Gabe was a hunting dog, so cool he normally ignored the prowling neighborhood cats that invaded his territory as though they were beneath his dignity.
“What are you going to do?” he asked again.
“I’m going to leave the damn thing locked in the vault, for now. Maybe one day I’ll bury it in a hole deep enough nobody can ever find it again.”
That was my plan. Of course, I didn’t figure on my brother’s interference.
WITH MY HAIR growing quite lengthy by my standards, control was more than just brushing and blowdrying; now I had to gel and spray and use a curling iron and all that stuff. Just how much longer I could stand the bother was a debatable. Caleb liked to run his fingers through the soft curls which was the only reason I didn’t whack it all off again.
I spent longer in front of the mirror than I’d intended, and I heard our company talking with Dad when I finally stepped out of my bedroom. Scott had brought Sonja over. She was in the living room, her face glowing with happiness as she showed off the brand new diamond ring my brother had, at last, worked up his nerve to give her. Scott stood behind her, as euphoric as if he’d won the lottery. Maybe more so. If he’d been a rooster, he’d have been crowing.
Caleb, his North Carolina drawl soft as down, was teasing Scott about bumming a kiss off the bride-to-be, while Dad sat beaming. He’d about given up hope on my brother ever settling down, whereas he had his doubts that I, with my strange ability, ever would—or should.
Sometimes I agreed with him; sometimes not. With Caleb in my line of sight, as now, this was a time I did not.
As though the faintest whisper of this thought somehow passed to Caleb, his head jerked up, and our eyes found each other’s. His, truly as green as rich deep grass, locked with mine. A kind of chemical reaction moved us simultaneously in the direction of the kitchen, all the while making the right kind of congratulatory discourse to the others.
I wanted nothing so much as to throw myself into his arms and be held as though I were precious. I wanted to weld myself down the whole length of his body, to breathe his breath, and kiss and be kissed until the world faded. I wanted to belong to him.
Caleb toed the doorstop aside, allowing the kitchen door to swing closed. He backed me up against it—insurance no one could burst upon us unaware—and stood with a hand on either side of my head. Tantalizing, not touching me yet. I knew he felt the same hunger I did.
“Damn, sugar,” he said. “Your brother is putting me in the mood.” If he’d looked down, he’d have seen the leap my heart took.
“And what mood would that be?” I dared him to be specific.
But his mouth was already descending, drifting closer, until it touched first on one side of my lips, then lifted and went to the other side.
My heart pounded and my insides felt as if they were melting as I frantically sought to catch his lips dead center on my own.
Damn. I love the way he kisses me. After a while I said, “In the mood?”
“Uh-huh.” But he still didn’t explain what he was in the mood for. I kind of thought I could guess.
There is no guaranteeing privacy in my house, however— something Caleb is learning rather quickly. Unprepared and off balance when Scott pushed against the closed door in back of me, I rocked forward, my head butting hard against Caleb’s face.
“We’re cookin’ in here,” he complained mildly as Scott forced a way around us.
“Yeah, and I know what you’re cookin’ up, too.” Scott leered at Caleb who wiped a smear of blood off his lip.
I rubbed a matching sore spot on my head, unable to tell if he’d cut his lip against a tooth, or just bitten his tongue. One thing for sure, the kissing was over until the bleeding stopped.
Glaring at my brother, I punched him lightly on the arm. “Go away.”
“Ow,” he said, as if I’d hurt him. I knew I hadn’t. “I just came in to tell you the rest of us are getting hungry. In case you don’t remember, sister dear, you suggested dinner together tonight. I want to know when we eat?”
“Soon, soon. Here, take these.” I pulled three, icy-cold Buds and a bottle of wine from the refrigerator, pushing the beer at the men. “Somebody start the grill, and Scott, you can send Sonja in here to help me.”
“Help you? I’ll give you fair warning. I’m not marrying her ’cause she can cook. I know damn well she can’t.” He didn’t appear especially perturbed by this lack of talent.
I gave him a haughty stare. “I never said she had to cook. I thought she could help me drink this bottle of Riesling.” I set the bottle, two beautiful, old crystal glasses and a corkscrew on the table.
