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Polly was falling.
Falling, falling, endlessly through the infinite black, and then suddenly the air around him changed from the hot and sulfuric miasma of the Industry to cold and sharp, and then the ground was rushing up to meet him. He plummeted to the ground with the velocity of a crashing satellite, bone cracking and earth shattering under the impact, and he was gone.
He wasn’t dead, somehow, not entirely, and he became aware of that fact slowly over the next several hours. The pain hit him first, the throbbing of broken bone and split skin secondary to the burning emptiness and missing-tooth ache of the holes where his eyes used to be and the splintered stumps of his long, lovely horns. The ground beneath him was hard and crackling, and the air stank of burnt metal and blood. He became aware, slowly, of something near him keening, whimpering wounded-animal noises, and it took him longer to realize that the thing making those noises was him.
I can’t stay here, he thought. I need to—
His thoughts ground to a shuddering halt. He needed to what? He had no mission, no purpose. There were no tasks to complete, no paperwork piling up, no supervisors watching over him. They made sure of that. Tiff had looked at him with cold, disapproving eyes and an expression that hadn’t changed all through Polly’s surprised and then increasingly frantic apologies and excuses, and didn’t even change as he dashed Polly’s head against the marble steps in front of the temple until something cracked. It was the last thing Polly saw before Tiff plucked out his eyes like grapes and hurled him into nothing.
It was over.
He was over.
The sob caught him off-guard. It hurt, wrenched out of his broken chest, stinging in the wet holes of his eye sockets as blood pulsed out like tears. The last time he had cried, some part of his mind pointed out, was when Yaretzi had asked him if he had ever made a covenant. If he had ever had a choice. But this wasn’t like stifling his tears in the forest, pushing them down with pretty words about how he was better than all that. He had failed. His suit was ruined. His horns were gone. His eyes were blinded. He had no umbrella, no power, and no jurisdiction. No one was coming to help him. He was maimed, disfigured, pathetic. Broken.
He lay there for a long time, choking on sobs, crying on the ground like a worm. His mouth tasted like blood and ash, and his matted hair stuck to his face, itching as it dried. The fire and smoke of the impact slowly blew away on the cold wind, and underneath it came the scent of pines.
“Fuck,” Barb spat suddenly.
The Countess glanced up from her cigarette, the clove-scented smoke curling around her face. Barb had gone rigid where he leaned against the railing of the balcony, sightless eyes turned out towards the woods. She uncrossed her legs and stood from the bench where she’d been lounging, drifting out to join him. Beyond the neon glare of the Resting Place, the stars twinkled faintly in the dark sky, half-obscured by the tall black pines.
“What is it?” she asked.
Barb nodded out at the night. “Looks like little Polly found himself on the wrong end of the Industry.” He shook his head, stubbing his cigarette out on the railing with an unexpectedly vicious motion. “I told him they’d chew him up and spit him back out, poor bastard.”
The Countess thought back to the younger devil in the battered floral suit, the proud tilt of his chin, the strange company he kept. There was a desperation to his manner, something equal parts repulsed and fascinated by Barb’s broken horns and empty eyes. He kept his spine very straight when he walked. Interesting little man. Somehow he’d gained the friendship of a revenant and a Starwolf, of all people. Befriending that revenant wasn’t too terribly impressive一the thing looked like it would cozy up with a rock if it weren’t actively hostile and maybe even if it were一but the servant of Tolshatol was a surprise. She licked her sharp teeth at the memory of Yaretzi’s golden eyes and predator’s bearing and took another drag of her cigarette.
Something caught her eye out in the darkness, and she watched with interest as a distant spark of red fire plummeted from the sky. They stood side by side and watched it in silence as it disappeared behind the trees. Barb sighed, low and heavy, and when she glanced at him, the line of his mouth and the slump of his shoulders spoke of an old weariness. She wondered how long it had been since his own fall from grace.
“I’m going to get Cherry,” Barb announced.
“I’m coming with you,” she decided.
He gave her a crooked grin. “We’re gonna need a tarp.”
It hurt. It hurt, it hurt, it hurt.
Polly collapsed back to the ground, biting back a scream. He was in bad shape. His left shoulder and arm were shattered, and the bones grated together every time he tried to move. Half a dozen ribs were snapped like twigs, and every time he breathed in, they screamed in agony. His left leg wouldn’t support any weight. The ground was hard and sharp and burning hot, and it cut his hands and the unsalvageable remnants of his floral suit. He dropped his cheek back against the earth and panted.
