Brotherhood Protectors: Soldier's Heart Part 2 (Kindle Worlds Novella)

by Ilsa J. Blick

  Which begged the question of what they would do this evening. Well, make their wonderful snow ice cream, eat crisp, and then go to sleep. In separate rooms, duh. Normally she kept the bedroom door open, but Hank would be bunking in the front. So, close the door tonight? That would be the more modest thing to do, and maybe even prudent.

  Oh, right. She scrubbed her hair hard enough to make her scalp tingle. First off, sweetheart, no one was exactly modest in the backcountry. Second, well, she was assuming an awful lot, now, wasn’t she?

  “You’re a moron, you’re an idiot.” The fact her thoughts were tending this way pissed her off. Not only had Hank never given even the slightest hint that he considered them anything other than friends, Pete had been his brother, for God’s sake. Hooking up with Hank . . . God, what an awful term; what are you, fifteen? . . . well, doing anything with Hank would be practically incestuous.

  Or like a really bad romance novel, the kind with shirtless guys sporting rock-hard abs and women who look as if their biggest worry is whether they chip a nail. Wasn’t that always what happened in those books? Stoic brother steps in, rescues grieving girlfriend/widow/fiancée?

  She wasn’t interested. “Well, I’m not,” she said, furiously, as if daring someone to contradict her. She didn’t need a guy to feel good, whole, complete. Hadn’t she’d been on her own before Pete? Absolutely. No parents, no close relatives. So, she was on her own again, big deal. Thinking of any other alternatives or possibilities smacked of desperation, and she was not one of those women, so afraid and unable to be alone.

  Riiight, you are just so different, so special, snarked a mean, little voice, one she’d heard earlier in the evening. Honey, you’re the cliché. Hug Pete’s ghost, and you don’t have to think about risking anything ever again now, do you?

  “Oh, bullshit.” Except . . . she had gotten pretty pissy when Hank stepped out in Pete’s clothes. Well, that was normal. Seeing Hank that way was a reminder of what she’d lost, was all.

  Or was it that she liked how Hank looked? That he had chosen to be here?

  She snorted then. Hank hadn’t chosen. The sheriff sent him, thinking she’d take the news about Soldier and all the fallout from earlier in the day better if that came from Hank. Not like Hank could say no. For the first time, she wondered if Hank was seeing anyone. She’d never bothered to ask, and no one in Lonesome had mentioned it. God, did the townsfolk talk about her and Hank? No, she thought not. Josie, her SAR instructor, wouldn’t have been able to help herself. Josie would’ve asked, let something slip. And James asked if I wanted to get a bite. He wouldn’t have done that if anyone in town was talking.

  “What are you thinking about?” she asked the empty room. Hank probably wasn’t even interested. He was helping her out because of their connection to Pete, and that was all. Besides, she wasn’t interested. “Because I’m not.” As if catching her mood, the wind banged hard enough to make the windows buzz and the door jamb rattle. Tossing her towel aside, she shoved into fresh clothes. “I’m not ready.”

  Whoa, whoa. She paused then, fingers on the next to last button at her throat. What are you saying? That she might be ready someday? With Hank?

  “You know what? I’m not going to think about this anymore.” She was pathetic. She had to stop this, strangle it before it turned into something more than just stray maunderings on a snowy night. “I’m not going to worry about it. Hank is my friend. He’s taking Soldier, he’s helping out his brother’s girlfriend, and that’s that.” She remembered to add, “And I’m not interested.”

  Uh-huh. That little voice was having a field day. Say that enough times, and you might even convince yourself.

  “Shut up, you.” Still annoyed, she turned and snatched up to Hank’s wet clothes, snapping them much harder than she needed from the crate over which they’d been draped. The wine had stained his deputy’s uniform khaki shirt a deep maroon, like he’d been knifed in the heart, and who was she kidding, that was never coming out. An idiot, you’re an idiot. As she grabbed his trousers, stray coins bounced out, and his wallet, cracked and so old that it retained the shape of his butt, tumbled from a back pocket to spew its contents.

