Rain of Fire (27 page)

Wyatt pried her hands from around him. “Get outside.”

Another shock brought a piece of heavy metal down in a blow to her ankle. The scrape sent a wave of nausea through her, one so strong that she gagged. Only by an effort of will did she keep from vomiting on Wyatt’s boots.

“You’re drunk,” he accused, stepping back.

Giving up the search for her lights, she followed his flashlight through the front room and onto the porch. Nick was already outside, his face and bare chest pale in the starlight, arms crossed against the cold. Kyle went down the steps in sock feet; gravel underfoot reminding her that her soles had not yet recovered from losing her shoes while trying to get into the swamped RV.

She sat on a boulder, put her head in her hands, and shivered in her inadequate fleece, feeling both sick to her stomach and ashamed that Wyatt was seeing her this way.

Inside the cabin, she heard him kicking the remains of the embers back onto the hearth. She should have done that.

In a moment, he emerged carrying an armload of sleeping bags, which he dumped at the base of the porch steps.

Something else she should have thought of.

“You want this?” She looked up in the dimness to find Wyatt with her jacket extended at arm’s length. Carefully, she took it. He made another trip for her and Nick’s boots, throwing them to the ground. Last, he brought out one of Kyle’s flashlights, turned it on, and placed it in her hand.

In the glow, she saw Nick sneer. “Kyle’s a big girl. I think she can take care of herself.”

“Looks like you were taking care of her all right.” Wyatt’s tone dripped disgust.

“Want to mind your own business while you toss me my jacket?”

For a moment, she thought Wyatt would refuse, but he bent, snagged Nick’s coat off the earth, and flung it short. “You’re drunk, too.”

Nick lunged, missed the catch, and had to retrieve the garment from the ground.

“You’re drunk all right,” Wyatt drilled. “Both of you half-naked …”

“Naked’s how it’s done, cowboy.”

Disbelief penetrated her brandy haze. If anyone had told her a week ago that two men would be fighting over her, she would have told them they were crazy.

Nick drawled on, his voice affected by the booze. “You need some lessons on how to get a gal in the sack …”

Kyle’s trouble was that she didn’t know whom to root for. Neither Wyatt nor Nick sounded like themselves, or at least, the selves she imagined she knew.

“Stop it,” she ordered.

“If I need lessons,” Wyatt came back, “I’ll get them from somebody who has the guts to stick around after he gets a woman to fall for him.”

She heard the hurt in his voice, a reminder that Marie had dumped him the way Nick had her.

Nick dropped his coat and advanced on Wyatt.

Kyle pushed up off the cold rock. “I said for you guys to cut it out!”

Bare-chested and barefoot, his hair disheveled as though he and Kyle really had been in bed going at it, Nick swung a right hand roundhouse.

Wyatt threw up his arm but Nick missed. “Look, I’m sober and I don’t need …”

“No, you don’t need anything here.” Nick drew back and wound up to strike again. “Kyle and I go way back.”

Wyatt parried another blow, catching this one on his forearm.

“Damn it!” Kyle shrieked. “Will you stop?”

In the instant Wyatt’s attention shifted to her, Nick brought up his left. It connected with Wyatt’s cheekbone, just below the eye. The sound wasn’t like in the Old West movies when John Wayne hit with a satisfying punch; this dull thud sounded sickening.

“Nick, no!” Kyle dropped her light and it landed to shed a half circle of illumination on the surreal scene.

Wyatt’s eyes flashed and she could see his clenched teeth. “All right, you sonnuvabitch.” He brought up his hands and thrust at Nick’s chest, sending him sprawling amid the grass tufts on the rocky slope.

Lying on his back, Nick spread his hands at his sides in a gesture of surrender. But it was mock, for he raised his head and glared at Wyatt. “Okay, cowboy, we can’t settle this ‘cause she’s the one who decides.”

Suddenly, both men were staring at her. Kyle had never felt so inelegant in her disheveled state, so helpless at watching two men she cared for fight … but at Nick’s words, she had also never felt so powerful.

Nick, no matter that he had left her long ago, wanted her once more. Wyatt, bless his heart, was defending her honor against the man who had broken her heart.