There still wasn’t any reason for him to get up, beyond habit and stubbornness, and he contemplated lying on the ground until the world stopped turning or something big and nasty came along to eat him. Maybe he could be like Mort, like those sleepers who lay in their foul black water until the end of the world. He could smell the stench of Marolmar all around him, seeped into the ground and the water and the air, pulsing through the pines and undergrowth.
…Mort. Where was Mort now? The memory of Mort and Yaretzi filled his chest with an emotion he didn’t want to try and identify, an ache that was entirely separate from the physical pain pulsing through his body with every beat of his wretched heart.
Why are you so torn up about your hired brute and the wolf who wants to tear out your heart, he scolded himself, reaching up with his good hand to swipe at the mess of tears and gore on his face. It didn’t do much, and he mostly just smeared it around. He groaned and spat a mouthful of blood onto the ground. The motion was too weak, and it dripped down his chin instead.
Disgusting, he thought, and didn't try to wipe it up.
Unbidden, his mind flickered back to sitting around the campfire, jaw bruised and suit ruined, struggling to heal up the wound from the silver dagger in his shoulder. He'd expected Yaretzi to react to the sight of his blood with hunger, the holy bloodlust given to her by Tolshatol. Instead she'd mostly watched him with pity. She had asked him if he'd ever had a choice.
No, he thought, and it felt like being gutted and being freed at the same time. No, I never did. This is where trying to make a choice gets you, in the Industry. Broken on the ground in a filthy corrupted forest waiting for something to kill you.
There was a sound in the distance, like a far-off roar, and Polly struggled to prop himself up on his elbow. His good leg felt clumsy and hot, but at least he could move it, and he shuffled his knee forward, tearing cloth and skin on the sharp earth. The movement sent a spike of pain lancing through his hips, his back, his shattered chest, and he braced himself and shoved with his foot. His broken arm and useless leg scraped along the ground, and he crumpled forward again, retching as his whole body seized in agony. The world spun and flickered. His head thunked to the ground again.
The sound got closer, and as it approached, he realized that the noise he heard was not the roar of an animal, not even a corrupted one like the beasts that lived in these awful woods, but rather the sound of an engine. He wondered if it was that horrible man who had stolen his umbrella and then stabbed him in the shoulder before Mort had gotten there and chopped off the thief's hand neatly at the wrist. It would be nice to have Mort here, he reflected, a mountain of red chrome and unholy fire and innocent childlike curiosity that was as endearing as it was annoying. He had no claim on Mort now, though. Not, he supposed, that he ever really did, remembering the bridge with those damnable seagulls.
Assuming, of course, that Mort was still alive. Or, well, functional. Present. Polly imagined Mort's metal body lying broken on the ground like scrap, dome cracked and water spilled and the eyes of his skull devoid of life and personality. More hot tears rose to his leaking eyes.
...he hoped Mort was all right. He hoped Yaretzi was with him. He hoped they both had survived, and that wherever they were, they were together.
The noise got louder. Polly tried, one more time, to get his arm under him and prop himself up, to crawl to safety or maybe just somewhere less exposed, to face whatever was coming for him with some modicum of dignity, but his arm barely responded. He tried to curl his fingers into a fist, and they twitched weakly toward his palm and then were still. He was so tired. He turned his face toward what was probably the sky and lay there, helpless, ragged eyelids fluttering as they tried to close over eyes that no longer existed. The roar of the engine grew loud—descending?—and then stopped. A car door opened and shut, and footsteps crunched on pine needles.
There was a low whistle.
"Damn, kid," Barb said. "They really got you good, huh? Need a hand?"
"Oh," Polly rasped, and passed out.
Barb shook his head. The Industry was not kind to its castoffs.
The Countess dismounted from the passenger seat with all the grace of a lady descending from a coach and came up beside him. Her dark eyes widened.
"Nasty sight, isn't it?" Barb said.
She didn't say anything, but her eyes flickered quick and sharp over the bandage over his eyes and the broken horns he wore like a crown. Barb suppressed a grimace. The fact that he'd been through some shit was obvious to anyone looking at him, but it was another thing entirely to have the evidence of that bleeding on the ground in front of you. Luckily, the Countess was too smart to pity him for it.