Caleb pressed his cold beer bottle against his lip, puffing now although the bleeding had stopped, laughing as he gestured my brother from of the kitchen. He paused for only a moment, resting his hand on the back of my neck, then pulling his fingers through my curls as gently as though he caressed old velvet.
DINNER WAS LOVELY. Salmon, fresh and succulent, salad snapping crisp, a carrot cake purchased this morning from the Rocket Bakery down the street and enough to make grown men drool in delight— which I swear they did. Nobody goes away from my table hungry.
I managed to push aside my earlier encounter with the old gentleman, knowing the memory of his manic eyes might awaken me during the night. Don’ t borrow trouble, I told myself, refilling my glass with wine. His eyes . . . It was a trick of light and shadow. I’d been looking into the sun. Gas fumes always make me a little woozy. I organized the excuses to be retrieved at need.
Then it was into the kitchen to clean up, Sonja traveling back and forth from the dining room with dirty dishes, me busy loading the dishwasher. Many hands make quick work—isn’t that the expression? Anyway, I’ll swear cleanup took no more than fifteen minutes.
Sonja went into the powder room to freshen her lipstick, and I went looking for Caleb. He and Scott must have gone downstairs to the shop, I decided, unless they’d simply disappeared. They weren’t on the deck or in the living room sleeping off dinner.
Dad was. He reclined in his Lazy-Boy with Gabe on the floor beside him, both tootling an uneven snore every now and then.
Understanding Caleb and Scott’s motives, I opted to follow the men.
I heard them first—Scott’s baritone; Caleb a little deeper, a little softer—as their curiously echoing voices carried up the stairwell. They must be in the doorway to the vault, I surmised, for me to hear them with such ease. From their conversation, I gathered they’d come down to the shop because Scott belatedly remembered a promise to call a customer whose special order scope had arrived by mail this afternoon.
“How was it when you asked Sonja to marry you?” This was Caleb, changing the subject. “And when she said yes.”
Wretch that I am, I stopped on the stairs to listen. This could be fairly fascinating.
“About scared the bejesus out of me,” Scott said.
I smothered a laugh at my brother’s turn of phrase. I wanted to hear his answer all right, but most of all, I was intrigued with Caleb’s motive in asking.
“I didn’t know if I was scared she’d say no, or afraid she might say yes. That lasted about five seconds. Just long enough for her to start crying, and laughing and kissing me. Longest five seconds of my life—but worth the wait.”
Caleb made a little snort of amusement. There was a pause. Then my brother asked, “You’re not thinking about asking Boothenay, are you?”
The pause was longer this time.
I swallowed my breath, collapsing onto the stairs like a sinking ship. Oh, please. Oh, please. Like my brother, I didn’t know if that was a yes or a no. Oh, please.
Caleb had heard the same thing in my brother’s intonation that I had—a warning. “Have you got something against me asking her? You got something against me?”
“No!” Scott’s reaction was explosive. “Hell, no. Nothing against you. Far from it. But I wonder if you’ve got any idea what you’d be in for. That fricking voodoo of
hers. Do you seriously want to be saddled with that?
“God! I remember sometimes Mom—you know our mother had ‘powers,’ too, though not half as bad as my little sis—anyway, those bedamned powers nearly caused my folks to break up many, many times. I give full credit to Dad that they didn’t. Sometimes I think Mom wouldn’t have noticed if he was gone.”
He’d never been more wrong. I could have told him, but he wouldn’t have listened, or believed me.
Caleb brushed Scott’s bitterness aside, not because of callousness, but because there was nothing he could do. “My decision, I think. Boothenay’s and mine if we ever get that far. I guess I only wondered if you knew how she felt.”
“Who knows what that girl thinks? She’s been in a tizzy the last couple of weeks because of an old.45 Colt she says has designs on her. She hasn’t been entirely lucid the whole time.”
Complete nonsense. My brother is an awful exaggerator.
“I knew she’d been fussing over something,” Caleb said.
“Oh, yeah. Something. Look. Here’s the culprit, just sitting on a shelf with our girl afraid to so much as take a peek.”
