Phoenix's Mend (Iron Thorn MC #15)

Prologue

Elias

Heat first. That's how it always starts, if it starts at all, because most of the time my brain has the decency to keep the door shut.

Heat, and the particular white-gold color the road gets at eleven in the morning when the sun is directly overhead and there's no shade for forty miles in any direction.

The vehicle ahead of us was called Widowmaker. Some corporal with a sense of humor painted it on the door in white spray paint. We used to joke about that. Not anymore.

There's a sound that isn't a sound. People think an explosion is loud. It is, after — after there's a half second where the whole world just stops making noise, like it's taking a breath before it screams.

Then the screaming.

I don't remember deciding to move. I remember dust, so much dust, and the wrongness in my own leg registering somewhere far away, a problem for later, and my hands already working before my mind caught up to what my hands already knew.

Three names. I'm not writing them here. They don't belong in a story where I get to be the hero, because I'm not the hero of that day. I was just the man who lived.

Rodriguez had a two-year-old daughter he called "my little warlord" because she ran his house like a four-star general.

Petrov was going to propose to his girlfriend when he got home; he had the ring in his kit, wrapped in a sock, and he showed it to me twice a week like I hadn't seen it the first eleven times.

Doc — everyone called him Doc even though I was the actual medic, because he had that steady, unbothered energy — Doc wanted to open a bait shop.

A bait shop. In Ohio. He had it all planned out.

I worked on all three of them. My hands did what four years of training taught them to do while my leg screamed and the dust hadn't even settled and somewhere behind me somebody was calling for air support in a voice that didn't sound human.

None of it mattered. That's the thing nobody tells you about combat medicine. Sometimes you do everything right and it still doesn't matter.

I lived. My leg didn't, not the way it was supposed to — three surgeries and eleven pins later, it mostly works, if "mostly" is a word you're willing to be generous with.

I lived, and Rodriguez's little warlord doesn't have a dad anymore, and Petrov's girlfriend got a folded flag instead of a ring, and there is no bait shop in Ohio.

I don't remember much of the evacuation.

Bits. A helicopter with a bad rattle in the rotor.

A nurse holding my hand in a field hospital and telling me, in a voice built for calming down horses, that I was going to be okay.

I remember thinking: okay is a strange word to use on a man who just watched three better men die in the dirt.

The military hospitals blur together after that. Fluorescent lights and physical therapists with clipboards and a psychiatrist who kept asking me to rate my mood on a scale of one to ten, like grief was something you could hand a number and be done with.

Somewhere in that blur, word came from home.

The Iron Thorn kept my chair. Knox called — actually called, on the actual phone, which for Knox is basically a marriage proposal — and told me the clubhouse table still had a spot with my name burned into it, that they toasted me every Sunday, that Clover Ridge was waiting.

They wanted to throw me a parade. I told them not to. They did anyway, a small one, banners and a barbecue and a hundred hands clapping my shoulder like I'd won something instead of just outlasted it.

I smiled through all of it. I've gotten very good at smiling through things.

On the plane home, I had a window seat, which felt like a small cruelty from whoever assigns airline seating, because it meant I had to watch the whole country scroll by underneath the wing — mountains, then desert, then more mountains, an ocean of blue-gray unfamiliar land that I bled into and now get to leave.

I had a duffel bag. I had a cane, new, still smelling like a store, that I hated the second the physical therapist handed it to me.

And I had this thing sitting on my chest that I didn't have a name for yet, heavier than the bag, heavier than the leg, heavier than anything I've ever had to carry, including men.

They call me Phoenix. Road name, given the week I came home, because somebody — I think it was Boone, though he denies it now — said something about rising from the ashes, and it stuck the way things stick in a club that loves you too much to let you disappear quietly.

Phoenix.

I looked out that airplane window at a country I couldn't feel anything about yet, and I thought: I don't believe in the name. Ashes, sure. I've got those. I've got ashes for days.

The rising part I wasn't so sure about.

I didn't know yet about the rehab wing opening at the county clinic, or the woman who was about to open it, or that in a few weeks I'd meet somebody who'd looked straight into a fire like mine before and hadn't looked away.

I just knew I was going home a hero, and I didn't feel like one, and somewhere over Kansas I closed my eyes and let the plane carry me back toward a life I wasn't sure I still knew how to live.