He took in the tableau in front of him, assessing the damage with senses that he'd long since learned to use to compensate for his eyeless sockets. The other devil lay in a crumpled heap in the center of a crater of black glass. Even here, he could feel the heat radiating off it. The impact hadn't been kind to the kid, his left arm twisted at an unnatural angle and his leg out of kilter in a way that meant it was probably out of its socket. His pretty floral suit was in tatters, burned and torn and streaked with gore, and his face was almost invisible beneath the mask of clotting blood and burning tear tracks like molten gold covering it. His broken horns oozed into his tangled hair. There was a snail trail of soot and gore trailing behind him for about a foot, crawling from the epicenter of the crater. Polly lay still and silent, but there was still a flicker of life in him.
Barb began picking his way down into the shallow crater, shoes crunching on the vitrified earth. The Countess hovered behind him with curiosity she couldn’t quite hide. Polly twitched when Barb poked his shoulder – the one not attached to an obviously broken arm – and he decided to take that as a good sign.
“Up and at ‘em, sunshine,” he said, snapping his fingers next to Polly’s ear. Polly flinched slightly at the noise, but didn’t move aside from that. Barb groaned in frustration. Of course it wouldn’t be as simple as giving him a hand up and helping him limp back to the car.
Barb might have had a couple inches on Polly, but years of sitting in a hotel casino cut off from the source of Syrensyr’s fire had left Barb a wiry, spindly excuse for a devil. He could hold his own well enough, and if you were wily enough, rich enough, or popular enough, fights tended to turn out in your favor, but physical exertion wasn’t his strong suit. He drummed his fingers on the ground and gnawed his lip contemplatively.
“Aw, to hell with it,” he muttered, and slung Polly’s good arm around his shoulders, hefting him to his feet like a drunk patron on the bar floor.
Polly screamed, a horrible guttural sound. He convulsed, clawing at Barb’s shoulder, face twisting into an open-mouthed mask of agony. “Shit,” Barb hissed, and tried to reposition his arm to support Polly more, but when he tried to brace his hand against Polly’s ribcage, it grated like breaking ice. Polly crumpled inward, shuddering, and vomited blood and thin black liquid onto Barb’s shoes.
“That was a terrible idea,” the Countess commented from the lip of the crater, and Barb glared up at her, already carefully lowering Polly back to the ground.
“Got that, thanks,” he huffed.
She was in front of him when he glanced up, movements as quick and noiseless as a night breeze. She scooped Polly’s limp body up into her arms effortlessly, cradling him against her chest, and swept back towards the car. Barb clambered out after her, wiping blood from his face – he wasn’t sure how much of it was his own. He opened the door for her and gestured to the backseat. Polly sobbed when she laid him down on the plastic-covered leather, but he lay still.
“I see what you meant about the tarp now,” she said, dabbing at a smear of blood on her chest. “You’re going to pay for the dry-cleaning on this dress.”
Barb quirked a grin at her that showed all his sharp teeth. “Naturally.”
Barb hadn’t worn a seatbelt since before the world had ended, but the Countess didn’t comment as he carefully clicked the backseat belts into place around Polly’s body, or when he accelerated into the sky with uncharacteristic caution.
“I miss Polly,” Mort said morosely.
Yaretzi glanced up at him, half-draped over his lap where he was seated against a huge black tree. “I know, Mort,” she said gently, and patted his leg. Her clawlike fingernails clinked against the metal.
“Why did they have to make him go away?” he continued, voice wobbling. “I like Polly. He’s my friend.”
Yaretzi heaved a massive sigh and rested her chin on his leg. “They are bad people, Mort. Bad people with access to terrible things. We were all caught off guard. You did the best you could.”
Mort stared sadly into the distance. There were a few little birds in the trees nearby, but no seagulls. Bert hadn’t returned after the mass of seagulls had bought them enough time to escape, running into the woods at full speed until Yaretzi had paused to sniff the air and declare that they’d gone far enough. He didn’t have a heart inside his huge metal body, only machinery and water and bone, but something in him felt hollow and aching. Three days ago, there were four of them, a happy little family walking their way to finish the job. And now there were only two of them.
Yaretzi shifted on his lap, and Mort set his huge gloved hand on her back. She was warm, and her back moved with her breathing. She had made a deal to kill Polly when their mission was done, and they’d both agreed to it. Mort didn’t want it to happen, but he was resigned to it. But Yaretzi had cried when Polly burned up. Maybe she wouldn’t have gone through with it after all.