It was dark on the stairs. The absence of light heightened my ability to hear, to perceive through other senses. I heard the telltale click as Scott—I knew it was Scott—flipped the first latch on the leather and foam gun case.
I shot to my feet.
What is he doing? The thought shrieked at me. But I knew. God help us, I knew. And with a surge of horrified realization, I understood he was doing just what the gun wanted him to do.
All thought of silence gone, I clattered the rest of the way down the stair, clutching at the rail to keep from falling. I kept trying to call out, to tell them it wasn’t safe, but the words seemed stuffed in my throat.
I’ll swear I heard the power coming, bearing down on us like a freight train at a crossing. The building shook with danger.
Scott held the open gun case. I’ll always believe he felt something, too, deny it though he may, for his eyes stretched wide in shock and awe.
Why was Caleb reaching for the pistol? Why didn’t Scott have the sense to slam the case closed? Why? Why?
“No! Caleb, no.” My cry should have stopped him in his tracks. It should have pierced armor; should have rung sharp enough to kill every mouse hiding within the walls.
But it didn’t stop Caleb. Oblivious, he reached into the case.
I reached for him.
We touched for a moment to be measured as a tick on time’s clock.
I felt his hand, strong under mine. But under that, I felt the cold steel of the 1911.45 Colt. And then I felt⏤nothing.
I stared at the spot where Caleb had been standing. Gone. Between one blink of my eyes and the next. No fading, no slow withdrawal into that other place. Just gone. An afterimage was printed on my retinas, a picture of three drops of blood on Caleb’s bottom lip. How could such a tiny cut still be bleeding?
The building stopped shaking. The whirlwind rush of power ebbed. Scott stood with his mouth half-open and an expression of utter horror and loathing on his face.
You can’t begin to imagine the shocking purge of blood from my veins, to be replaced by something bent on preserving my pain.
“Caleb,” I finally found voice to whisper. It rasped in my throat like a scream. “Oh, Jesus God. Caleb?”
CHAPTER 4
Son-of-a-bitch!
Instantaneous recognition of his plight, déja vu in devastating measure, ripped through Caleb’s insides. Another goddamned war. He might have known.
His sphincter tightened as he dropped into a crouch, bending his back in a tight curve, an unlikely position for anyone less than a contortionist. Standard procedure instructions said to make as small target of yourself as possible. A shell exploded overhead, briefly lighting up the sky, then another and another as the big guns hammered at the night. None was far enough overhead, or far enough away, for his peace of mind.
Boothenay! Gut wrenching panic swept him around in a circle. His eyes squinted first against the bomb’s glare, then against the dark, working as the light arced back and forth like a strobe, to cut through the rain and smoke layered over the battlefield.
No Boothenay. He couldn’t see her anywhere, though for long seconds he was positive he heard her voice crying out his name. Then that faded and he was nearly deafened by the thud and thunder of the artillery barrage. Shells screamed much too close over his head for him to feel much optimism about surviving the night. It seemed impossible that all the shells would land beyond him. Rain beat in his face.
He wanted to think of the poor bastards back there where the shells were exploding as they plowed to earth. The sound of men in mortal pain caused him, in an automatic gesture he’d thought left in his past, to flatten onto his belly and start crawling toward the carnage. In his wars, Afghanistan and a tour in Iraq, he’d been a medic. Yet when he checked his gear, he discovered he hadn’t so much as a spare band-aid, let alone his medic kit.
Further suppressing his impulse to give aid, a machine gun in front of him started hammering—make that two machine guns in a devilish wicked crossfire—and he felt a bullet snatch at his sleeve.
Sleeve? A half minute earlier he’d been wearing a summer sport shirt and Levis. Somehow, in the intervening time, he’d shed those and acquired a mud-colored uniform. A mud-covered uniform sporting a brand new bullet hole in the sleeve. Fear, along with the taste of cordite, clogged his throat.
Another rocket went off. Its magnesium flare showed Caleb a foxhole or a trench a few yards ahead and he froze where he lay until it faded, avoiding any motion that might draw attention.
