Part 6 (1/2)

Browning stayed where he was. He wasn't looking in that coffin. If there was a chance he could see his son alive, he didn't wish to see his corpse.

Was there a chance?

Dear G.o.d, let it be possible. Let his boy rise from that coffin, not the pasty-faced child with the mottled lips and eyelids, that sick child, that dead child. Let him rise as Browning remembered him.

Browning cleared his throat. ”Yes, that's Charlie.”

Eleazar smiled. ”He's a fine boy. Well-formed. Don't you agree, Rene?”

Browning had not even noticed the old man there. Rene leaned over the coffin, and something in his face made Browning go cold. He wanted to leap forward.Yank the old man back. He swallowed hard. Rene nodded, jowls bobbing.

”You have a fine boy, sir,” Rene said, and there was nothing in his clouded old eyes but kindness.

”Thank you.” Browning turned to Eleazar. ”You said there was more?”

Eleazar nodded. ”Another price, I fear. One that cannot be negotiated.” He walked back to Browning. ”I said earlier that I use my powers sparingly because that is the Lord's will.There is another reason. The second price. Unlike our Lord, I am but a mortal man. I cannot return the soul to a body for nothing, as he did.There must be an exchange.”

”Exchange?”

”A soul for a soul.”

Browning blinked. ”I . . . I don't understand.”

”I do,” said a voice behind him.

Browning turned to see Doc Adams in the doorway, looking ill.

”Yes,” Eleazar said. ”Our good doctor understands. I cannot steal a life from heaven, like a base thief. I take a soul for you, I give a soul to Him. For a child to live again, someone must die.”

PreAcher Preacher was poring over a Latin book with Sophia.The words . . . well, as he'd joked to her, they could have been Greek for all he understood of them. He knew Latin, of course. At this moment, though, his mind was otherwise too occupied to translate them to English. He was trying to distract himself from what was happening at the community house and it was not working.

His wife was also trying to distract him, and had been since he'd explained when he came home.

”You can do nothing about it,” Sophia said. ”They must make their own choices and their own mistakes.”