There was a noise somewhere off in the trees, and Yaretzi shot up, gold eyes narrowing as she sniffed the air. Her lip curled, teeth lengthening in readiness.
“Who is it?” Mort asked. “Is it the bad men again?”
She remained stock still, faintly quivering, for a moment longer, before relaxing. “No, it’s only an animal.” She licked her teeth and began to settle back down when the wind changed, whistling softly through the trees. Yaretzi breathed in and her eyes went wide.
“Yaretzi? What is it?”
She sniffed intently, and then leapt to her feet in one smooth motion. Mort followed, less gracefully. Her eyes shone under the shadows of the trees with a golden fire.
“It’s Apollyon,” she growled, mouth lolling open in a huge grin. “I can smell him. He's back.”
Polly woke up. This was unexpected.
“Welcome back to the land of the living, kid,” drawled a voice nearby. It took him a moment to place it. Barb? Why was Barb in his office? He tried to blink, but his vision remained black.
“It’s dark,” he mumbled. His tongue felt clumsy. “Why’s it dark?”
Oh, he realized, there was something on his face. He tried to reach up to touch it, but his left arm wouldn’t move, and oh that hurt. That hurt a lot. The noise that came out of him was positively embarrassing. His ribs ached, sharp and bone-deep, and his whole left side felt like a massive bruise, especially around his hip. His head hurt too, his eyes and his horns, and he lay there for a moment, head swimming.
“Aw, jeez,” Barb muttered. He shifted in his chair. “How much do you remember?”
“It hurts,” Polly rasped. He tried reaching for his face again, carefully only using his right hand this time. His ribs protested as he lifted his arm, but he was able to brush his fingertips over his face. There were thick bandages over his eyes, tied around his head.
All at once, everything came rushing back. The dismissal. His horns. His eyes. The fall. The impact. Everything got blurry after that, but he could put the pieces together. He groaned, and scrubbed his hand over his face, carefully avoiding his eyes. There were other bandages on his face, little plasticky ones covering smaller cuts, swelling and bruises and an awful bone-deep ache from his cheekbones to the top of his head where his broken horns throbbed. He must look awful.
He let his hand fall back to his side. There was a sheet draped over him, up to his chest, but he didn’t seem to be wearing much underneath it.
“My suit?” he croaked.
“Yeah, we had to cut it off you. Sorry, kid. There wasn’t much worth saving by the time I got there. Kept all the crap in your pockets, though.” Something jingled as Barb waved it in the air. “Good thing you still had this.”
“What…” Polly started, before he remembered. “Oh. The room key?”
“Yep. Welcome to the Resting Place Hotel.” The key clacked slightly as Barb put it down on a table. “I’d say enjoy your stay, but clearly that ship has sailed.” He cackled to himself, and Polly winced. His head hurt, and he wasn’t in the mood to deal with gloating. “You had some weird stuff on you, by the way. Why do you have so many rocks?”
Rocks? Polly wondered, before the memory clicked into place. A few days before arriving at the fateful confrontation at the church, Mort had paused as they waded through a stream – or rather, Mort and Yaretzi waded the stream and Polly painstakingly picked his way across on the stones that stuck out of the surface of the water. He was sweating and breathing hard by the time he got to the other side, which was frankly undignified, but the others didn’t seem to notice, as Yaretzi was watching the treeline intently and Mort was bent over near the bank, poking at something.
“Come along, Mort,” he’d called, straightening his jacket and discreetly mopping his brow with a handkerchief. He hoped they didn’t notice how hard he was leaning on his umbrella. Yaretzi, as he’d expected, loped over to join him at once, but Mort lingered for a few more moments, picking something out of the streambed. “We don’t have all century, now,” he called, and Mort straightened up and clanked over to join them.
To Polly’s surprise, he held out his big gloved hand to Polly, curled into a fist. Polly raised an eyebrow. “What is this, Mort?”
“It’s for you!” Mort said cheerfully, and Polly hesitantly held out his hand to accept it. He hated to think what Mort might find in a black stream in these accursed woods.
Mort’s big hand opened with a whir of machinery, and to Polly’s relief, the thing that dropped into his palm was only a smooth pebble. He didn’t know much about geology, but it appeared to be feldspar, maybe, or granite, with flecks of pink and black and glittering white.