  Crap. Bending, she began fishing up credit cards, several business cards with Hank’s name and a sheriff departmental seal, scrap paper, a few crumpled receipts. She tweezed up a chewing gum wrapper, shook her head. And people complained about women’s purses. She never carried a purse, thought they were stupid because you always needed more room and there was nothing a good backpack couldn’t do that a purse could.

  A plastic wallet insert for pictures had jarred loose to spin under the bed. She reached for it now, sweeping aside several dust bunnies and making a mental note if the snow kept up, she’d get some cleaning done. Straightening, insert in hand, she glanced at the topmost photograph.

  Pete—younger, braces on his teeth, his corn-tassel hair a mop around his ears—smiled out through filmy plastic.

  She heard herself pull in a small gasp. The insert fanned in an accordion of what looked to be family pictures. She reached a finger to flip to the next, stopped herself, then actually sat back on her heels, listening so hard her ears rang. Nothing, not a bark from either dog, and she couldn’t hear Hank.

  Don’t do this, don’t do this. Skin fizzing, she tiptoed fast into the front room—darkened now because she had moved the Coleman to the bedroom—and moved in quick, mincing steps to a far window. Slipping a finger into the slit between a pair of filmy curtains, she eased fabric aside a bare inch. The ball of Hank’s headlamp was muzzy with snow and distance. From the angle and then a fan of snow flying from his shovel, she knew his back was to the cabin, and he was near the outhouse.

  Plenty of time.

  These are not yours, that little voice nattered. You really ought to put these back.

  The voice was right, of course. But it could go screw itself.

  There were ten in all, and for five of the last eight, her eyes sprang hot and then she was knuckling tears from her cheeks, swallowing against a clog of salt.

  The pictures were all of Pete, captured at different ages. Many, she’d seen before, at Pete’s funeral, but there were some that were new and more recent. Most were of Pete in-country and with his dog, Soldier: a shot of the two with a variety of munitions seized in a raid—the inked inscription on back said Soldier and Pete had found the cache three months before Pete died—arrayed at their feet; Pete, reading a book on a cot and Soldier’s head on his stomach. Pete geared up and in a Humvee, with Soldier on the seat beside him, clear plastic Doggles over his eyes.

  But then she came to the final three pictures—and it was as if the world simply stopped.

  What? She could feel the word assume a shape. If she’d been a cartoon, the word would’ve been scribbled into a thought bubble to float over her head. Her lungs went airless. Her eyes dried up and a clot, hard as ice, formed in her chest. What?

  Through the sudden thunder in her ears came the muted stomp of boots on boards, a deep-throated bark from Soldier, and then a long metallic squawww as Hank pulled open the front door. “Sarah? All done! Got the snow.” The dull slap of cloth, probably Hank knocking snow from his cap. “Oh, man, that crisp smells great. You decent?”

  “Yup.” Shoving the insert back into Hank’s wallet, she swept what had spilled from his pockets into a small heap. Heart thumping, she deposited everything on the bed, though what she really wanted was to throw those pictures into the woodstove and watch them curl and burn—and die.

  Just before she reached the threshold to the big room, she arranged her face, smoothing her features into the Sarah Grant Hank knew and expected. “Coming.”

  10

  Within twenty minutes of leaving camp, the trail steepened and soared away into the darkness. She moved as fast as she could, following Gabriel’s faint tracks and the beam of a headlamp. (She’d been tempted to try without and then thought this really wasn’t the time to play G.I. Joe.) The spikey teeth of her cra
mpons crunched slick rubble and ice. Thick and heavy with moisture, the snow sleeted down in sheets and on a slant, the flakes blasting apart into wet crystals that instantly melted on her cheeks and dripped along her neck. As she climbed higher, the mountain rearing first on one side and then the other, and the rest falling away, the forest thinned but didn’t disappear.

  Through it all, the wolves stuck with her, laboring up a maze of steeply pitched switchbacks that went from bad to worse to complete shit. Debris choked the path. Entire trees, long ago uprooted, barricaded the trail almost as effectively as a bulwark, and then it was either clamber over or find a way around.

  Almost an hour and a half later, as she hauled herself along, Kate wondered just what in hell she’d been thinking. Following a tough trail at night in the snow and ice after a guy who had skedaddled and more than likely blown his brains out wasn’t just nuts. It was downright suicidal.

