Brotherhood Protectors: Soldier's Heart Part 2 (Kindle Worlds Novella) Read online

  “Check your magazine.”

  Nag, nag, nag. What do you think I’m doing? They both knew the magazine was full. She hadn’t fired the weapon since hiking into the Black Wolf, but she always checked. Habit. Still, as she thumbed out bullets, it took her a few seconds to realize she hadn’t snapped on a headlamp. Now that she thought about it, she hadn’t used any light at all.

  But I can see these just fine. She bounced the last two bullets, number fifteen and her lucky plus-one, in her right palm. The jacketed hollow-point brass wasn’t bright, though the silvered casing seemed to glow. Flipping the bullet over, she squinted at the base but couldn’t quite make out the manufacturer’s stamp or caliber.

  Yet.

  The thought provoked another frightened clutch. Stop. You’re not going to wake up one morning and not be you. Angry, she slotted in number fifteen, butted the magazine back into place with the heel of a hand, pulled back the slide, chambered a round then released the magazine and topped that off with her last, lucky plus-one. A shootout in the middle of the backcountry was such a remote possibility, her insistence upon that plus-one round—a sort of surprise, asshole, if anyone was bothering to count (and she always counted)—was laughable.

  Except that one last bullet had been the margin between life and death not so long ago. Her lucky number plus-one. Well, Bibi’s, actually. So, she always chambered an extra.

  The fingers of her left hand were going numb after only a few minutes in the cold. Folding her pop-tops back into place, she wriggled her fingers until her hand tingled back to life. The sensors embedded in her right hand registered nothing but pressure and, for a moment, she wished the biobots would do something useful, like re-engineer her sensor pathways so she never felt pain or the cold—or the agony of memories that refused to die. She wondered if she could get a message to the biobots: Say, fellas, since you’re rewriting my brain, I could do without that particular nightmare—

  Her thought sputtered because the wind had changed. The storm spun a dervish, swirling around her body to lift her hair and rake her face. A funnel cloud of icy snow spun into a tight arabesque, and she thought of how a whirlpool works, the centrifugal force sucking stray bits and flotsam to a central point.

  And that was when she smelled them.

  The wolves.

  7

  With all that had gone down—the shots, Gabriel’s disappearance, waking to find that the biobots had been busy little bees—she’d completely forgotten about the wolves who’d trailed her for days.

  Now their scent, heady and feral, wreathed around the way water circled a drain.

  And it’s different, too. Or was it only she who was different, and they were responding to her in some new way? There was no way to answer that.

  But you’re here. Weird, how comforting that thought was. She stood absolutely still as the aroma balled in her mouth and rested on her tongue. The animals’ perfume had changed over the time she’d been in the Black Wolf, at first rank and sour with more than a hint of decayed flesh and a fair amount of what she thought was shit. This tallied, too. Tompkins was always brushing in dry shampoo and grooming Six, who didn’t mind a good roll in something incredibly ripe and preferably really, really dead, a behavior common to all dogs. She wondered, though, if the stink wasn’t also the wolves’ way of disguising themselves, a habit they’d now discarded because they’d grown accustomed to her. They’d chosen to follow and, at this moment, they smelled almost exactly like very large, very shaggy if also very wet dogs. A good smell.

  Shielding her eyes from the bits of ice nibbling her cheeks, she probed the darkness to her left. Not as complete or total as the interior of a cave, the darkness was more of a gloaming, showing gradations of soft gray—the snow sifting at her feet, ghosting the trees, mantling large boulders—juxtaposed against the more solid black of trees bunched into ranks.

  “And why not use your headlamp?” Jack, hovering just behind her left shoulder.

  Because I want to test something. Cupping a hand against wind-driven snow, she peered into the dense, ebony wall of forest, staring between the taller, rigid ranks of trees for other shapes, closer to the ground, that didn’t quite belong—and then she spotted them, far back but unmistakable. Gotcha.