“Thank you, Mort, it’s a nice…rock,” he said, glad that it wasn’t something worse, at least. “Ah…why did you give me this?”
Mort shrugged. “It’s pretty,” he said. “It’s pink, like your flowers. It made me think of you.”
Polly glanced down at his suit jacket, where there were, indeed, several pink flowers intertwining with the pattern, although their hue was closer to fuchsia than the dull reddish color of the stone. “So it is,” he said, feeling a smile tug at the corner of his mouth. “Thank you, Mort, that’s very thoughtful.”
Mort’s skull wobbled happily at him, and his eyes shone brightly, the closest he came to beaming. The revenant turned and tromped away, making his way for the treeline, and Polly hurried to catch up, Yaretzi pacing beside them. She gave him a knowing look as Polly slipped the little stone into his pocket, and he glared at her, but didn’t throw it away.
Barb was still waiting for a response, Polly realized. His chest ached for a reason totally unrelated to his broken ribs. He pressed his lips together hard and willed his chin not to wobble.
The old devil took pity on him, shifting in his chair. “So, ah…basically, you got fired.”
Polly winced. “I remember,” he rasped.
“Oh, good,” Barb said. Polly tried not to feel insulted at the amount of relief audible in his voice. “Wasn’t lookin’ forward to trying to explain that one to ya.” He chuckled, and Polly suppressed the urge to throw something at him. He was mostly stopped by the fact that he could barely move his arms, and while he had an idea of where Barb was based on his voice, the odds of hitting him seemed dismally low.
“Anyway,” Barb continued, “I thought I’d offer you a bit of help. Give you some tips and tricks for figuring out the new situation.”
Polly sighed and turned his face away. “I think I would prefer to hold off on trying to learn how to play cards with no eyes until I can move without wanting to throw myself to a flock of undead seagulls and end this for good.”
“Undead seagulls, huh,” Barb said, grinning. “That’s right, one of your pals had a seagull buddy. The dead one. Birds get along well with the dead.”
“I don’t care,” Polly huffed, ignoring the twinge of grief at the reminder of Mort. “The point is, for now, I don’t want to do anything until I can move again.”
“Well, that’s a shame,” Barb cajoled, “since the first lesson was gonna be that you can still use magic the way you used to. Put yourself back together. It’s just gotta come from different sources. But if you’re not interested…” He shifted, as if to stand up
Polly swallowed hard. “No,” he rasped, and the word felt just a bit like hope. “I’m listening.”
Polly sat on the edge of the bed in a white terrycloth robe, gingerly combing the tangles out of his wet hair one-handed. The lesson Barb had given him was grueling, but he had to admit that it had worked. Trying to draw out a trickle of innate power when he was used to the powerful flow of the Industry’s resources was exhausting to the point of agony, and he doubted he’d ever manage anything as flashy as a vorpal step or a torrent of fire again, but he had successfully patched the worst of his broken ribs. Start small, Barb had said, reserve your strength. You can’t fix everything at once. The ribs were small, and close to his core, and couldn’t be set any other way, so they were apparently a perfect starting place. When the bones had finally knitted themselves together, he’d slept for a long time.
But he’d woken up, and felt much better without stabbing pain in his chest every time he tried to move; his arm and shoulder were still shattered and would take a lot more time and effort to heal, so they were still in a cast and sling, but the sleep had helped with his injured hip, and he could walk on it, albeit slow and limping.
His horns still throbbed, and the empty holes of his eyes still poured blood like tears, and when Polly had asked if he shouldn’t fix those first, Barb had laughed like a knife being sharpened and brought Polly’s good hand up to touch his own cheeks, the skin hot and weathered and slick with the blood seeping through Barb’s saturated bandages.
“Those,” he’d said, grinning with all his teeth, “those are never gonna heal.”
Polly had taken advantage of his newfound mobility and limped his way to the bathroom to wash off the accumulated gore and dirt – Barb must have given him a perfunctory wipe-down when he brought him in, for the sake of the sheets if nothing else, but Polly could tell that he was filthy still. He’d had some trouble navigating the room without seeing it, but fortunately it was relatively small, and the layout was simple. Apparently, there were tricks to seeing without your eyes, but Barb had promised they’d get to that later. The water was scalding, just the way he liked it, and the bubbles provided for the bath were rose-scented. Polly appreciated that. (He might have fallen asleep briefly in the water, but that was neither here nor there; it wasn’t as though anyone was expecting him.)
