He’d lose the trace in the night, so he was forced to stop. He tried a flashlight, but it was insufficient to see trail signs.
He hunkered down to wait.
A whole night…
He wasn’t willing to wait another whole night.
In the failing light, he noted and memorized the various marker shapes of the landscape: two ridges lined up due east and a single high hill at three hundred degrees to the northwest by the compass, with a lonely lightning-struck tree clearly marking its crown.
Now he knew he could return to this point in the morning if he had to and start over. He waited until the stars came out so that he could remain sure of his orientation. Thankfully, the desert sunset was as fast as it was dramatic. The evening sky shimmered in oranges, golds, and reds that had come out of the same vivid paint box as the afternoon sky’s blue.
Once the show had ended and the few lingering high clouds were too small to obscure the sky, the stars shown like needle pricks in the jet-black night. A crescent moon after a new moon remained aloft, enough for him to see a boulder before he walked into it, but not much more. He’d lose even that bit of light by midnight, so he’d best hurry.
He set off in sweeping arcs that expanded along the most likely lines. Three hours later, the faint scent of fresh horse dung led him to a narrow track cutting up along the side of a steep slope. A quick inspection with his flashlight indicated broken branches to either side, just the kind a rider’s boots and stirrups might make. He followed that until again the landscape opened before him.
The moon was setting, so he watched the direction of the stars as he once more began tracing sweeping arcs across the landscape.
It was still an hour to daybreak when he scented the char of a wood fire, though he could spot no light. The breeze was so light and variable that he followed the elusive trace down into steep rocky clefts and into tree tangles. He almost stepped on a family of sleeping deer but was able to back away before they took to their feet and gave away his position.
He was finally close to the campsite when a voice spoke from the darkness. “I hear you out there, Michael. Go the hell away.”
She didn’t sound angry; she sounded weary. As if she was sick of it all.
* * *
Claudia didn’t have the energy to look up as Michael stepped from the trees.
“How?”
Of course he’d want to know how his field craft had failed.
“There’s a night cricket about a hundred feet over that way that stopped singing twenty minutes ago. You were about fifty feet to my other side when you knocked loose some dirt. Sounded like a deer, but it didn’t recur. So it was you. My horse smelled you before either of those, but all she does is let out a huff when she smells something unexpected, so you wouldn’t have heard her. But I did. Now go away.”
She knew he wouldn’t, so she wasn’t sure why she even bothered saying it.
They’d given her two weeks’ medical leave once she’d stopped falling asleep without intending to. Then Trisha and Bill had come to her together and told her that Michael was gone. She had waited until they left the room in the infirmary to cry herself dry. Now she was an empty husk, hollowed out by the events of the last weeks. She knew where he’d gone, of course—up his goddamn tree. Well, she’d rot in hell before she chased him there.
She’d come to Upper Dead Cow Spring to find the silence once more. It was here that she’d run her way from girl to woman. But how little she’d known then of the heart and the pain of a woman. Now Claudia needed the silence so that she could once more be strong enough to stand the noise of the world again. She wasn’t there yet.
Hell! She wasn’t even close.
Michael still stood at the edge of the clearing, the only evidence that he stood there was his silhouette against the stars. She’d been watching the remaining coals of her tiny fire, a remote observer to the slow death of its glowing heart.
If she asked him to go away a third time, would he? Claudia considered the question. Based on his stillness alone, he would. The man was so stupid that he would actually listen to her if she told him to go. If she were Trisha, she would call his bluff. If she were Emily, she go up and add her own fist to any damage Bill had already done—Trisha had told her that one when Bill wasn’t around to be embarrassed.
But she wasn’t either of those women. She was Captain Claudia Jean Casperson. A woman who loved a man who’d walked away without saying good-bye or trying to explain.
Yet still she loved him. That was her weakness. Her failure.
“Why are you here?”
He moved to the fire, squatted on the far side of the glowing embers. He reached out to place a dried branch from her pile onto the glowing coals, to nurse it back to life.
“Don’t. Just leave the fire alone and answer the question.”
“I’m…” He trailed off for several minutes. “I’m not sure.”
“That’s not very complimentary, Michael.” She’d thought to be sarcastic, but Michael never understood sarcasm.
“It’s the truth. I just knew I had to come.”
She rubbed her forehead. That was one thing about Michael; he always spoke truth. He’d never said he loved her. He’d barely been willing to acknowledge the word “lover.”
“Can you tell me why you left?”
“To protect you.” He didn’t even hesitate.
“From what?”
“From my death.”
For the first time she wished she could see more of him than the soft fire glow that barely reached the toes of his boots.
“Are you dying anytime soon?”
“Not planning to, but it’s possible.”
“And that’s why you left?”
“Yes. Watching you fall from the sky, I knew how I would feel if you died. I don’t ever want you to have to feel that.”
She’d had many strange conversations in her life, but this was one was definitely the oddest.
“Yet you’ve come back, but you don’t know why.”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Asking me why I don’t know why is like asking…why isn’t fruit purple?”