Her gaze darted from Nick to Wyatt and back. “This is ridiculous …”

“Hey, look at that!” Lying on his back, Nick pointed to the rising new moon. “Old Brock would be proud.”

H
ours later, Kyle lay in her sleeping bag beneath the sky. The fingernail of pale moon reminded her of when she was five, looking through her father’s telescope at the brilliant pockmarked surface. He’d shown her Saturn’s gauzy rings and the big red spot on Jupiter that glared like a baleful eye.

Once Dad had pointed out a little spark moving fast against the black of beyond and told her it was a Russian Sputnik.

Tonight, as the bright bead of another satellite fell between the stars, she was in a different sort of cold war. Ten feet from her, Nick snored evenly, while Wyatt had spread his bedding farther away. The wind bore the stench of burned rug.

She’d never been able to sleep when she drank. Oh, she’d fall into a stupor for a while and then awaken feeling like hammered rat shit. With a cottony mouth and throbbing temples, the iceberg peak of a huge submerged hangover, she realized that even though her sleeping bag had good insulation, the cold was seeping through.

Reality was insinuating itself back into her consciousness, as well. Brock’s prediction had come true. And if the new moon quake’s focus plotted on the plane of the fault running through the Saddle Valley what did that mean? Could her suspicion of this afternoon be correct, and the gas seeps along the valley really be evidence that magma was rising along the fault? She would have to talk with Nick about it in the morning.

She looked at him, his forehead a pale shape against the darkness. If there had been no earthquake, what would have happened between them? She thought she knew, something naked, raw … and needful, for she’d been alone too long. Yet, how did he view what they’d been about to embrace, with the passion she thought she’d seen in his eyes, or with the kind of crass male indifference he’d thrown in Wyatt’s face?

Twisting her head toward Wyatt, she saw that he lay with his hands clasped behind his head, staring at the heavens. She had an idea how much more virulent his anger would have been had he walked in on her and Nick in
flagrante delicto
.

Something surged inside her. Whether it was anger at Wyatt for not joining the Nick Darden fan club or hurt at his continued betrayal of their prior closeness, she didn’t know. Maybe she’d brought this on herself by refusing to tell Wyatt the reason for her tears at Earthquake Lake, or not recounting enough details of her and Nick’s past when Wyatt asked the other day, but that didn’t make her sense of loss less painful.

She didn’t expect to fall back to sleep, but the next thing she knew her eyes stung in the relentless morning light. The generator rattled and coughed. Her headache was a horror, and her head stung in the cold.

When she raised it, she saw that at least four inches of powdery snow covered her sleeping bag. Nick’s was still mounded nearby and his frosty hair stood up in disheveled little peaks. Wyatt was gone. Over by the stable, the three horses munched breakfast from the bin he must have filled.

Kyle worked the zipper and slid out of her cloth cocoon. Retrieving her jacket, she brushed it off, and found her boots stiff from the cold. Carrying them, she headed toward the cabin. Wood smoke poured from the leaning chimney. At the door, she stumbled and wondered if she might still be drunk. Then she realized the jamb was askew.

Inside, the pungent aroma of coffee greeted her. Last night she would have sworn they’d have to abandon the cabin, yet now the cheery fire made a mockery of last night’s terror. Clean-shaven, save for his moustache, Wyatt was intent on the computer screen. A steaming mug sat beside him.

“Morning,” Kyle muttered.

“Coffee’s ready.” He did not look up, but she saw the livid bruise beginning to form, a bona fide black eye. Its colors were likely to rival those of her bruise from the dinghy when they’d swamped in Yellowstone Lake.

A brief war waged between hot caffeine and cold feet. She dropped her boots by the fire, picked her way across the boards for a mug and poured. As she did, she realized Wyatt had piled the fallen rock, pulled down the loose timbers and swept. “You’ve been busy.”

“Um.”

She stood by the hearth and drank.

Wyatt raised his head. “Nick still sleeping it off?”

Something sharp in his tone brought back her anger. “I don’t have to defend myself to you. At least Nick was drunk when he hit you, what’s your excuse?”