  The angle wasn’t a sheer vertical, but it reminded her of the time she was a kid, hiking up Killington with her folks. Her dad, an ex-Boy Scout who couldn’t read a map to save his life, took a wrong turn. Soon, they were all clambering up a slope so steep she was practically staring into the mountain all the way up, the earth so close to her face that when she slipped, all she had to do was crimp her knees to stop her fall. Later, when they finally huffed their way over a bizarre lip of earth and looked back down, they realized her dad had led them up a double black diamond ski trail. Really, that lift waaay off to the right shoulda been a clue. They never did let Dad forget.

  This was nearly as bad, except she was doing it at night, in the snow, and along narrow diagonal cuts, hoofing it uphill like a billy goat. The higher she climbed, the harder it was to catch a breath that didn’t ache. The snow had changed, growing icier and finer, whipping along on gusts of wind that flung needle-like grit into her face and burned. It was like being hit with a sandblaster.

  She stopped for a rest. As she leaned into a sharp-edged boulder, her nose suddenly prickled against a scent she knew well—and she thought, Oh, crap.

  In Kate’s experience, writers didn’t know shit. Novels had it all wrong. Blood did not smell like rust or metal, nor did blood taste sweet. Maybe writers fixated on metal because hemoglobin contains iron, but blood didn’t smell metallic. (She’d even read one guy who wrote blood had a penny-bright aroma—which was copper, for God’s sake. Which was likely only true if the guy was Vulcan.) Assuming no explosion, blood had a scent that was like seawater trapped in a tidal pool: primordial, musty, a little brackish. And blood was most definitely not sweet. Ask any EMT or doctor or soldier or medic whose buddy’s head has just exploded into a halo and splattered her face with bone and hair and brain and a fine pink mist. Not sweet in the slightest.

  Now, blood-smell filled her nose. Testing the air, she tracked the scent, her gaze trailing over rock for the source.

  She spotted a smear of blood along the razor’s edge of a spur. Reconstructing it in her mind, she thought he’d sliced a palm, maybe ripped his fingers. Gabriel must not have proper gloves. Left hand, she thought, judging from the blurry fingerprints. A few paces on, more blood dappled the hump of a boulder. The blood was frozen solid, like red sprinkles on white icing.

  Well, she was on the right track then. She also had to be close to Gunny Peak, which she thought was the most logical spot where she might find him. A landslide twenty years ago, like that which brought down Dead Man Mountain in the early part of the last century, had effectively hacked Gunny in two. As far as she knew, the Gunny Peak slide was the last major one in these parts and nothing like Dead Man, where most of the mountain caromed down to bury the mining town nestled in a box valley at its base.

  At Gunny Peak, the trail forked. To the east and north lay Dead Man Mountain, which every guide and map warned was impassable and a very good way to get yourself killed. Veer west, and the trail led downslope to a ridge and then a saddle between two mountains and, finally, a long series of switchbacks into a valley.

  If Gabriel hadn’t blundered upon her, would he have tried for Dead Man? Maybe. She might not be a telepath, but she could intuit a lot. Nothing about Gabriel’s body language, his scent, or anything he’d said suggested he planned to leave the wilderness. Plus, he was AWOL. Not a lot left to go back to civilization for.

  For her, it was Gunny Peak or bust. If Gabriel went on to Dead Man—if his tracks headed that way, presuming the snow didn’t thicken and she lost them—she didn’t know what she would do. By some miracle, if his trail pointed down into the valley, all the better. Down was smart, the right choice. Not one most people made in the middle of the night, but beggars couldn’t be choosers. Her plans didn’t include that spur, though.

  If Gabriel had descended the mountain, she would let him go. She had enough problems.

  So, according to her map, one more uphill push and then the way leveled out to an enormous rock scramble created when the peak let go twenty years ago.

  Not much farther then. What was left of Gunny was on her left, and she leaned into it while still trying to center her weight as best she could. Ahead, two boulders had tumbled onto the trail at some point in the past and then jammed together, angling in toward one another like the supports of a teepee so their tops touched. The only way to stay on the trail was to crawl through a narrow V at their base. Fanning her light over snowy rock, she eyed the gap. If she shucked then shoved her pack through, she could make like an earthworm, do a low crawl, and wriggle her way through. She was thin enough, but what if she got stuck or her crampons snagged? No way to really reach back and unhook them.