Fire and fury, though, he was tired. Polly picked at a tangle listlessly before giving up and dropping his hand back to his lap. He felt better than he had, but his whole body still felt like a bruise, stiff and aching. The bandages over his eyes were fresh, but he could already feel them soaking through. When he successfully replaced his clothes, he would have a hell of a time keeping them clean, he thought irritably. Barb had informed him that someone would be up with some food or clothes or something around this time, and he decided that he would stay up long enough to wait for them, and then he was going back to bed to sleep this off. His hair would be hellishly tangled in the morning, but he simply did not have the energy to deal with it now.
Someone approached his door in the hallway—two someones, actually. One set of footsteps was light and purposeful, the other one slow and very heavy following behind. They paused in front of his door, and then there was a sharp, decisive knock.
Polly sat up and tried to make himself a little more presentable. “Come in,” he called, and winced at how his voice cracked in his raw throat.
The doorknob rattled, and then rattled again more forcefully, and Polly’s heart sank.
“Leave your door locked,” Barb had advised him. “All the staff who have any business being in your room will have a copy of the key. They never came for me, after, but who knows, maybe having two of us ex-employees in one place’ll be too tantalizing for Tiff and his lackeys. In any case, a lotta the patrons here wouldn’t think twice about slitting your throat in your sleep and looting your corpse for valuables, and you—” he had jabbed Polly in the recently-healed ribs, and Polly gasped, “—are in no shape to be fighting anyone off. Just keep things closed up, capiche?”
He had kept things closed up. And now whoever was trying to get in didn’t have a key.
His hands itched for his umbrella, for a knife, for anything, but there was nothing to use as a makeshift weapon except for maybe the lamp. It was better than nothing, he supposed, and began inching his way towards the bedside table.
The door rattled one more time, then shuddered under a great blow. Polly flinched, even as some part of his mind started piecing together details to come to an impossible conclusion.
Another blow, and the door gave way with a crack, slamming open, and he braced himself for the worst.
“There you are,” growled a low, familiar voice, and then Yaretzi was throwing her arms around his neck, lean and strong and too short to properly reach, surprisingly gentle for all the violence he knew she was capable of. He gasped out in pain as she jostled his bad shoulder, and she stepped back, but he could picture her wide canine grin as she panted happily. She smelled like dog and fresh sweat and old blood, and he had never been happier.
Mort sidled in awkwardly, metal clanking and hydraulics hissing, and carefully propped the door back into place before approaching. “Hi, Polly,” he said, sounding almost shy, and moved towards him, but Yaretzi twisted around and stopped him, her sharp nails clicking against the metal.
“Careful, Mort,” she said. “He’s hurt.”
“Oh,” Mort said, and then his big gloved hand came down to gently pet at Polly’s good shoulder.
“What happened to you, anyway?” Yaretzi asked, and he could feel her gaze on the broken horns he didn’t have the energy to hide, the bandages over his eyes, the sling and cast immobilizing his arm and shoulder.
“Ah, well,” Polly hedged, tucking a piece of hair behind his ear. “I…got fired.” He gave them a wry, bitter grin. “There’s not much room for failure in the Industry.” His throat felt tight, and he swallowed against it.
He didn’t actually mean to say the next thing that came out of his mouth, but it slipped out before he could stop it. “…You’re here.” It came out soft and wondering, dangerously hopeful. Vulnerable in a way that he hadn’t deliberately been in front of another person for as long as he could remember. He carefully felt behind himself for the bed and sank onto it, knees shaking with the effort of keeping himself upright. He was so tired.
Yaretzi paused for a long moment, then carefully climbed onto the bed next to him, leaning gently against his good shoulder. Mort sat on the floor in front of him, close enough that his metal legs brushed Polly’s bare feet.
“…Mort would not have forgiven me if we didn’t come to find you after I smelled you again,” Yaretzi said, shuffling around to make a nest for herself in his comforter.
Mort rumbled in displeasure. “You wanted to see him too,” he said, accusatory and stubborn.
Polly’s cheeks ached. It took him a second to realize that it was because he was smiling, wider than he had in years.
“…Thank you,” he said quietly, and his little family settled closer around him.