Forged in Smoke (A Red-Hot SEALs Novel Book 3) (19 page)

With a snort, he picked up his pace. “Anythin’s possible.”

While he didn’t sound like he believed her new explanation, that earlier tension seeped out of his muscles.

Faith relaxed against him again. He appeared to carry her with no effort, but it wasn’t fair to let him do all the work. She was perfectly capable of walking—even if she didn’t want to. Even if she’d much rather lie here and wallow in the pleasure of his closeness and the feel of his hard, warm muscles rubbing against her body. Drown in the hot, musky scent swirling around her head.

Good lord, did the man ever
feel
and
smell
delectable.

“I’m perfectly capable of walking,” she finally forced herself to admit.

“I’m sure you are.” He stopped long enough to give her a subtle hug. “Just kick back and relax. No sense in tuckerin’ yourself out. Everyone’s waiting for us just up ahead.”

She glanced down the dusky tunnel, for the first time realizing there was a flashlight beam bouncing around up ahead—leading the way. Which explained why the area around them was dusky rather than dark. Some of the light ahead must be filtering back.

“Who’s up there?” she asked. All she could make out was a bulky shadow.

“Cosky and Kait.”

Oh . . .

Her mind shifted gears. “Was anyone hurt? Did everyone make it out of the cabins okay?”

“Everyone else is fine.”

Everyone
else
, as in
she
wasn’t fine. Possibly her willingness to remain in his arms was giving him the wrong impression.

“Honestly, I’m fine. Put me down.”

“No.” His arms tightening, he continued walking.

Well, fine then. She’d just enjoy the ride. With that in mind she looped her arms around his neck and settled back down to enjoy his muscles and scent. Her momma hadn’t raised a fool.

The silence that fell between them was easy. Comfortable. She gave in to the impulse to close her eyes and doze.

“Faith.”

“Hmmmm.”

“Do you remember anythin’ from when you were out? When your heart stopped?”

That question brought her head up. “What do you mean?”

He was quiet for a moment. And then a shrug lifted the arms curled around his neck. “You have any weird dreams? Any stray memories? Anythin’ odd happen back then?”

She frowned. “Like what?”

Stillness fell again, only this time it lacked the ease of earlier.

“Any
. . .
you know
. . .
out-of-body kinda experiences?” he finally asked after the silence had dragged on far too long.

She raised her eyebrows at the combination of curiosity and discomfort in his voice. “You mean like an NDE?”

“Yeah, like that.”

“No. There was nothing like that.”

What an odd question. Why in the world would he ask about near-death experiences? But his question elicited another memory.

The rifle lifting. Rawls spinning in a circle shouting a name. Pachico. Pachico—who was dead and apparently acting as Rawls’s ghost.

Suddenly the question about NDEs made sense.

And just like that it was her turn for curiosity. She tried to frame her question as tactfully as possible. “Is that what happened to you that night you were shot in the woods? Is that where you picked up your ghost?”

He’d told her in the kitchen the day before that he’d been mortally wounded and Kait had healed him. Maybe he’d experienced something akin to a near-death experience while he was out, and the experience had paved the foundation for his delusion.

“My ghost,” he repeated beneath his breath in a disgusted voice.

Who was that irritation directed at? Him? Her? Pachico? All three of them?

Nor did it escape her notice that he hadn’t answered either of her questions. Obviously he didn’t want to talk about what he’d gone through. She swallowed her brewing sermon on the scientific veracity of near-death experiences. As someone with wide experience in the medical profession, he would have heard all the competing theories.

His ghost, on the other hand, that was just too tempting a subject to ignore. “Is Pachico here?”

A slight twitch of his shoulder was the only indication he’d heard the question. But once again he refused to participate. Apparently the topic of his ghost was off limits too.

Well, that was just too bad.

However, her plan to pester the information out of him vanished beneath a wave of exhaustion. Apparently, her body recommended immediate sleep to offset its recent ordeal. It didn’t help that his arms were warm and comforting or that with each step, he rocked her. Her eyes drifted closed
. . .
she’d just rest for a while
. . .
plenty of time to ask about his ghost later.

