Forged in Smoke (A Red-Hot SEALs Novel Book 3) (5 page)

Cosky grimaced, absently stroking a finger across his eyebrow. “I’ll have Kait ask him.”

A moment of silence fell.

“What about Rawls?” Zane asked, his tone careful. “We may need his med kit.”

More tense silence. Along with furrowed brows.

As quietly as possible, so she wouldn’t interrupt their conversation, Faith removed two loaves of bread from the oven and set them on the counter to cool.

“Have either of you seen him today?” Mac asked, scrubbing a hand down his tight face. At the shake of Zane’s and Cosky’s heads, he grunted. “He talk to either of you about what’s going on?”

More head-shaking.

Faith frowned. There had been something strange about that situation involving Seth Rawlings in the woods after Wolf’s house had exploded. Something odd, and it continued to itch at her. The man had been lying there, still as death, drenched in blood. She’d been horrified, mournful, certain he’d been dead. Only suddenly, he’d opened his eyes. And then there had been no wounds when Amy had wiped him down with the wet cloth.

Cosky and Zane claimed blood transfer was to blame for his saturated clothes—that the body he’d collapsed onto had been riddled with bullets and had bled out. But if that were the case, if Seth Rawlings hadn’t been wounded, what had triggered his collapse and unconsciousness in the first place? What was causing his current erratic behavior? And even more troublesome, what accounted for
. . .
the glowing? Cosky and Kait, even Rawls
. . .
all three of them had been wrapped in a luminous silver sheen.

With a shake of her head, she shrugged the memory aside. Likely it had been a trick of her eyes, the play of moonlight against the darkness. But still—something about that night prickled at her, and her instincts whispered that whatever had happened out there that dark, dangerous night played directly into Rawlings’s erratic behavior of today.

“I know he’s your medic, but if he snaps and starts shouting at an inopportune time
. . .
” Amy’s voice trailed off.

From the grim expressions stamped across the three SEALs’ faces, they shared her concerns.

“He’s sitting this one out.” Mackenzie turned to Zane. “Talk to him. He’s a liability in his current condition. And for Christ’s sake, find out what the hell’s going on.” His scowl disintegrated into a grimace, and then a sigh. “I’ll talk to Wolf, see if he’s got anyone with medical experience we can borrow.”

From eavesdropping on the random conversations that took place across the kitchen counter, it sounded like Lieutenant Rawlings had more than mere medical experience. Indeed, he was as close to a doctor as one could get without completing their internship. Cosky had told Kait that Rawls had graduated from medical school and passed his medical exams, he’d even completed his first two rotations of internship. Why in the world he’d thrown all of that away to join the navy and eventually the SEALs, well, that just wasn’t her business, was it?

What was her business was whether he was mentally stable enough to approach with her problem and whether he could write prescriptions. Or if he couldn’t write her a prescription, whether he knew someone who could—someone who’d fill her prescriptions with no questions asked and no medical history required.

The medical history was bound to get sticky, considering she’d been listed as dead by the King County coroner earlier in the week.

She’d been off the immune suppressors for six days now. In most cases, donor rejection was chronic, rather than acute, so the damage to her heart would accumulate over a period of time. As long as the cyclosporine and mycophenolate were reinstated at a higher dose soon, the immune-system suppression should occur soon enough to prevent damage to her heart.

The ventricular tachycardia, however, was a different obstacle completely. She needed that prescription of Cordarone. Every day without it put her life at risk. She had four doses left in the bottle; after that she’d be courting a heart attack with every beat of her heart.

She was down to the wire now. She’d tried to find Rawlings time after time, but the man was a master at avoiding unwanted company. And while he wore a walkie-talkie, along with the rest of the men in camp, she didn’t particularly relish the thought of her medical history floating over the airwaves and around camp. Unfortunately, she’d officially run out of time. She was going to have to approach Zane or Cosky and ask one of them to contact Rawlings for her. And no doubt they’d want to know why.

She shook her head in disgust and scowled down at the kitchen counter. She should have just stuck it out earlier, regardless of Wolf’s interference, and asked the pair for help then.

“We’ll discuss scheduling when Wolf returns,” Mac said, his gaze hard on Amy’s face, as though he expected her to protest.

“I want to pick up Mom while we have the chopper. She’d be safer with Zane’s father and his crazy-ass friends than where she’s currently holed up,” Simcosky announced, his square face uncompromising. He held Mac’s gaze steadily.

The commander shrugged. “That’s Wolf’s call.”

