by Amy Lane
Mrs. Cramer nodded, looking relieved, and followed the nurse’s directions down the corridor. Ernie, Ace, and Sonny were left feeling superfluous again until, after about half an hour, Ernie heard a booted tread in the corridor.
And felt the wall of safety that was Lee Burton.
He darted for the hallway and launched himself into Burton’s arms.
For once he wasn’t disappointed. For once Burton didn’t hold back. There was no sex in Burton’s touch—although that simmered between them always—there was only tenderness and joy.
“Hey, kid,” Burton whispered against his ear. “You doing okay?”
“We’re waiting for news,” Ernie told him, needing to be in his arms more than nearly anything else in the world. “Lee, I’m so sorry—I didn’t mean to put you in danger or distract you or—”
Burton stepped back from him for a moment and smiled, his eyes tired and at peace at the same time. “Baby, you are a distraction. But you’re a distraction I can’t live without. If you can live with me going on missions, you can distract me all you want.”
Ernie gasped, almost too afraid to hope. “Really?” he asked. “Can we—”
“Hey, guys!” Ace called, looking up from where Sonny was digging into their takeout. “You hungry? I mean, you’re not going to solve all your problems here, are you?”
Lee laughed a little—but he still looked tired. So tired.
“So,” Ace said as he passed out cheeseburgers. “You staying around for a while?”
Burton shook his head. “As soon as we hear how Cramer is doing, I need to take off again.”
“Oh.” Ernie’s disappointment was acute. After the things Burton had just promised him, Ernie had been hoping… oh God. Just some time alone. Like Christmas but longer. Some time where they could cement this thing they meant to each other.
“Some of Lacey’s men left before shit went down,” Burton told them, and Ernie was forcibly reminded that his man worked for a higher cause. “And they’re headed overland toward Rivers’s family. My boss says I got the Jayhawk and some backup troops to stop them—my bet is they’ve all gone dark until their job is done, because that’s just how Lacey did his thing. But I need to talk to Rivers—”
“He’s barely functional,” Ace warned. “I’m not sure what magic Cramer’s mother can work—”
“He’ll be okay,” Ernie told them, that remarkable lightening of the air still ringing in his ears. “He’ll make it through. As long as Ellery lives, he’s going to be fine.”
Burton regarded him soberly. “Any ideas on that one way or the other?” he queried with delicacy.
Ernie grimaced. “Sorry—no. Jackson’s internal screaming has pretty much spun my gears all day.”
Burton’s hand, soft in the small of his back, told Ernie all the things they hadn’t had time to say about how things had changed between them. “Been a rough day on your noggin, hasn’t it, kid.”
Oh. Kindness. Sympathy. Ernie leaned his head against Burton’s shoulder. “Yeah, Cruller,” he said, melting a little, letting some of the trauma of the day ease up off his shoulders. “I’m glad you’re here, if only for an hour.”
Burton kissed his temple, and at that moment, Rivers and Mrs. Cramer entered.
Meetings and Partings
BURTON SAT next to Jackson Rivers as he was getting his hand stitched and wondered at human endurance. The nurse stabbed his hand with a needle and he barely flinched, but his voice as he talked about his fear of hospitals was the sound of a man in pain.
And Burton had to add to it by telling the man that there were people after his family. In the back of his head, he could hear the clock, plan the op, have people gathering around Rivers’s people in Truckee and in Sacramento, but he couldn’t seem to force Rivers to choose: stay here in the hospital with Ellery Cramer or leave and join Burton on the op to protect his family. With an ordinary civilian, Burton wouldn’t have even offered—but Jackson wasn’t ordinary. Burton had seen him be a soldier and a protector with a single-minded ferocity and a stunning competence. Jackson Rivers was a man to be reckoned with, and Burton wouldn’t mind him on Burton’s team.
He put off the decision until after they heard news. They could wait another half hour, right? And in the meantime, Rivers called up his brother and handed Burton the phone.
“Is Jackson okay?” Kaden Cameron sounded… well, street. Much like Rivers himself did, to be honest, but with a deeper voice.