Eric Manheim scowled as he dropped his cell phone on the breakfast table.

Breathing deeply, he counted to ten while sitting perfectly still. Damn it. Another delay. Another fuckup. They’d found their targets, even had the camp surrounded. They’d had every fucking thing in place. Was it too much to ask that things go according to plan?

“Problem?” Esme murmured, commiseration warming her pale blue gaze.

He focused on her face. Breathed in her light, breezy scent, and the frustration eased. Her eyes never failed to fascinate him, shifting as they did between pale icy-blue and brilliant azure, depending on the whim of the lighting or her emotions of the moment.

“The signal’s gone underground,” Eric told her tightly.

“How far and where underground?” Esme folded her newspaper in half and set it neatly on the glass table beside her cup of tea.

“Twenty feet, give or take, within a thousand feet of their camp. Apparently, the campsite was built over some kind of rabbit’s warren.”

He hadn’t taken any chances this time. He’d surrounded the camp with snipers before calling in the air strike. He’d covered every angle—except the damn ground.

Irritation flared. If he were lucky, eventually the signal would simply cease, indicating that the boys had died beneath ground. With the compound exploding above them, there was a good chance the tunnel had collapsed, burying them.

But he couldn’t count on luck.

“Are you sure the SEALs are with them? From the satellite images, their camp is a cluster of small cabins. What are the chances they’re all living in the same space? Or that Chastain’s widow is staying in the same one with them. As a mother with young children, she’ll want her privacy.”

Eric nodded absently. The men could have been staying in different cabins. But it didn’t matter. If Mrs. Chastain and her kids had been able to escape into the tunnels, the frogs could have too.

“We’ll just have to wait them out. Eventually they’ll surface to find food or water. When they do, we’ll move on them. If Mackenzie and his men are in the tunnels, we’ll take them out at the same time as we hit Chastain’s family.” He relaxed and smiled across the table at her.

He saw the flash of regret cross Esme’s face and reached for her hand, squeezing it comfortingly. His wife had a soft heart. While she understood that the deaths of Amy Chastain’s children were for the greater good, an absolute necessity, she didn’t like it.

For her sake, if there had been a way to kill the SEALs without involving the two boys, he would have taken it. He didn’t derive pleasure from the slaughter of innocent children either. But the SEALs had gone to ground, and there’d been no other way to flush them out.

So for the sake of the millions of lives he’d be saving in the future, he’d see Amy Chastain’s sons die in the now.

And he’d bear that black mark on his soul with no regret.

But then he froze. His whole plan rested on the kids exiting the tunnels at some point. But what if they didn’t need to? Mackenzie’s men were seasoned veterans. They’d have prepared for a retreat. Stocked for it. They’d have food and water stored in the tunnels. His best bet was to call in another air strike. Hit the bastards with a lot more firepower, enough to blast a twenty-foot hole in the ground. Make sure they never emerged from those tunnels.

Of course, it was also highly possible, probable even, that the boys would remain in the safety of the tunnel, while the men snuck aboveground to clear the camp of intruders. They were SEALs after all. Trained warriors with years of battle experience behind them. They weren’t going to wait belowground while their enemies destroyed everything.

They’d join the fight. Or even take the fight to Eric’s crew.

He swore beneath his breath and reached for his phone. Last time one of his teams had tangled with Mackenzie and the rest of those bloody sods, they’d paid for it with their lives. Every last one of them. He’d lost an entire team, along with their chopper, and those bastards had escaped without a scratch.

True—he was using a different contractor, one who’d provided his own team, but it wouldn’t hurt to remind the man of the results from the first skirmish with this group.

Or what the consequences would be if it happened again.

Chapter Thirteen

C
LEARLY
,
LACK OF
oxygen hadn’t damaged Faith’s mind.

Torn between relief and rankling irritation, Rawls blew out a frustrated breath. She’d awakened with her intellect fully intact, along with her stubborn refusal to consider anything that didn’t fit neatly into her scientific mindset.