Faith swallowed a comment. The whole operation would be Wolf’s call since he owned the helicopter. But she didn’t bring that salient fact to the commander’s attention. Her standard operating procedure during the SEALs’ strategy sessions was to pretend she was invisible. Sometimes it felt like she actually was invisible, the men ignored her so completely.

Not that she was complaining—there was a reason invisibility was considered a superpower.

Maybe by the time Mackenzie’s contacts located Dr. Benton and the rest of her crew, she’d have eavesdropped on enough conversations to know whether she could trust them with the real reason her friends had been targeted and taken—assuming, of course, that they weren’t planning on packing her off to God knew where with Kait and Beth and the rest of the women.

Chapter Three

T
EN MINUTES AFTER
Wolf took to the skies, Rawls dragged one of the kitchen chairs into his bedroom and shoved it against the wall next to the window, angling it until he had a clear view of the helipad. He’d know the minute Wolf returned to the compound.

He scanned the room for Pachico’s translucent form, but his ghost was still missing. The sudden silence after days of endless chatter, and obnoxious top-of-the-lungs singing, weighed on him, filled him with ominous portent. The calm gave him way too much time and peace to think, which led to questioning
. . .

How much of the past five days had been real versus hallucinations? Had Pachico even existed? Or—more specifically—had the transparent version of Pachico been a product of a damaged mind?

Before settling into the chair to watch for Wolf’s return, he backtracked to the kitchen, pulled open the cupboard above the stainless-steel sink, and dragged down the bottle of Jack Daniel’s Tennessee Honey. Bottle in one hand and an eight-ounce juice glass in the other, he backtracked to his bedroom and settled into the wood chair.

He set the bottle on the windowsill and stared at it. The golden liquid inside glowed with molten intensity beneath the sun’s rays.

Since that incident when Zane and Cos had walked in on him yelling at Pachico to “shut the Goddamn fuck up” he’d spent from dawn to dusk outside, avoiding his camp mates as much as possible. When he did return to the cabin, it was to sleep. Or try to anyway. Pachico had turned sleeping into an exercise of frustration and futility.

It didn’t matter how much toilet paper he jammed into his ears, or how hard he pressed the pillow over his head, Pachico’s voice never dulled. In retrospect, the fact that he hadn’t been able to mute the bastard’s singing lent credence to the possibility the ghost was a byproduct of blood loss and his oxygen-deprived, damaged mind. If Pachico had been a hallucination, external methods to muffle his yammering would prove ineffectual.

No matter how he broke it down, he couldn’t escape one hard fact. There was absolutely no evidence proving that Pachico had actually existed in that incorporeal state. Nothing to verify that Rawls hadn’t lost his damn mind and dreamed the whole damn thing up. Hell, even the conversation with Wolf earlier could have been a product of his overactive imagination.

It was hell not trusting your own mind.

With a tense hand Rawls reached for the bottle of Tennessee Honey, rotating it on the windowsill. He’d found the bottle three days ago. It had been full back then. It was still full. A miracle considering that every chorus of that endless song had pushed him closer to twisting the cap and breaking the seal. Thus breaking a promise he’d made thirteen years ago.

A promise to himself
. . .
and to his sister, even though Sarah had been dead by then—past caring what he did or didn’t do with his life. Past blaming him for the trajectory her short life had taken because of him.

Past blaming him, something his mother and father—hell, even he himself—hadn’t been able to get past.

He slowly turned the bottle again, watching the amber liquid inside the glass burn, as though the sun were boiling the booze trapped inside. Tennessee Honey was the kind of smooth, sweet liquor Sarah would have appreciated back in the day.

He’d gone for the harder stuff, booze with a bite, although he’d never crossed the line between partier and alcoholic. He’d been too committed to medicine to make that mistake. Driven to join his father and grandfather in the family tradition of surgical medicine—in wielding the power of life and death. So while he’d partied hard over semester and summer breaks, it hadn’t affected his studies, his residency, or his life
. . .
until Miami. Until his alcohol-induced recklessness had stolen Sarah’s life and sent his into a 360-degree tailspin.

From his third year of surgical residency to Navy SEAL in six months. What a curve his life had taken. And once again he was reeling from a 360-degree wipeout. Only this time, he had no clue what his life would look like once the world stopped spinning.

“Jesus Christ, Doc. At the rate you’re moving, you’ll never get that damn shirt off her. How about—” Pachico’s voice cut off. He rocked back on his heels and took a long, slow look around. “What the fuck
. . .
when—” His mouth snapped shut and an unsettled expression crossed his face.

