a sinking feeling he wouldn’t find him.
“Where is Tabby?” I asked after I tallied everyone, going to Seth, who was charred and coughing from his heroic deeds. “Where is she?”
“She didn’t come today,” Seth croaked. “Wasn’t feeling well.”
Something nudged at the back of my mind, but I forgot it when I saw Bat finally emerge from the smoking stone building. There was soot on his cheekbones, ash in his short, cropped black hair, and a livid burn already bubbling the skin over his right hand.
Immediately, Tempest, Steele, and Shaw ran to him.
Amelia fainted, but Seth reached over quickly to catch her as she did.
I took a moment to look at Amelia swooned in his arms, wondering why a woman like that had ever been drawn to a man like Bat. It occurred to me that some people might consider Amelia and I cut from the same cloth. We were both petite and pretty, favouring feminine clothes and female companionship. But that was where the similarities ended.
Beneath the pink and silk, I had a spine of steel that had been forged in the fires of my neglected youth, the horrific betrayal of my father, and the illness that plagued my beloved sister. I was not so easily torn, so easily defeated as Amelia gone to raptures because her husband was burned.
I was the kind of woman who would stand in the fire with him if it meant being beside my man.
With a last––probably judgmental––look at Amelia, I went to Bat, noting that he was already being well cared for by his little crew.
“Fire’s out, but there is smoke and water damage,” Bat told me over the increasing roar of motorcycles.
The Fallen was coming.
On cue, a fleet of chrome and black Harleys rounded the corner onto Main Street and rumbled to a stop in the church parking lot. Zeus was off his bike before it was fully stopped, looping across the asphalt with eyes only for his wife. Loulou was already full sprint running toward him, hair flying, arms pumping until she could throw them around his neck as she hurtled into his open arms.
“Little Lou,” he growled, too angry and shaken to curb his volume.
I watched as Loulou successfully soothed him, hands in his tangle of gold-tipped dark hair, lips peppering kisses over his craggy face.
When I turned back, Bat was looking at them, then to Amelia, who was sitting up on the asphalt drinking the water Seth had found for her. Even from a distance, I could hear her wax on about Seth’s heroism and her gratitude.
“She’ll be okay,” I assured him, hoping he couldn’t hear what I did.
Bat’s coal dark eyes cut to mine, more eloquent than any words he could have said. This, somehow, at the end of many years of an unhappy marriage, was the end of the road for Bat with his wife.
Then Dane was there, jogging instead of sprinting, even though his face was cast in marble, features fixed in anger. Steele, Shaw, and Tempest made room for him as he stopped a foot away from Bat and looked him over.