  Settled on his haunches, the alpha male was a slate-gray hulk with the others in his pack gathered behind in shadowy humps. The alpha male was an outline, a daguerreotype without detail, and yet, even with no light, she knew from the attitude of his head and prick of his ears, he was staring at her. A few moments later, she snagged a change in his scent, which was still mostly warm dog but also different. Musty and somehow ancient, the smell was primeval and stroked thoughts of a deeply green and silent forest. The smell was calm, almost serene. The smell was about companionship. Not friend but something much subtler. Closing her eyes, she cleared a space in her mind for the words to form themselves.

  We are with you, the scent said. That was the message and made sense, too. By and large, wolves were pack animals. A little like soldiers, come right down to it. Eyes still closed, she felt the edges of her mouth tug into a small smile even as her heart twisted in a sudden ache. Get cut off from your squad—lose your people, your tribe, the buddies who watched your back—and then a soldier, like a lone wolf, couldn’t count on lasting very long. What was it Gabriel said only a few hours and what felt like a thousand years ago? I miss being a part of something bigger than me. That was it. He didn’t miss the war. He missed who he had been in war.

  Her situation was different, though. She had Jack, didn’t she? Oh, who are you kidding, sweetheart? You’ve got an illusion, a phantom. Whom she could taste and feel and smell; who drove her to ecstasy . . . but was still only an amalgam of memories and nothing more than a product of a really good imagination, or—even more likely—one hell of a badass hallucination. He did go away with meds, after all. Although did that really prove anything other than she could medicate that part of her brain into submission? Muffle it enough so she couldn’t hear it shout? It reminded her of something she’d once read about how babies lost reflexes as they matured only for those same reflexes to re-emerge in adults suffering from dementia. Or what about those stories about guys who didn’t know squat about music before but composed symphonies after a bad head injury? Maybe Jack was like that. Either something very old and ancient every brain could manufacture once upon a time, or new and different, a latent talent requiring only for the right connections to be made and the correct switch thrown.

  Oh, riiight. She almost laughed out loud. Only one little fly in that ointment, sweetheart.

  No matter how real Jack felt, the simple fact was she and Jack had never made love. They had never kissed, not once. Jack was only—really—so much smoke and mirrors.

  She waited for Jack to object, but he remained silent. Maybe he couldn’t debate this or didn’t want to. Could a hallucination sulk? Have its feelings hurt? Oh, don’t be a nut. On the other hand, he might know something she didn’t, but that was about as loony-tunes as the belief that Jack could be more real than her brain could make him.

  This was the only reality, then. The snow, the wolves. What she was. Flexing her right hand, she shifted her weight on new legs and stared into the darkness at the alpha male and his pack. Their scent was heavy on her tongue and strangely sweet, and she studied them with new eyes machines smaller than a grain of sand were even now still reconfiguring, reworking.

  “Come on, guys.” She turned north, into the teeth of the wind. “Time to find our boy.”

  8

  “Something smells good.” An exaggerated inhale, and then Hank moaned as Daisy and Soldier, who’d been staring with that peculiar intensity only dogs hoping for something edible to go to ground muster, broke ranks and scrambled over for a greeting. “Oh, my God, Sarah, are those peaches?”

  “Canned, but yeah. The blueberries are fresh at least. Picked them up earlier today.” Earlier today when the world had still been relatively sane, Soldier hadn’t
nearly torn a little kid in two, and she hadn’t boogied back up to her little hideaway on the mountain where she’d subsequently dissolved into a screaming bitch, hurled wine glasses, and acted like an all-around and complete drama queen to Hank, who’d not only been patient and kind but offered her—offered Soldier—a way out that didn’t involve a needle. Then, why was she feeling so crappy again?

  Just tired. She was. The dogs always got up at the crack of dawn, which, in late summer, seemed to come even earlier on the mountain because there was nothing between her and the sunrise, and here it was, almost midnight and she was making dessert.

  Except that’s not all of it now, is it? You’re ticked off because of Hank. Annoyed, Sarah levered shut her woodstove’s oven door and then slid oven mitts from her hands. Took a little longer than necessary, too, peeling them off with the care of a brain surgeon who’d just finished a tricky operation. She knew why she dawdled and delayed. Please, get over yourself already.

  Back still turned, she said, “I had oats and sugar, so I figured I could whip us up a crisp.”