Rawls staggered up from the kitchen chair, stunned by the hot rush of relief that hit him. Sure, the asshole’s reappearance didn’t prove Rawls’s sanity. Pachico could still be a delusion, but when he was walking and talking, or more apt—singing—he didn’t feel like a hallucination.

“What the hell happened to you?” Rawls asked.

Something had kicked his transparent stalker out of existence—at least this existence, this world. It hadn’t been for long, maybe fifteen minutes, but if he could figure out how and why, he’d have control over the bastard, and the ability to boot him at will.

“What the fuck are you yakking about?” Pachico asked, but the uneasy expression in his eyes belied his truculent question.

Pachico knew he’d blinked out for a bit. The look of shocked surprise on his face to find himself in the bedroom instead of the woods had been a dead giveaway.

“You disappeared,” Rawls shot back. “You were gone fifteen minutes. Why? Where did you go?”

He suspected the questions were a waste of breath. If the ghost had remembered going somewhere, he wouldn’t have shown such astonishment when he’d found himself back in the cabin. For the moment at least, Rawls bet he had more answers than his ghost did. Or at least one answer. The big one.

Wolf.

But he’d be keeping that name under his hat until he had a chance to question the man.

“I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about,” Pachico growled, a stony expression dropping over his face.

Sure he didn’t. “We were out at the creek, then you up and vamoosed. What’s the last thing you remember?”

The real question was whether he remembered Wolf’s approach. Since the bastard had been totally focused on Faith, Rawls was pretty certain the answer to the Wolf question was no.

“That it’s none of your fucking business, that’s what I remember,” Pachico snapped. “And I think you’ve lost focus here, Doc. You ready to make that call?”

“No,” Rawls countered with a dry smile. “I reckon you were at five hundred and one.”

Through the bedroom doorway came the sound of a fist at the cabin’s front entry, followed by the squeak of the door opening and the muted bang as it fell shut again. Rawls tensed, turning to face the hallway. Only his teammates would enter on a knock, without introducing themselves first. The women in the compound were more polite; they waited for acknowledgment.

He listened to the sound of boots hitting the plank floor. Zane from the sound of them. Cos had a quicker pace, and Mac was faster still—clipped and impatient rather than brisk.

“Five hundred bottles of beer on the wall, five hundred bottles of beer—”

Rawls groaned beneath his breath. Yeah, this conversation was bound to be fun. He’d be lucky to hear a tenth of what his LC had to say.

After another fist against the bedroom doorjamb, which Rawls saw but couldn’t hear, Zane stepped into the room. He stopped halfway between the door and Rawls. And thank you, Jesus, Pachico shut the fuck up. Had Zane’s arrival kicked him out of existence? It hadn’t the last time Zane had visited. Rawls shot his ghost a quick look. It hadn’t this time either. Based on Pachico’s expression, he was simply more interested in what Zane had to say than torturing his ride-along.

“Who were you talking to?” Zane asked with a long, slow look around the bedroom.

Ah hell, apparently the cabin walls hadn’t muffled his voice. Of course the living room windows were open
. . .
Rawls groaned beneath his breath in disgust. This was exactly why he’d taken to hiding out in the woods.

“Nobody.” At Zane’s raised brow, Rawls shrugged. “Talkin’ to myself. Ain’t no crime in that.”

A tense silence settled over the room.

Zane was the one to break it. “You know we’ve got your back. No matter what. You can tell us what the hell’s going on.”

Yeah? How was he supposed to tell his best friend that he was quite possibly certifiably crazy—as in
actually
certifiably crazy? What was the protocol for that conversation? A case of Coors, a jumbo bag of chips, a ball game on the telly, and during the intermission just throw the admission out there like a mortar shell?

“Goddamn it”—frustration tightened Zane’s voice—“you forget what being a member of ST7 means?”

Rawls stared at the ground so hard his eyes burned. He knew exactly what being on the team meant. Unqualified, absolute support from your teammates. But hell, there were certain qualifications an operator had to possess to secure that spot in the Zodiac. One of those qualifications was mental health, and the very definition of mental health was the absence of delusions involving ghosts.

How many of his teammates would jump into the beach boat beside him if they knew he was stuck in his own production of
The Sixth Sense
?