“The vote’s still out,” Burton said lowly, not wanting Rivers to hear him. “We’re waiting on news of Cramer—”
“Is Jackson bleeding,” Kaden demanded, voice hard.
“Yes, but he’s getting stitched.”
“Goddammit. Ask him about his head—he just healed from a concussion!”
Burton peered into Jackson’s eyes and saw that they were shadowed and bloodshot—but not blown. “He might live,” he muttered. “But I’m worried about your family now, so focus.” While he was talking, Jackson pulled up a picture of Kaden, his wife, Rhonda, and their two children, River and Diamond, on another phone and showed it to him. They were playing with a little boy about twelve who Burton knew as Anthony, who Adkins had been dumb enough to pay to do his dirty work for him. Anthony was probably the reason Gleeson and Adkins had left on their little adventure, but that wouldn’t save the rest of the family, or the young man in his early twenties with them, who was a family friend.
Burton stared for a moment and then shot a quick glance at Jackson.
The Camerons were black.
Burton had never gotten a picture of them—neither Kaden nor Jade Cameron, who he gathered to be twins, nor the rest of Kaden’s family.
Jackson, eating his heart out about whether he should stay with his boyfriend or go help the op that would protect his family—these were step- or foster siblings, and Rivers would die for them.
And the little boy in the picture was as pale as Cramer had been—after he’d been shot. And the twentysomething kid was a bronze tone between them.
It was a stupid detail, really. Something Burton had never realized he’d believed, the idea that families would look the same.
His family had looked the same, but he’d decided a long time ago that his family, the one he’d grown up with, wouldn’t be the kind of family Lee Burton could sustain.
But this was a family. He could easily see Jackson Rivers in these pictures, could see Cramer there too, helping to build a snowman, drinking hot cocoa, being real people here.
Burton and Ernie and Ace and Sonny and even, God help him, Jai and Alba, could be a family.
It wouldn’t be anything like this one, with kids and uncles and aunts and days playing in the snow. Burton would come and go, but when he was there, he could help Ace and Sonny in the garage and take Ernie on vacations and cook dinner for them all so Ernie didn’t have to.
And when he was gone….
Ernie was already a part of their family. He’d told Burton that himself. It was why he’d had to get into the car.
This had happened without Burton’s conscious decision. He’d been telling himself for three months that he “had to decide” what to do with Ernie, but the truth was, Ernie had already achieved complete and total Ernie-dom with or without him.
Of course they were going to buy a house and live together. Of course they were going to stay in Victoriana and be part of Ace and Sonny’s life. Ernie was the distraction he couldn’t live without? That was weak shit, right there. Ace and Sonny were his family—but Ernie? Ernie was his church.
Burton finished up talking to Kaden Cameron and explaining that a group of soldiers would arrive by helicopter, probably landing in the nearby school parking lot, and then looked up to see the focus of the waiting room had changed to the man wearing bloody scrubs who had just come through the door to the OR.
He held his breath until the doctor made his pronouncement and had to breathe through spots when he was finished.
“Burton!” Camero
n barked. “Burton, are you there?”
“Cramer’s out of surgery,” he said hoarsely. “It’s looking good.”
“Oh.” He could actually hear Cameron swallow. “Thank God. Jackson… Jackson wouldn’t make it without him.”
No. And now Burton knew what that felt like.
Burton signed off with Kaden and watched, heart aching, as Ellery Cramer’s mother, who had seemed a pillar of granite, melted like sugar in the rain. And Rivers—who had seemed irreparably broken—shored her up and held her, looking surprised the entire time.
Burton could relate.
At a quiet moment, he pulled Ernie aside and out of the waiting room and tried to make “You’re my church” make sense with “I don’t know when I’ll be back.”
“I want a house,” he said without preamble, not making any sense and not caring. “I want to live by Sonny and Ace and have cats. And I won’t be there every day and I might not be able to call, but I will always come back to you. Can you do that, kid? Can you be my haven, my church, and my lover, and know that, if there’s breath in my body, I’ll come back to you? It’s a lot to ask—it’s weak sauce to even offer it to you, but…. God, kid. I can’t—whatever lies in store for me, I’m just like Rivers in there. I can’t deal with it if you’re not there. Can we do that? Can we—”
Ernie kissed him. Fully, joyously, without inhibition.