  “Sounds great.” Judging from the number of piggy little grunts, Daisy was having one hell of a tummy rub. “You like that, don’t you, don’t you, girl? I don’t know why I’m being so nice to you guys, considering that you two ate my pie.”

  “I don’t have any whipped cream, but we can throw on a little condensed milk.” She turned then. Even though she was prepared—she was the one who’d gathered the clothes together, for heaven’s sake—her heart still did a spastic little jig. Stop it, for God’s sake. She dragged up a grin that she didn’t think wobbled. “Won’t be the same, but better than nothing.”

  “The crisp is already better than nothing.” Hank was down on one knee, scrubbing Daisy, who had flopped onto her back and was wriggling like a worm. Not to be outdone, Soldier ducked under Hank’s free hand and head-butted until Hank obliged and dug at the big black shepherd’s ruff. “What do you want? What do you want, big guy, huh, huh?”

  “Some disciplinarian you are.” The cuffs of Pete’s camo pants showed a little too much ankle, and Hank was broader in the shoulders and chest so he’d left Pete’s old chambray shirt, which he’d slipped over an olive T-shirt, unbuttoned. The shirt was still tight. Hank’s biceps strained against faded denim blue. She wondered if the shirt would capture Hank’s scent now instead of Pete’s. As Hank hit Soldier’s sweet spot, the dog’s left leg began kicking furiously. “You realize that’s just reflex, right? Has nothing to do with whether he likes it or not. In fact, he might not. It would be like a doctor banging a reflex hammer against your kneecap over and over.”

  “Oh. No.” At the snippiness in her tone, Hank’s face took on the sheepish, almost guilty look of a little boy. He stopped scratching Soldier, who looked around, wondering what was going on before head-butting Hank for attention. “I didn’t know . . . no, it’s okay, boy. You’re a good dog.” Giving Soldier a perfunctory pat, he tapped Daisy on the belly. “You, too, sweetie. Come on, guys, that’s enough for now.”

  You, Sarah thought as Hank pushed to his feet, are a complete bitch. She should apologize. Instead, she said, briskly, “I’ll get your shirt, see if I can soak some of that wine out, and I’ll rinse out anything else you want. I have a clothesline we can string across the front room here, close to the stove. Things should be pretty dry by morning.”

  “Yeah. Okay.” Slipping his hands into the back pockets of Pete’s camo pants, Hank looked around with a vague expression. “Ah . . . is there anything I can do to help? Maybe set up the cot or let the dogs out, maybe take them for a little walk to work off all that huckleberry pie? Wait.” He snapped his fingers. “You said Daisy doesn’t like the snow, right?” At the sound of her name, the little dog bounced over, tail whipping furiously, to nose at Hank’s ankles until he relented and reached down to ruffle Daisy’s long ears.

  “You’re going to spoil her.” She felt her mouth kick into a grin as Daisy let out a blissful sigh and leaned into Hank’s legs. “More than she already is, I mean.”

  “I don’t mind. Some girls just need a little extra TLC now and again.” And then, before she could think of a riposte, Hank went on, “Doesn’t she need something special, a poop spot or something?”

  “Snow does bring out her inner drama queen.” Pot calling the kettle black, sweetheart? “Back in Kalispell, I shovel a path to her favorite tree and even then, she isn’t thrilled. She’ll pee, but there’s something about pooping she just doesn’t like.”

  “I could shovel a path now.”

  “There are only four or five inches.”

  “That was when we were up in the tower, and it’s still coming down. We’ll have to shovel again in the morning, but it’s something to do while the crisp bakes. I’ll get that done and work on a path to the outhouse while I’m at it.” The left corner of his mouth showed a dimple as he quirked a grin. “Give you some privacy so you can have your bath, too.”

  “I didn’t get as soaked as you. I’m okay.”

  “Well, actually”—Hank wrinkled his nose—“it wouldn’t do you any harm.”

  She was about to be offended, caught herself, said, “Okay. Thanks.”

  “No problem. Just point me at a shovel. How much time before the crisp is ready?” When she told him, he spread his hands. “Thirty minutes is perfect.”