  “Crap.” She worried her lower lip with her teeth. Gabriel was larger and, even thin, still broader. How had he managed? Squatting down, she studied the snow gathered along the base, her eyes zeroing in on a faint series of ridges from a waffled sole that led off to the left and then over rock glittery with accumulated ice and snow.

  That way. Bracing her left leg, she took a step up and onto the boulder with her right, heard her crampons bite and then catch. Stretching her right arm, she eyed a stone spur. Felt her powerful right fingers hook rock. Gritting her teeth, she pulled herself up, got a knee onto the rock and then the other, and that’s how she went, crabbing her way. Pausing for a breath, she straddled a boulder and sucked air. Glancing over a shoulder, she spotted the wolves on their haunches, tongues lolling, sides heaving like bellows as they kept well back in the relative shelter of the forest. She wondered if they’d follow her onto the rocks and then thought they might have more sense.

  “Right, so what’s my excuse?” The wind shredded the words as she blinked against swirling snow. The wind whipped, spinning wild patterns in what had already fallen. If there were tracks down there, she couldn’t see any. Too high, probably. Or there’s nothing to see. But that couldn’t be right. Gabriel’s prints led this way. Glancing back toward what must be a cliff, she squinted at a long thin dark line on the rock. What was that? A stick? Even with her spidey-sight coupled with her headlamp, she couldn’t quite make it out. Would Gabriel have used a walking stick?

  “Not if he wanted to get up the mountain. A walking-stick could easily snag in a crack. Be much more trouble than it’s worth.”

  She was so surprised she nearly toppled from her perch. “Talking again, are we, Jack?” Snippy, but she didn’t care.

  “I had nothing of value to add, but go ahead and be as pissy as you want. Still doesn’t change the fact that you’ve got to decide, Kate. You have two options, and only one is good.”

  Jack was right, damn him. “Well, I won’t know anything if I just sit here.” Which meant getting out onto the rocks. Directly below, the trail petered out, the way swamped by boulders that were themselves blanketed under a slick mantle of snow. What remained of the mountain to her left looked as if it had been gouged out with an ice cream scoop. There was nothing gradual here. The mountain had sheared. It was as if she’d climbed a high wall only to face a long, steep slalom.

  She turned another
look at that stick. Something strange about it. Too short? Gabriel was only a few inches taller than she, which put him at around six feet. That stick was better suited for a Hobbit.

  “So, leave it. If he’s not here, he’s not here.”

  “Mmmm.” The only way to get down would be to inch along for twenty feet or so and follow this ridge to her left where more boulders were humped together into a buttress. She could inch her way down that, but, once down, she’d have to be careful. The mountain leveled but only briefly before sloping down and then falling away into the black. At the edge, she spotted a shallow dip in the rock. Probably a cliff. A person might sit there, dangle his feet over the edge.

  She did the smart thing first. She called for him, five, six times, bellowing into the night. Only the wind answered.

  So, then she did the dumb thing. Well, okay, it wouldn’t have been dumb in daylight and good weather. Give her some credit.

  Besides—pulling up her legs, she began crawling on hands and knees along the ridge—no one ever accused me of being very smart.

  “No, you’re only being stubborn. What do you think you’re going to find?”

  “I just want to check, Jack. If there’s nothing, there’s nothing. If there’s blood . . .” She left the rest unsaid. At the end of the ridge, she levered herself onto snow-shrouded stone. Even with crampons, the mountain was slick, greedy, ready to throw her off-balance and send her shooting over the ice faster than a luge. Gabriel had been wearing hiking boots, and he’d risked this?

  “If you’re going to be stupid about it,” Jack suggested, “lose your gear. You’ll be fighting gravity as it is.”

  He was right. Shucking her straps, she carefully wedged her gear into a shallow crevice at the base of the rock wall then snugged her tin fire carry alongside. Not like she was going to start a fire on the rocks, after all, and the less gear she had to worry about, the better.