To get to the dubious safety of the trench, he crawled past a wrecked gun carriage that bore what was left of a Stokes 3-inch mortar. Still hitched to the traces were two dead horses, horribly mutilated with missing legs and guts spilled out. The whole lower half of one horse’s head was shot away and they lay in what was a virtual pond of their own blood.
Caleb turned his head, sickened, only to find himself staring into the eyes of a man, apparently unscathed, until he saw those eyes, nearly as green as his own, were glazed in death and that the cadaver was lacking the whole bottom half of his body. He sat upright on what once had been his waist, giving the impression the missing half was buried somewhere just out of sight.
Another explosion illuminated the battlefield, and rather than look upon the mangled body, Caleb did his best to bury his own face in the dirt.
While he was not a man who normally indulged in profane language, he shocked himself when he became aware of the string of filth spewing out of his own mouth. His only other choice was to weep.
Where the hell was he? When the hell was he? Most importantly, where was Boothenay? He knew he must be stuck in the history of the old automatic pistol Scott had been showing him. No genius was required to figure that much out—he now knew first-hand why Boothenay had instinctively feared the power gathered within the weapon.
As soon as the flare dimmed, he took off, crawling on elbows and toes with his belly as flat to the muddy earth as he could press it. A quarter of a minute later he tipped himself over the edge of the trench and fell into comparative safety.
“Well, howdy do, Sarge,” a man said to him, swinging his rifle barrel aside and removing his finger from the trigger. “I didn’t expect to see you again. Damned near shot ya. I figured you was a goner.”
Caleb could only stare. Was the fellow talking to him? Must be, since he was looking straight at him, ignoring the only other person in the trench. That one was on lookout duty, keeping watch over the ground ahead of them from where they expected the next attack to come.
The soldier who had spoken set down his rifle and, pulling a little bag of tobacco out of his uniform pocket, rolled a smoke without paying the slightest attention to what his fingers were doing. Caleb noticed the man’s hands were perfectly steady.
But. . . Sarge? Seems he’d been demoted. Last time he’d
been in one of these situations, he’d been a captain. A British officer on an errand of mercy.
What in God’s name had Boothenay’s magical interface gotten him into this time—besides a war? Besides people shooting at him? Again.
Caleb took a deep breath and spoke, letting the words come of their own accord. “Yeah, I figured I was dead meat, too. Only thing that saved my ass was the horses taking the hit before me.”
“Lucky sum-ova-bitch.” The fellow—somehow Caleb knew his name was Walsh—ducked deeper into the trench to light his smoke, sheltering his lucifer from the rain as the two enemy machine-gunners fed another belt of bullets through their guns.
Hearing the awful thud slugs make when striking flesh, Caleb blanched, waiting for the third man sharing this section to cry out, or topple over, or make some move, but he didn’t stir. Caleb peered more closely and saw the soldier was deliberately propped against the side of the trench, his feet on the step-up, and that he’d been dead for some time. He could see several distinct holes in the uniform. Some of them had been made after the man had bled dry.
Caleb gestured at the corpse. “Shall we lay him down?”
“Hell, no,” Walsh said. “Gives the Huns something to shoot at. If they’re shooting at him, they ain’t shooting at me. What the hell? Palmer can’t feel nothin’.”
He had a point.
“So, Walsh,”‘ Caleb said. “Do you know if anyone is left of the unit except you and me? I guess I must’ve missed some of the action. Concussion knocked me out.” It seemed as good an excuse as any for his belated appearance and possible lapses of intelligence.
Walsh jerked a thumb to the left. “Corporal Benner’s bunch went to cover over yonder. I doubt they’re all dead. Wait till the bastards come over the top. Guess we’ll find out then. If you ask me, Sarge, you’d been better off to stay knocked out. Play dead for a while.”
“You could be right.” Caleb found no argument with that. “Ah, Walsh?”
“Yeah?”At the sudden cessation of machine gun fire, Walsh perked up and checked the load in his Springfield. Caleb reefed his own rifle off his shoulder and did the same. In the quiet, it was possible to hear the rain beating against the already soggy earth.
Shadow Soldier (The Gunsmith Book 2) Page 4