  “Your coat’s still pretty wet. It’ll freeze in the wind.”

  “Shoveling will keep me plenty warm.”

  “Mmmm.” She thought a second. “Whoever was here last year left this big old cardigan wrapped up in dry-cleaner’s plastic. I kept meaning to contact the park service people, ask who’d been here last, but just never got around to it.” She swept a critical eye up and down. “Should fit.”

  “That’ll work.” Turning to the dogs: “What about it, guys, want to come help me shovel?” As she moved to the bedroom to dig out the cardigan, Hank called after, “Oh, say, you said you have condensed milk? Ever have snow ice cream?”

  Snow? “No.” She wrinkled her nose. “Sounds kind of unsanitary.”

  “Well, yeah, if you go for yellow snow, but don’t tell me little Miss Sarah Grant never once stuck out her tongue to catch snowflakes or ate a snowball.”

  “Sure, but . . .” She heard the defensive note and dialed it back. “I just never had snow ice cream is all. I don’t have a crank or ice cream maker or anything either.”

  He flapped a hand. “Don’t need it because the snow’s already cold. It’s easy. Us kids would make some up whenever it snowed.” At her doubtful look: “You’ll like it. Promise.”

  “Okay, sure.” Whatever. Why was she being such a grump? Forcing some enthusiasm into her voice, she asked, “So what do you need?”

  “A great big bowl, milk, sugar, snow.” Hank ticked items off on his fingers. “A little salt and some elbow grease. Vanilla would be cool, but beggars can’t be choosers.”

  That made something go ding. She held up a finger. “You know, I’ve got this little plastic bottle of chocolate syrup. I made hot chocolate early in the season when it was still pretty chilly at night and I wanted something sweet.” She’d also slurped down several sinful spoonfuls, doling them out like medicine—chocolate really did help beat the blues and with all the humping around the mountain and chopping wood, she could afford the calories—but there was no way she was admitting that.

  “Then we’re set. You get cleaned up, I’ll shovel, and then we’ll make ice cream for our crisp. Which reminds me.” Hank favored the dogs with an exaggerated scowl. “First dog to lay a paw on my dessert gets kicked off the island.”

  9

  Twenty minutes later, she was drying off by the hard, white light of a Coleman. With no woodstove, this back room was also colder than the front, and she shivered as the chill stroked long fingers over her skin, teasing the soft down along her arms and the nape of her neck, and knuckling her nipples. Had it been only a day since she’d stood here, touching herself, aching for Pete? Denying hersel
f that pleasure? Any pleasure?

  You’re becoming a professional martyr, you know that?

  Between fists of wind that grabbed the cabin for a good shake, she caught snippets of Hank talking to the dogs. A nice thing, actually, having another voice up here. Before she stripped, she’d heard him stomp around to the lean-to where she stored both wood and her tools, and then the excited yawping of the dogs. Her bedroom’s one window had curtains, but they were flimsy and old enough to be see-through, not that she’d ever worried about Peeping Toms and so hadn’t given this another thought. At that moment, though, a bolt of light speared through snow and then Hank—bulky cardigan buttoned midway to his chest—had passed on his way to the lean-to, Soldier by his side trotting through snow already deep enough to cover his hocks. Daisy was nowhere to be seen, but that figured. For a Montana pound-pooch, the little dog really was a delicate Eastern flower. When Hank ducked back out again, shovel in hand, and turned to cock her a wave, though, she spotted the bulge just below his chest. A second later, Daisy poked her head through a gap in the cardigan, grinned, and yapped, Hey, hey, lookit!

  She’d laughed, waved—and then, even knowing Hank would be working his way around front and couldn’t possibly sneak a peek, she shook out an extra blanket to wedge over the curtain rod, just to be on the safe side.

  Like you think he just wouldn’t be able to help himself? Snorting, she toweled her tumble of auburn hair, shivering again as damp hair brushed her shoulders and whisked over the hollow of her throat. Dream on, sweetheart.

  “And what the hell are you dreaming about anyway?” Stupid question to which she already knew the answer: because Pete and Hank were just enough alike that she could fool herself, lose herself—and that was so damned pathetic.