“Grapes.”
“Oh, right.”
Claudia poked at the fire and the embers crumbled. If she didn’t feed it soon, it wouldn’t make it through to breakfast.
“How did you get here?”
“Well, I was up in Nell thinking about you.”
“I liked her.” I wanted to visit her again someday. Her heart ached with the thought. She couldn’t bring herself to say it aloud. It hurt too much even thinking it; the memories of things that were so good but weren’t to be.
“I’m glad. I shouldn’t have climbed. That storm we saw coming in. She was damaged. Unsafe. I knew before I went up. But I went.” His English was becoming stutters of images. “I fell. It’s the closest I’ve ever come to dying in or out of Delta, doing that climb. No one would have known.”
I would have. But again there were words she now couldn’t say. She added a small stick to the fire. Its bark flared briefly, revealing his shadowed face.
“I knew I’d done the right thing, leaving you so that you wouldn’t feel the pain if I died on a mission. But it doesn’t feel right. I don’t understand why. The more I thought about it, the less sense I was making to myself.” He shifted in place as he hunted for words.
She left him the silence to find them and added another small stick. This one didn’t flare, but it did start to burn with a sharp resin smell.
“I only knew of one person who would understand, who would see and could explain it to me. That’s when I knew I had to find you.”
“The most words you’ve ever spoken to me, and you’re telling me that you had to find me so that I could explain why you broke up with me. Without a word.”
“Uh…” He toyed with his bootlaces.
She still couldn’t see his face and added a bigger branch this time. It would take it a few minutes to catch.
“Sounds pretty lousy when you put it that way…but it’s pretty much right.”
Claudia looked up at the sky, wishing there was some guidance there. The stars were supposed to lead the way, not confuse the path.
“You’re so much better at that sort of thing than I am,” he continued in the dark. “You understand how people work. I don’t know how you do what you do, but in less than a week you built a team, pulled off a miracle, and got us out alive. I was best man at Bill and Trisha’s wedding, and he flattened me on your behalf. I never even had a chance to block it. How?”
“That’s not your question. Retain your focus.” Because she desperately needed him to answer his prior question.
“Right. Good advice. So, uh, previous question was that I don’t understand how something I know to be right could feel so wrong.”
“You’re still convinced that it was the right thing to walk away from me?” Claudia considered kicking the fire at him: ashes, embers, and all.
“Maybe not the way I did it. I can see that now.” This time his silence was that of a man lost and she let him explore it. “It may have been the one…cowardly act of my life. I’m sorry.”
“Is that supposed to make it all better?”
“No. But I am.”
She was sorry too. And the apology helped. Even more important, how much had it taken out of a man like Michael to admit he’d been cowardly?
“We do dangerous work, Michael.”
“I know tha—”
“Shut up. I’m speaking now.”
She could just see him nod his head. A glance up showed that the sky was lightening toward dawn.
“We’ve both chosen that path. I fell in love with you—”
He grunted as if she’d just struck him.
“—knowing that about you. You think I don’t understand how close we came to dying on that mission? You think my heart didn’t stop when that body fell overboard off the Russian ship? Well, it did. But it went on beating. You know what hurt, Michael? It wasn’t watching you risk your life. I was doing the same thing. It wasn’t even waking up alone and you weren’t there, though that was pain enough.”
He shifted, almost reached out to her, but didn’t. It was good that he didn’t as she would have laid her own blow atop Bill’s. She couldn’t quite make out his expression yet in the faint predawn light.
“What hurt was thinking that you could cut yourself off from the joy we shared. It was imagining that wonderful heart of yours closing back in on itself. I think together we offered each other a first glimpse of light.” Claudia liked how that sounded.
“I’ve spent three days sitting here, right here. Going no farther than to find firewood. And I have decided something. I suffer from the same fault as you. I wrapped my heart in ice as much as you hid yours behind danger.” She could feel the weight sliding off her shoulders, the armored carapace of the Ice Queen finally melting in the fire’s light.
“I’m choosing to embrace that joy. I am a better person for loving you, whether or not you love me back. I know that now, and I’m going to embrace that. I couldn’t have survived that mission without you, and I’m not just talking about you dragging me out of the helicopter.”
A mountain pygmy owl passing overhead hooted a final call of the night as it sought its nest. The thin trail of smoke spiraled upward against the pinking sky. They sat in silence, the last of the stars fading away.
It was almost dawn before he spoke, though he didn’t look up from the low, steady flames. His voice was different. More assured, like the man she’d first met, but also clearer somehow than he’d ever been before.
“I love you, Claudia Jean Casperson. From the first moment I saw you flying us off that beach in Yemen, I loved you. You are magic in the air and in my arms. I don’t know how to live without you, but the thing I fear the most is hurting you. Which I’ve done while trying to protect you from just that. It makes no sense.”
“Hurting each other happens, Michael. Between two people, it happens. But it is easier to find the way through it together.”
