Flash (SEAL Team EAST #8)

Chapter 1

The Guardian reeled back from the force of the two minds he’d inadvertently touched while pushing back from Chaos. He staggered at what he felt. Human, unshielded, and blazing with promise, with power that had not yet been tapped or tested.

He understood too late. Chaos chuckled, receded, and stopped pushing. Their enemy had chosen their ambush well.

The Guardian had fucked up. The dual realms teetered on the brink of collapse, and worse, he had compromised its defenders before they could even rise to meet the fight.

The Veil destabilized, rifts tearing open, demanding everything he and the Keepers had to contain them. But Chaos had already achieved his objective.

Chaos slipped through. His agents were free. The Guardian’s jaw tightened as the truth settled into something cold and final.

These agents were assassins.

The Guardian called out in sheer terror. If those agents carried out their missions, it was over.

* * *

Flash jerked out of a deep sleep in his Virginia Beach apartment, the familiar weight of humid air and distant ocean sound doing nothing to ground him as everything around him rippled like a dream.

Every one of his teammates wearing the ghostly trident woke up in a cold sweat, Tex, Bondo, Easy, Shark, Twister, Dagger, and Brawler, with harsh breaths and a collective feeling as if their bodies were dissolving.

Not just their Shadowguard vow, but the fabric that held that vow together.

Panic caught him and his teammates. He could feel their disorientation.

He closed his eyes, reaching for something solid in the swirling dread.

Lechuza, CIA Shadowguard Killa Saqra Rumi, materialized in his mind, the fierce predator who'd called him águila estrellada, star-spangled eagle.

Her amber eyes, unblinking and sure. The controlled stillness that made her dangerous.

The way she'd looked at him like she could see straight through to his core.

Her presence shattered the supernatural chaos, steady as stone.

He gathered his courage, his energy into veins of shining gold, sent them out to his team, and as they settled, so did the air around him.

The trident still throbbed, a low burn he'd carried since the night the Veil claimed them, in the same spot just beneath the heart, burning pale the night his brothers stood around his bed and made the fight their own.

They would be SEALs till the day they died.

But they were Shadowguard now too, the same as Lechuza and the operatives who'd carried the title for years.

The operatives had come to it the formal way, sworn in, inducted, a name on some classified roster.

The Veil had reached through Flash's vow, found seven men bound to him so completely that even supernatural law couldn't ignore it, and marked them as its own.

The Guardian called it a reflection. Flash called it brotherhood.

Either way, it meant the war was never his to carry alone, and it meant whatever was tearing through them now could take all eight at once.

Agents of Chaos were on the move, something fundamental had been broken, and they had only begun the hunt for Lechuza. Flash and his team were running out of time.

* * *

Easy couldn't relax. The Virginia Beach humidity clung to his skin despite the air conditioning, but he was still gasping, his mind whirling in the pre-dawn darkness. Sweat beaded along his hairline, cold despite the oppressive heat.

"What's wrong?" Astraea asked, her voice cutting through the thick air like she was speaking through water.

He was drowning in the familiar, damaged energy radiating through him, throbbing in the now fractured trident.

Flash's actions, his soothing energy, had been a temporary fix.

Something was broken, maybe not beyond repair, but Easy knew a threat when he felt it, the way he knew incoming mortars or the shift in ocean currents before a riptide.

"Matty?" she said again, this time grasping his sweat-slicked arm, her cool fingers a shock against his burning skin. Her voice carried the kind of concern that sliced straight through to bone. "My God, you're burning up. Are you ill?"

He couldn't answer. The familiar scent of their bedroom, clean sheets, Astraea's lavender shampoo, the faint salt tang that never quite left anything in Virginia Beach, all faded as his senses were hijacked.

He was helpless to follow the thread, a kind of kinship that was an integral part of the SEAL oath, but wrong, twisted, pulling him somewhere he'd never gone before.

"Babe," she said softly, but his perception of everything fogged over and winked out. The mattress beneath him, the soft cotton of their sheets, the sound of her breathing, all of it dissolved. He had no idea if he was even upright anymore.