“Fine.” Zane released a sharp breath and tightened his shoulders. Rawls knew him well enough to catch the displeasure and frustration lurking beneath his flat expression. “As soon as the chopper returns, we’re headed out to grab Amy’s kids and Cosky’s mom.” When Rawls’s head came up, Zane shook his. “You’re sitting this one out, holding down camp.”

Rawls simply nodded, unsurprised. His LC’s caution was well placed—they both knew it. He couldn’t be trusted during the risky mobilization of a team insertion when lack of focus could result in casualties.

Zane cocked his head and studied Rawls’s face for a moment, as though expecting a protest, before continuing. “Keep an eye on Beth for me. This morning sickness is giving her hell, but she needs to eat. She likes French toast. Maybe ask Faith to make some?” At Rawls’s nod, Zane hesitated and shrugged. “Wolf’s leaving one of his guys to help out in case of trouble.”

Rawls’s lips twisted. Wasn’t that sweet? They were leaving a babysitter for the babysitter. He forced the self-disgust aside and concentrated on the subtext of the conversation. Someone must have talked to Wolf over the sat phone. What else had Wolf told them?

“Did Wolf say when he’s returnin’ to camp?” Rawls asked, working like hell to keep his expression neutral and his eyes away from the corner where Pachico was silently following the conversation.

Something told him Wolf was the key to dealing with his ghost.

Zane’s brows crinkled. “He didn’t say. He flew off with Jillian. He’s not coming back for the op, but he’s sending his pilot and his second.”

Rawls nodded and swallowed the rest of his questions. If Wolf had told them about Rawls’s ghost, Pachico’s name would have been the first thing out of his LC’s mouth.

“We’re sending the women and the kids to my dad’s doomsday friends. I know you’re not close to your father, but you should contact him, convince him to join—”

“He’s dead,” Rawls interrupted.

Surprise swept Zane’s face and then it closed down like storm shutters during a hurricane. “When?”

Rawls held his lieutenant commander’s icy green gaze. He’d known from the get-go that withholding the news of his father’s death and flying out alone for the funeral would eventually rouse confusion and ire with Zane and Cos. “Fixin’ on a year now.”

“A year
. . .
” Zane shook his head, the ice turning brittle in his eyes. “Those two weeks you disappeared to visit some gal back east?”

“I visited her while I was there.” Which wasn’t exactly a lie. He had visited Alyssa, which had been every bit as uncomfortable as the memorial and the two weeks of funeral arrangements.

“You’re full of surprises.”

Zane’s flat, cold comment stung, but Rawls shook the bite off. He didn’t regret keeping his friends out of that personal and painful intrusion from his past life. His teammates, for all their closeness, didn’t know who Seth Rawlings was. Hell, they didn’t even know his real name. Shrugging off his old life had been the entire purpose of joining the navy, of qualifying for the teams, of convincing HQ1 to let him join a platoon as a corpsman, rather than sticking him in the bowels of some naval hospital removed from the action. He’d been determined to erase that clueless, pampered child, determined to make sure he’d never face such helplessness again, and he had developed the skills necessary for survival.

If he’d told Zane and Cos about his dad’s death, they would have insisted on heading out to Columbia, South Carolina, with him, where they would have heard far too quickly about William Crosby Seth Rawlings—the self-absorbed son of one of South Carolina’s oldest families—and how his pathetic, ill-prepared, good-ol’-boy lifestyle had gotten his baby sister tortured and murdered.

“Please, make them stop, Will. Make them stop.”

He flinched at the memory. Forced it down into that pit of shame that never quite scabbed over.

Sure, headquarters had known his full name, but they’d been as eager to bury his story as Rawls had been. He could just imagine the headlines if some enterprising reporter ferreted out the ugly details—
Southern socialite rescued by US Special Forces, turns Special Forces himself
. Of course SEALs weren’t Special Forces, but none of the original articles had gotten that little detail correct anyway.

“Your brothers joinin’ your father at the camp?” Rawls asked, recognizing the irony in the question as soon as it hit the air.

He knew everything about Zane—from his four brothers, right down to his quest for his life-mate, which he’d found in Beth. Zane on the other hand? Hell, his best friend didn’t even know Rawls had once had a sister.

“Dane, Chance, and Webb are out on rotation, but Gray’s going to meet the bird and haul everyone out to Dad. God knows how long he’ll be able to stay.”

Rawls simply nodded. Zane stared at him for a couple heartbeats too many, as if he was waiting for him to come clean, waiting for him to step back beneath the umbrella of team life and team camaraderie. When Rawls remained stoically silent, Zane swore beneath his breath and turned, heading for the door.