“I seem to recall you asked me to hurry back here last night. Christ, if you’d told me you had other plans, I’d have camped on the trail.”

“Maybe you should have,” she returned. “What in hell’s the matter with you?”

He slowly flattened his palms on the table. “You’re a smart woman, Kyle. You figure it out.”

The intensity of his gaze combined fury and something passionate. The fire toasted the back of her thighs while the morning chill nipped her front. Her coffee mug began to tremble.

She cradled it with her other hand, while holding eye contact with Wyatt. Somehow, she had trouble breathing.

“Darden’s a player,” he went on. “He lights where the volcano blows.”

“So what?” Nick stood in the doorway.

Kyle turned toward him.

“I’m a guy who drives fast and does handsprings on fence rails.” He walked to her and plucked the cup from her hand. His Adam’s apple bobbed beneath his stubbled jaw as he swallowed and made a toasting motion toward Wyatt. “Kyle’s a big girl, as I vaguely recall telling you last night.”

Kyle felt heat rush to her face and prepared to tell them both to stand down.

Before she could, Wyatt glared at Nick. “Let’s not go there again. We have to work together, at least until we get off this keg of dynamite.”

Nick shrugged. “Come on, Kyle. What say we make breakfast?”

If she had to face food, she’d probably throw up. Still seething, she went out onto the porch and resisted risking another splinter in her palm. When Nick followed, she put out her hand in a stop gesture. “Not now. Just not now, okay? Let me be a few minutes and then I’ll help you cook.”

He opened his mouth, but appeared to change his mind and went back inside. Though she listened to see if he and Wyatt had words, it stayed quiet.

A hard wave of nausea rose. She deep-breathed until it passed.

After a few minutes she went in and helped Nick with breakfast. He worked by her side with uncharacteristic quiet, but knowing him, she likened it to the seismic lull that had preceded the earthquake. She was less able to hold things in, breaking eggs into the skillet so viciously that they were peppered with shell and the yolks broke.

As they sat to eat, an aftershock rattled the dishes. Wyatt sat quietly through the tremors while Nick rode them with a surfer’s grin.

“That was the first I’ve felt this morning,” she said. “I would have expected more.”

Nick took on a thoughtful look. “Scientists in Japan often use a period of relative inactivity along a fault system to predict a sharp release of stored energy. Maybe the period of quiet we observed led to last night’s event?”

“I thought those periods of quiet were measured in months and years,” Wyatt said. “We’re talking about too short a time period here.”

“I would have thought so, but things seem to be happening here on an accelerated timetable.”

Kyle was glad that speaking of their mission brought the two men to a truce.

Nick went on, “We know for a fact from Wyatt passing safely through the canyon the other morning that the gas seeps popped up within a matter of hours.”

A mouthful of pancakes grew bigger and dryer as Kyle chewed and forced them down.

Wyatt pushed back his plate. “You guys should look at the quake records from the remote stations. Unless I miss my interpretation, the focus of last night’s quake was right under us at Nez Perce Peak.”

“Uh-oh,” Nick said.

Kyle got up and paced. Charring marked the floor from the burned rug. “We need to gather the quake data from the stations we’ve set out near here.”

Wyatt agreed. “We’ll go on horseback and split up to save time.”

“Whoa.” Nick held out his hands. “I’m walking, especially with the snow.”

Wyatt looked exasperated. “I’ll take Thunder down the Lamar Valley. He can cover more ground in a day than Kyle on Strawberry or Nick on shank’s mare.”

“Whoa,” said Nick again. “Kyle stays here.”

“This is going to take all three of us,” Wyatt argued.

“I’m going with you guys,” Kyle insisted, while Nick and Wyatt left their dishes on the table and started putting their gear together.

Nick stopped rummaging in his pack and gave her a level gaze. “You need to monitor the stations.”

Wyatt went to the computer.

Kyle looked at the machine. “We need to email Mammoth and tell them how bad the quake was up here.”

“I sent Radford a message earlier.” He glanced at Kyle. “Now I’m letting Alicia know I’m all right up here.”