He nodded and looked up at her finally. There was just enough light to see the softness of his dark eyes.
“I get that now. I have only ever been myself, truly myself, in two places: sitting aloft in Nell and being with you.”
“I wish we could climb her again.” Claudia wished it with all her heart.
“Maybe someday. Another storm a year from now, or maybe a decade, will blow down the broken sections, and we could climb her again. Oh”—he patted his breast pocket—“I brought you a present from Nell. After I survived my fall, I found this.” He pulled out a long, black feather and twisted it slowly in his fingers.
It appeared to glisten, though the sun had yet to break the horizon.
“It’s a raven feather. You find them on the ground, but it’s the first I ever found among the branches. Very powerful magic. The Yurok and Tolowa peoples of the redwoods believe that the raven is one of the few powers who can travel to the land of the deceased and bring back the soul of someone who has died. It made me think of you, reborn after I thought you’d died.”
And he didn’t see that he too had been reborn from his own passage through the trees. He had come back to her wiser, even more thoughtful.
She loved him without question.
Her problem had been whether or not she could forgive him. Inside she knew the answer. With his rebirth, there was nothing to forgive. He’d almost sacrificed his own heart to spare hers, but it didn’t work that way. That too he now understood.
When he held the feather out to her, she didn’t take it. Instead, she moved around the fire and knelt before him. She wrapped her hands over his to keep him from withdrawing so that they held the feather together.
“To the Yavapai and others of Arizona,” she told him, “raven is the bird of creation. Raven who flew out of the dark womb of the cosmos and brought the light of the sun. Brought understanding.”
Then she looked up into his eyes and saw herself there. Her better self, the one she’d forgotten in the misery of his departure.
“I love you, Michael. There’s been no other. I can’t imagine one. Whether we have a day or a hundred years, I want to spend those with you.”
They leaned together until their foreheads touched. They stayed there in silence as the sun rose and lit the feather they both still held.
“Now might be a good time to use your words, Michael.” Claudia could feel her smile growing for she knew what was coming next.
“Uh, what should I say?”
“You could try proposing to me.”
“I thought I just did.”
“In that case, the answer is yes.”
“Good.”
She waited. “You can kiss the bride now, Michael.”
“Oh, right.”
And he did.
Read on for a sneak peek from Hot Point, the next book in M.L. Buchman’s scorching-hot Firehawks series
The sharp warning buzz of a Critical System’s failure crackled through Vern Taylor’s headset.
A momentary panic hit him as palpably as the time Mickey Hamilton had gotten drunk and decided that plowing a fist into Vern’s chin made some kind of sense.
Vern had just flown his helicopter down into the critical “death zone.” Helicopters that broke between fifty and four hundred feet above the ground were in a really bad place—too high to safely crash and too low to stabilize and autorotate in.
A glance out the window didn’t improve the news. The Mount Hood Aviation firefighters’ airfield was still two miles ahead. Below him was nothing but a sea of hundred-foot fir trees covering rugged thous
and-foot ridges.
So screwed!
Meanwhile, the more rational part of his brain—that the U.S. Coast Guard had spent six years investing so heavily in training and that four more years of flying to fire had honed—was occupied with checking his main screen on the helicopter’s console.
He located the flashing, bright red warning. Hydraulic failure in the primary circuit.
He smelled no burning rubber or hot metal.
Several things happened simultaneously.
The first thing was being seriously ticked off that the helicopter was trying to kill him.
Vern had been type-certified in the massive, ten-thousand-pound firefighting helicopter for precisely thirty-two hours and—a glance at the console clock—seventeen minutes. It simply wasn’t fair to be killed on his second day flying this sweet machine.
The second thing that happened was he actually read the flashing message: #2 PRI SERVO PRESS. The backup hydraulic pressure warning system wasn’t reporting any problems which meant it was still running to cover the failure of the pump’s pressure.
Vern double-checked.
No secondary alarm.
He wiggled the cyclic joystick control with his right hand, which altered the pitch of the blades to control his direction of flight.
His chopper wiggled exactly as it should. The back pressure of the controls against his dry palm felt normal.
He tried restarting his breathing. That worked as well.
Then—with the practice of a hundred drills that had felt like a thousand under MHA chief pilot Emily Beale’s watchful eye—his left hand came off the collective control alongside his seat long enough to grab the correct circuit breaker among the eighty other breakers, switches, and controls that made up the overhead console attached to the chopper’s ceiling.
He pulled on the breaker which shut down the number two Primary Servo pump.
The alarm went silent and the blinking red warning on the screen shifted to a steady red glow. Then his hand returned to the collective, completing everything that really needed doing.
The third thing that happened—all in the same moment as far as he could ever recall—was the thought that Denise Conroy, Mount Hood Aviation’s chief mechanic, was going to kill him even if the helicopter had decided not to. Breaking one of Denise’s birds on your second day flying it solo and expecting to survive unscathed was downright foolhardy.
Bring On the Dusk Page 31