The discovery that Kait had completely healed her—sweet Jesus, even retrieved her from the dead—had kicked off a full-blown chorus of hallelujah in his head. The euphoria had lasted right up until Faith opened her mouth to contradict everything he’d told her. It was the first time in his life he’d wanted to kiss a woman and shake her simultaneously.

A steady glow appeared ahead, intensifying the closer they got. Cosky and Kait melted into the brilliance.

Looks like they’d officially reached the rendezvous point.

“Hot damn.” A transparent shape slipped past him and approached the hub at full-speed ahead.

Just . . . perfect . . .

Rawls scowled.

His ghost—as Faith insisted on calling it—had returned immediately after the healing. It had been remarkably docile since its reappearance. Holding its tongue and antics in check. Of course, Rawls hadn’t taken any chances. He’d removed the ammunition from the SCAR PD assault weapon and the Glock 17. Pachico might have succeeded in manipulating the rifle, but he’d find it a lot more challenging removing the rounds from Rawls’s pocket and inserting them into the guns.

Erring on the same side of caution, he’d hung way back from Cosky too. Effectively creating a lengthy barricade between his transparent troll and his teammate, or rather his teammate’s weaponry.

At least for the time being.

Dread building, he paused, watching as Pachico abruptly stopped as well. The time had come to admit to his hitchhiker and warn everyone. Now that Pachico had mastered the ability to lift and point weapons, it was only a matter of time before he figured out how to compress the trigger. Trapped, as they were, in such a small space, someone was bound to pay the price.

Frustration swelled, a thick clout of tension in his chest. Yet avoiding the hub was a false hope. If he didn’t show up, his teammates would come looking for him. Likely Kait and Beth too. As much as he’d tried to avoid it, to protect everyone, his mere presence would place everyone in immediate danger.

Even more maddening was the fact that they wouldn’t believe him any more than Faith had. At least until the first shot was fired.

His best bet was to drop Faith off, and get the hell out of there. Return to his original plan of avoiding everyone in favor of lurking in the woods. But to do that, he needed to pass through that cave. It was the only passage to the outside world now that all access points behind him had been blown.

He stared at the radiant cavern and the shadowy figures drifting around within. Knowing his teammates and company protocol, the damn place would be bristling with weapons. A virtual treasure trove to a disgruntled ghost.

Swearing beneath his breath so as not to awake Faith, who’d taken to dozing against his chest, he backed up, dragging Pachico away from that shiny beacon of peril.

It made more sense to let his buddies come to him. It would be easier to monitor a couple of weapons rather than dozens of them. He would explain the situation to Zane and Cosky—maybe Mac—and let them explain it to the rest.

Jude stepped into the mouth of the cave, his big body blocking the spill of light, his silhouette a hulking, menacing shadow.

Wolf and Jude shared similar ancestry. Did that mean he’d be as open to the possibility of ghosts as his gruff commanding officer?

“Goddamn you,” Pachico yelled as he stumbled backward. “How about you stop being a fucking jackass, and I’ll leave your girlfriend alone?”

Faith stirred, her head lifting.

Jude’s hand went to his chest. Suddenly he stepped out of the cavern and headed toward Rawls.

“I’m serious, you fucking shithead. Don’t think I won’t—”

Pachico abruptly disappeared.

What the . . . ?

Rawls froze, scanning the tunnel ahead. No, it hadn’t been a trick of his beleaguered imagination. The bastard really was gone. And the dematerialization had been sudden too, without any of the normal triggers.

Except
. . .
his mind flashed back to that moment at the stream with Wolf. Pachico had blinked out then too.

He turned his head and stared at Jude, who was rapidly approaching.
What the fuck?
Did the Arapaho nation possess some secret weapon that jettisoned ghosts?

“What’s wrong?” Faith asked, her voice thick and sleepy and sexy as hell. “You look angry.” She turned her head, following his gaze to Jude, and stiffened slightly in his arms. “You can put me down now.”

When her demand penetrated his mind, Rawls’s arms instinctively tightened. The most absurd fear had struck at the thought of letting her go, as though the only thing anchoring her to life was the strength of his arms. Which was ridiculous—her heart had been beating on its own when he’d picked her up.

