Chapter 46
CHAPTER FORTY-SIX
Mei Lin was running into the meadow, screaming her husband’s name, dead weeds dragging at her shins.
A body hit her from the side and drove her into the dirt.
“Down. Stay down.” Summer’s arm clamped across her shoulders, her cheek on the cold ground beside Mei Lin’s. A shot cracked to the right, close enough that Mei Lin felt it in her teeth.
She fought anyway. Ethan was out there. Ethan was bleeding.
“Mei Lin. Stop. You can’t help him if you’re dead.” Summer’s grip tightened, then eased as she lifted her head and scanned. “Crawl back to the forest. Stay low—use your elbows. You won’t help anybody if you get yourself shot.”
Mei Lin did what she was told. When they were in the cover of the trees, Summer stood and helped her up. “Stay with Camilla. Do what she says.” And she was gone, low and fast toward the fight.
Hands drew Mei Lin toward the hill where she’d been hidden before. The woman’s face was a pale smudge in the dark. “Come with me. I’ll get you somewhere safe.”
“No.” Mei Lin needed to think straight, not panic. Panic wouldn’t save her husband. “I’m a nurse. I’m not going to hide while he bleeds to death.”
The woman went still.
It was too dark to read her face, but Mei Lin saw that she turned toward the meadow and back. “Okay. I’m Camilla. Daniel’s my husband—he’s a doctor. He’s on his way to Ethan.” Her hand closed around Mei Lin’s wrist, no longer holding her back but pulling her along. “Stay low. He went this way.”
Mei Lin pressed her earpiece. “Someone direct me to Ethan.”
Grant replied, rough and certain. “Go around the east side—from the hill where you were hiding if you’re facing the meadow, that would be the right. Stay twenty yards from the meadow and work your way north, taking cover all the way. You know what I mean?”
“Hiding, yes.” Mei Lin followed Grant’s directions, Camilla keeping pace, her hand still wrapped around Mei Lin’s wrist, her flashlight bobbing a few feet ahead. They moved in rushes—boulder to brush, brush to a fallen log—while the woods rang with single shots and the thud of running boots.
“Clear, east side,” said a familiar voice. Callan, she thought.
“Two secured at the meadow. Clear.” That sounded like Alyssa.
“Clear.” That was a voice she didn’t know.
The shooting thinned, then stopped, leaving only men shouting in English, ordering Lu’s people to the ground.
“Mei Lin,” Grant said, “when you get to the big rock, go around the north side, then double back toward the meadow.”
There were rocks everywhere. How was she supposed to know…?
Ah, there it was, a rock twice her height and three times wider. Mei Lin ran around the back, then turned toward the meadow.
Camilla’s flashlight beam found her husband.
Ethan lay on his back in the matted weeds, one arm flung wide, his shirt black and shining. So much blood. It pooled beneath his shoulder and ran dark down his throat.
“Stop fighting me.” A few feet off, a fair-haired man knelt with a knee planted in the back of a Chinese man.
She had seen this enemy across the meadow—he was the one who’d kicked Ethan until he’d curled into the dirt.
He was the reason she’d called out. She’d have done anything in that moment to make him stop hurting her husband.
The captive’s wrists were bound behind him.
Mei Lin tore her gaze away and dropped to her knees in the blood beside her husband. “I’m here.” She found his hand and squeezed it. “I’m here.”
A man was on his other side, shrugging out of his coat. “Cammie, hold the flashlight.” He looked across Ethan at Mei Lin. “I’m Daniel. You’re a nurse?”
“Yes.” She searched Ethan’s body and, despite all the blood, found only one wound. “You have scissors?”
He pulled them from a bag and handed them to her, and she cut away Ethan’s clothes.
The entry wound was high on the left, below the arm. She pressed the heel of her hand over it. Warm blood welled between her fingers, a steady seep, not the bright pulse of a severed artery. She bore down.
“Through and through.” Daniel worked the exit at his back. “His arm must’ve been up.”
It had been. She’d watched him lift it, watched him spread himself wide and turn his body into a wall between Lu and her. She shook off the picture.
Ethan’s chest rose, fell, rose again, shallow but steady. She slid two fingers to his throat. His pulse ran fast and thin beneath them, but it ran.
He was breathing. He was alive.
Thank You. Keep him. Please, keep him here.
Daniel passed her a folded pad, and she packed the wound while he did the same at the exit wound.
They worked together, bearing down, counting in silence, settling into the rhythm of two people who’d done this before.
Her knees were soaked. There was so much blood—too much for a wound already starting to clot.
“It’s not all his.” Daniel said it as though he’d heard her thoughts. He tipped his head toward a still shape in the weeds beyond Ethan. “A lot of that belongs to him.”
“Is he—?”
“He’s dead.”
She tore her gaze away and took in the dark spray dried across Ethan’s collar. There was darker blood on Ethan’s jacket and pants. It wasn’t all Ethan’s—it couldn’t be.
Light swung through the trees, white and jolting, and then paramedics were there—new hands, new voices. “We’ve got him, ma’am. Step back.”
She didn’t want to let go. Daniel came around to her and lifted her hand from the wound. “It’s okay,” he said. “They’ll take care of him.”
They lifted Ethan, and in the glare of their flashlights, his face was gray and slack and streaked with blood.
Maybe he would live.
She let herself hope.