Burton groaned and kissed him back, devouring him, his last meal, his last sip of wine, before he went back into battle.
IN THE end, Rivers chose not to come with them.
Cramer’s mother had said it best—Burton was a soldier, and a soldier’s job now was to protect. Jackson’s job was to be there for the other chamber of his heart.
A year ago Burton would have seen it as cowardice, but then, a year ago he hadn’t met Ernie—and hadn’t been an unwilling fly on the wall between a shark and a shattered fish.
Now, creeping through the snowy woods in the Tahoe National Forest, he could recognize Rivers’s sacrifice for what it was: making the best of a brutal choice and learning to trust a heretofore indifferent universe.
He could also be damned glad for the heavy Marine-issue sweater Jason had scared up for him before they’d taken off from the now secured abandoned base outside of Barstow. The unit had arrived ready for winter ops at night, but Burton was wearing cargo pants and a hoodie, which was standard gear for a mercenary apparently, and not damned warm enough.
“Bravo, this is Alpha,” Jason said in his ear. “Do you see anything?”
“Negative, Alpha,” Burton responded, searching the darkness of the thick woods intently. “Charlie? Delta? Do you see them?”
Caspar Klein and Donnie Yamane were the other two members of the impromptu team Jason had thrown together, and they both gave negatives over the headsets.
“I’m going in,” Burton told them. “I have contact with the civilians. They know my voice.”
He neatly holstered his service weapon, grateful to have his Marine-issue Glock by his side again. Calvin Oscar had been an Army man and had carried a Sig Sauer, which had been entirely too small for his hands. Burton was really glad to be himself again.
Stealthily, he walked from the woods to the clearing where the Camerons’ house stood, two stories of kid-riddled domesticity, and looked around.
And tried to figure out what was wrong.
“Alpha, Charlie, Delta—it’s too quiet. It’s not ten o’clock yet, and the house is completely dark—”
“Maybe they’re early risers,” Jason said, but he sounded nervous too.
“Not when they’ve been told there’s a threat coming,” Burton said decisively. “Psst.” He melted back into the forest, taking station behind a hefty-sized pine tree and trying not to stand close enough to get any sap on himself.
“What do you see?” Donnie asked in his ear. Burton scanned the woods to his right and barely made out the slight, deadly form of Donnie Yamane in the dark of the woods.
“There’s someone standing in the living room, back toward the window,” Burton murmured. “He’s got his gun out in front of him, and he’s heading up the stairs.”
“I see him. Do you see the night goggles?”
“Yeah.”
“Flash-bangs?”
“No! Silent running!” Burton looked around one last time and sprinted across the yard to the front door. With a twist of his wrist, he found it was unlocked. “The house has been breached,” he hissed. “Charlie, Delta, swing up to the kids’ rooms. Jason, you and me take the ground floor. Go! Go! Go!”
Burton and his team converged on the little house, and he had no doubt that Jason was breaking in through the back door if it hadn’t been breached already, while Donnie and Caspar were swinging up to the top. Burton burst through the door just in time to hear a high-pitched child’s scream from the upstairs bedroom. The intruder on the stairs swung around, gun out, to take down anybody behind him.
“Gleeson!” Burton barked. “Weapon down!”
“Oscar?” Gleeson sounded legitimately puzzled—right before he adjusted his shoulder just enough for Burton to know he was going to fire.
“Got him!” Jason called, and Burton rolled to the right as Gleeson fired at the space he’d just vacated.
And Jason fired three shots into him.
But Burton didn’t hang around to see the face of his former antagonist. Instead he ran up the stairs, vaulting the body as it bled, faceup, on the landing. By the time he got to the upstairs bedrooms, things had gotten damned bad.