He hadn’t been the one to drag her back into the land of the living—Kait had done that.

“I’m serious, Rawls,” she hissed, jabbing him in the chest with her elbow. “This is embarrassing.”

When he didn’t release her, she struggled in earnest, which raised the alarming question of whether his hold was bruising her. His stomach twisted at the possibility of hurting her, so he reluctantly released her and lowered her to the ground. She wavered there for a moment under his steadying grip, and then her legs took control.

Her relieved sigh when her muscles kicked in was loud—hell, probably loud enough for Jude to hear—and then she got to work straightening her clothes. The smoothing, tucking, and tugging went on so long it got downright amusing. His irritation dissipated beneath the rising humor.

“Darlin’,” he said around the edges of a grin. “Much more of that and your knickers are liable to file harassment charges.”

Her hands froze. Bright red swarmed her cheeks. She looked so uncomfortable and lost standing there, her hands clenched at her sides, uncertainty swimming in her eyes, that the urge to laugh vanished.

“Hey!” He framed her face and kissed her forehead, the tenderness rising so thick and fast he thought he might drown beneath it. “You’re perfect the way you are. No need for fussin’.”

She relaxed beneath his hands and leaned against him, pressing her mouth against his throat. Her lips were soft against his skin, silky
. . .
hot as hell. They burned the tenderness right out of him. His hands dropped to her hips and pulled her hard against his crotch.

As his head lowered, his mouth searching out hers, a loud cough sounded beside them. Faith broke away with a startled gasp, as though they’d been caught doing something shameful.

Well, hell . . .

Rawls looked up with a scowl. Looks like he had two bones to pick with the Arapaho warrior. He got right down to the first one. “You want to tell me why Pachico vamooses when you or Wolf show up, but not when anyone else is nearby?”

Faith twitched at the question. She obviously hadn’t expected him to publicly admit to his ghost.

Jude’s face tensed. The lines bracketing his mouth deepened in disapproval and discomfort. “It is not wise to speak of the
biitei
. Acknowledging it brings it much power.”

“You didn’t answer my question,” Rawls snapped. He had no intention of being led down an Arapaho rabbit hole. “Why did it disappear when you approached?”

His face impassive, Jude tugged up the thin leather cord draping his neck, and lifted it from beneath his T-shirt. Dangling from the bottom was a tiny, circular weaving.

“Okay.” Rawls leaned in for a closer look. It resembled a primitive sun, with eight triangular spokes circling the outer edge. Upon closer look, the spiked sunburst was repeated again and again within the weaving—the pattern stacked in on itself in rich reds and blues. “You want to tell me what that is?”

“Protection,” Jude said succinctly.

From ghosts, apparently. Which made sense considering Pachico had vanished as Jude approached.

“Wolf have one of these things?”

Jude tucked the weaving back under his shirt and rearranged the cord around his neck. “We all wear a
hiixoyooniiheiht.”

Wolf had known about Pachico. He’d known Rawls was being haunted.

“No shit,” Rawls said, fury rising. “Why the hell didn’t Wolf tell me about this thing? Loan me one? Help me out just a fuckin’ bit?”

Faith shot him a surprised look as the f-bomb broke loose, but sweet Jesus, he’d been going certifiably crazy over the past few days. Not to mention how dangerous his transparent troll had become recently. Someone could have been seriously hurt. Wolf could have saved him a boatload of frustration and worry if he’d just opened his damn mouth and explained about this ghost-protection amulet.

Jude shrugged. “
Hiixoyooniiheiht
are created specifically for an individual, using the individual’s blood. They are not interchangeable.”

Blowing out a frustrated breath, Rawls regrouped. “How’s it work?”

Jude’s face collapsed back into its normal fountain of inscrutability. “That is the
notonheihii’s
domain, not ours to know.”

Rawls took a deep breath and counted to ten. The bastard had to be deliberately trying to piss him off.

“Did you see it?” Faith interrupted, sharp interest in her eyes.