Compelling energy streams, one a deep, gorgeous blue like the fathomless part of the ocean where light couldn't reach, the other as dark and powerful as the loam of rich earth after rain. They drew him in a core, fundamental way that couldn't be denied, like gravity, like the pull of the tide.

A strange sensation of being separated, floating, then he was somewhere else entirely.

"Fly? Fuck. Are you all right?" The voice was so damn familiar, then he placed it. That was Nathaniel “Than” Locklear, big, Native American kid, callsign North, his former BUD/S candidate, now a junior lieutenant.

As soon as he needed the answer, it was in his head, his perception shifting to an upscale hotel room at the Park Hyatt Aviara Resort in Carlsbad, California, across the freaking country.

Rich hardwood gleamed under soft lighting, and floor-to-ceiling windows revealed the California coastline in the distance.

The air carried the faint scent of expensive toiletries and ocean breeze.

North banged on the bathroom door, the sound sharp against the stone and polished surfaces, but his movements were stilted, unnatural.

His face creased in obvious pain, jaw clenched so tight the muscles stood out like steel cables.

Something flickered at his temples, the shadow of horns materializing and fading, ghostly bone pressing against skin before dissolving back into nothing.

These kids, top of their BUD/S class, legends in the making, had been touched by the Veil, and what? Compromised? How? The Guardian didn't hurt Shadowguard.

He heard retching, choking, a man in pain. That was Fly. The sound echoed off the luxurious bathroom walls, raw and guttural against the backdrop of Italian marble.

"Matty!" Astraea's frantic voice broke through the vision, her hands on his shoulders in their bedroom, but these young men needed him. No. They needed the team.

Using one of his broad shoulders, North forced the bathroom door open, the heavy wood splintering despite its quality construction.

His face contorted as phantom pain lanced through him.

The shadow of buffalo horns flickered again, more solid this time, curving from his skull before fading like smoke.

Fly lay in a fetal position on the hard, heated floor, knees drawn up, groaning as he clutched his stomach.

His skin had a gray pallor under the soft bathroom lighting.

But worse, his back arched, muscles contracting in spasms that had nothing to do with human anatomy.

Ghostly wings materialized along his shoulder blades, translucent feathers shimmering into existence before dissolving, over and over, like his body couldn't decide what it was supposed to be.

North bent down, gathering him close despite his own obvious agony, strong arms cradling his teammate. "I've got to get you to the hospital." His voice was strained, and the effort to speak normally cost him as another wave of transformation pain hit, phantom horns contracting against his skull.

What was plaguing them had nothing to do with normal human illness.

They'd been touched by something beyond the natural world.

Easy noted their broken tridents. Shock coursed through him.

Somehow those kids had been pulled into this whole Veil situation.

How? Why? Their beings were twisting, caught between what they were and what they were becoming, their energy signatures fracturing like glass under pressure.

Something was trying to manifest through them, trying to change them.

What the hell had happened? The transformation was incomplete, violent, tearing them apart from the inside.

"No!" Easy shouted, his voice carrying across dimensions. North's head jerked up, his dark eyes wide with recognition even as his face twisted in another wave of supernatural agony. Eye contact, strong and intense, broke through the supernatural static.

"Instructor Easy?" North whispered, his voice barely audible over Fly's labored breathing and the soft sound of phantom wings beating against air.

Easy tried to stay in the vision, to anchor himself there, but he was being pulled back like a fish on a line.

The luxury hotel room wavered, colors bleeding at the edges.

He shouted through the fading connection, his voice carrying all the authority he'd ever wielded over these two young warriors, "Hold on! We're coming!"

The vision snapped like a rubber band, and Easy gasped back into his own body, Astraea's worried face swimming into focus above him, her cool, soothing hands stroking his arm.

He reached up, cupping her worried face. "I'm all right, babe."

But she knew differently. Her eyes told him that she was aware of everything that had to do with the world ending, what he and his teammates had been called to handle.

She smiled, shook her head. "You always say that, and sometimes I almost believe you," she said fiercely. "I'm here for you. All of you. Always."

He nodded, pulling her down until their foreheads touched. "I love you," he whispered.

"I love you, through all this madness. Let me know what you need."