“Anthony!” A giant of a man wearing Star Wars pajamas stood outside what looked like a guest bedroom. “Anthony, calm down!”
“Kaden! Kaden, he’s got me! The bad man got me!”
“The bad man wants something!” Kaden Cameron roared. His family pressed up behind him, and he waved his arm at them in a fruitless attempt to make them get back. “I’m sure the bad man can negotiate, right, asshole?”
“I want safe passage the hell out of here!” Adkins demanded. “That’s all I want. But I got two assholes at the window with guns and you fuckers in front of me—just move and I’ll take the kid with me!”
The child in the room broke into tears, and another voice, adult, male, soothing, spoke up. “Let him go. Take me. He’s, like, a baby—I’m grown. I can deal.”
“You’re not nearly as fuckin’ cute,” Adkins snarled. “Now get out of my way!”
Burton took advantage of the chaos to whisper into his com. “Delta, Charlie, his name is Alan Adkins—ask him how many of his friends are out there. There should be three of them, and we’ve only accounted for two.”
“Roger that,” Donnie said softly, and Caspar echoed him. “Hey, Alan—we’ll give you safe passage, but we need to know how many of your people are here. You know, so we don’t walk around a corner and get our heads blown off!”
“Just two,” Adkins said, desperation clear in his voice. “There were gonna be five, but two of us went after Rivers’s sister, and Leavins said he had another job to do.”
While they were talking, Burton tapped the shoulder of the little girl in front of him. She turned, startled, and he held his fingers to his lips and pointed to the far end of the hallway. She nodded, obviously scared but also damned brave, and tapped on her brother’s shoulder. Both of them eyeballed Burton suspiciously, and he leaned forward to whisper “Jackson sent me” under the sounds of Adkins and Team Delta Charlie as they negotiated.
Both of them pulled away, eyes big, and the girl grabbed her mother’s hand and tugged. The mother—a gorgeous woman in her early thirties—looked at Burton, startled, but kept quiet as Burton held his finger to his lips and pointed. All three of them retreated silently across the carpet to the end of the hallway by the bathroom. Burton made a little fluttery motion with his hands, and they all went inside, hopefully to hide in the bathtub in case bullets started flying.
But Burton didn’t think they would.
Silently he dropped to a crouc
h behind Kaden Cameron’s big, solid dad-body and pulled his pistol from his holster, peering up from the gap between Kaden’s leg and the doorframe.
He could see Adkins in there to his left, holding his arm around Anthony’s throat and a gun to his head while Donnie and Caspar peered in through the window. Across the room a slight young man—AJ—stood, hands out, looking at Anthony in anguish.
Adkins had a big head—so big it was catching light from the moon through the window—and it made an amazing target.
Burton took a deep breath, aimed, and squeezed the trigger.
Adkins went over backward and the world erupted into chaos, and all Burton could think was that things weren’t over by a long shot.
CASPAR AND Donnie took cleanup, asking Rhonda Cameron nicely for some spare sheets and some bleach, both of them promising they’d have new furniture sent and a new coat of paint on the walls within the week. In the meantime the family gathered around the two frightened boys who had been in the bedroom and… and hugged them. Both. As often and as warmly as possible. Burton pulled Kaden aside as the family huddled in the kitchen and told him that was the best medicine he could offer the kids.
Kaden nodded once, a hard gesture that made Burton think maybe Jackson called this man brother because they’d grown up in the same hard place.
“You asked if there are others—what does that mean?”
Burton grimaced. “It means I’ve got my commander calling the unit we assigned to your sister to make sure they got everybody.”
“What about Jackson and Ellery. Do they get a unit?”
Burton stared at him. “Why would they need—”
“Why wouldn’t they?” Kaden asked bitterly. “I love my brother, man, but if a chunk of ice falls off an airplane wing and falls through a building to hit somebody on the head, you can bet that someone is Jackson Leroy Rivers.”
“I’ll call him and warn him,” Burton said, a hard knot of anxiety congealing in his stomach.
“Now.” Kaden pointed to the phone in his hand, and Burton nodded, pulling off to the corner of the living room.