“Only one who has dwelled in
hiihooteet
and walked the other side can see a
biitei.
”

Faith’s eyebrows crinkled. “Then how do you know it was there? How do you know ghosts even exist?”

Jude turned an indulgent look on her. “How does one know the wind exists?”

Faith’s eyes widened and pure exasperation flooded her face. “That’s not the same thing
at all
!” She leaned forward, her body practically vibrating with irritation. “I can quantify the wind. I can measure its velocity with an anemometer. I can see its effect on vegetation or kites or birds with my own eyes. I can capture it to power a sailboat or a windmill. I can measure everything about it from direction to miles per hour.”

Rawls choked back a sputter of laughter and hauled her back, anchoring her to his side. Sweet baby Jesus, she looked like she wanted to go after the man with her bare hands.

“I reckon the wind wasn’t the best comparison,” Rawls drawled.

Faith tipped her head back, gazing up at him with wide, earnest eyes. “I’m just saying there are plenty of scientific experiments that prove the existence of wind. However, there isn’t one that proves the presence of ghosts.”

He reached out to stroke her cheek. “You may not be able to see Pachico, Faith—but I can. I have.”

“Well, you might think—”

“Let’s table this discussion for now,” Rawls interrupted before she had a chance to launch an attack on his credibility or mental stability and get him all disgruntled again.

After a small hesitation, Faith nodded.

Rawls turned back to Jude. “So as long as you stick close to me, we can keep my invisible hitchhiker at bay.”

Jude frowned, looking uncomfortable again. “This
biitei
is bound to you. Only a
hiixoyooniiheiht
created for you, from you, will keep it at bay. Nor is it wise to allow it access to my or Wolf’s
hiixoyooniiheiht
. It will test the protection spells. Adjust to them, weakening your own
hiixoyooniiheiht
once Wolf arrives with it.”

Well that was news. “Wolf’s bringin’ me one of those things?”

Jude simply nodded.

“You said it had to be made from my blood—”

“Created, not made,” Jude corrected.

Yeah, well, same difference as far as Rawls could tell, not that it mattered in the grand scheme of things. “How’d he get my blood?”

But he suddenly knew. Wolf had asked about his shirt, the one Rawls had been wearing when he’d taken the bullets. He frowned, shook his head. There was no way Wolf would have had time to swing by the cabin Rawls shared with Mac, grab the bloody shirt out of the garbage, and then abscond on the helicopter before Rawls had even reached the helicopter pad. He hadn’t been that far behind the big bastard. So what had Wolf used?

An even more important question hit him. Why hadn’t Wolf, or Jude, told him what was happening and how to combat it?

Anger rushed him. Someone should have told him.

“Wise or not, you’re gonna have to stick to me like butter and keep that thing away as long as possible. My
biitei
”—he stumbled over the word, mangling it in the process—“has learned to manipulate objects in our world, which is dangerous as hell considerin’ all the weapons ahead. Plus”—he broke off, shooting a quick glance at Faith. He hadn’t told her this part yet. Not that she would believe him—“there’s this possession thing he’s got goin’.”

A jolt vibrated through Jude’s body, shaking the impassiveness loose. Alarm tensed his face and tightened the skin around his eyes. “It has skin-walked?”

Skin-walked . . . interesting term for that nightmare in the kitchen.

Rawls nodded, glancing meaningfully toward Faith.

It was Faith’s turn to jolt. “Oh come on, I would know if—”

“The kitchen,” Rawls reminded her, dismissing the disbelief on her face. He’d already known she wouldn’t believe him.

“This
. . .
this
. . .
is not good.” Jude shook his head, obviously struggling to regain his mantle of eerie calm. “One does not expect such escalation from a fledgling.”

“So you’ll stick close to me?”

Although he looked royally unhappy at the prospect, Jude agreed with a brusque nod.

And just like that the tension whooshed out of Rawls.

Finally,
finally
he had the means to protect his people. A thick, pervasive blanket of oppression lifted, and he emerged a thousand pounds lighter.

“Rawls,” Mac yelled from the cavern’s entrance, beckoning him forward.