Holt
Through my own glass I catch it too. The same half-second warning she must have caught from the ground: moonlight sliding off his scope, and the angle of it wrong. Not aimed at the building. Aimed at her.
I don't have a clean shot at him. I don't wait for one.
I come up off the scree on my knees and then my feet, no crouch, no cover, standing up into moonlight on purpose. Standing up into moonlight is the only way to put myself between his scope and where it wants to go.
The report comes a half second later, flat and short, swallowed almost whole by the creek.
She's down. Then she's moving, rolling for the base of the elevator wall, fast, not hit, and something in my chest lets go so hard it nearly takes my knees with it.
The second shot has my name on it.
I feel it before I hear it.
My right hand goes wrong. Not pain yet. Wrong, the way a thing goes wrong a full second before the body agrees to report it.
I'm on the ground. I don't remember getting there.
"Holt."
Her voice, close. Too close for how little time should have passed, except it hasn't been little. Scree is slow even in daylight, and she climbed four hundred yards of it in the dark on a dead run. Ten minutes, maybe more. It only felt like one.
"Holt, look at me."
I look at her instead of my hand. Her face is doing the thing I've only seen it do twice before. Once over Jacob in the snow, once in a frozen parking lot at midnight. Not panic. It’s the other thing. Focused. Terrifying.
"Talk to me. Where?"
"Hand." Flat, reporting, the same register I use for wind calls. "Right hand."
Her belt's off and around my forearm before I finish the word.
"Can you feel your fingers?"
"Some of them."
"That's not an answer."
"It's the only one I've got left in me tonight."
I make myself look down. A man who won't look at his own wound is a man lying about how bad it is, and I've never once had that luxury.
It's bad. Bone, tendon, this range. Whatever this hand does for the rest of my life, it isn't going to be what it did before Voss's second shot.
The rifle lies twenty feet off, thrown clear of my hand by the impact itself. I don't reach for it. That decision belongs to a hand that no longer answers to me.
"Where is he?"
"Knox had him for a minute. Not anymore.
" Her hands shake. Her voice doesn't, which is its own kind of miracle.
"Heard your channel go dead same as I did.
Broke off the bridge, chased headlights off a two-track a half mile north.
Lost him past the reservation line." She doesn't look up from the belt.
"He's turning around." Her hand slips on the strap, just once.
A hitch she covers by cinching it tighter than it needs to be.
"Coming back for us instead." Her voice catches on us.
She pushes through it anyway. "Don't you dare pass out on me, Blackwater. "
"Wasn't planning on it."
Her palm goes flat to my forehead, fast, clinical, reading skin gone clammy and cold under it. "You're grey. You look like a man planning on it."
"I've got a professional opinion on that." The words come out thinner than I want. "I'd know."
"Your professional opinion is currently bleeding through my belt, so forgive me if I don't take it."
That gets a laugh out of me, short and wrecked, and it costs me. A white flare of pain is running up through the wrist that makes the laugh die halfway.
"Don't do that," she says. "Don't make yourself laugh right now. It's tearing the wound open."
"Then stop being funny."
"I'm not being funny. I'm being right, which you're allergic to."
She cinches the belt down hard, and the pain finally catches all the way up, a full white sheet of it that tips the sky sideways for a second. I hear myself make a sound I don't authorize.
"Stay with me." Her palm finds my jaw. The same place mine found hers in that parking lot, except now she's the one holding steady and I'm the one being held. I don't fight her on it. That's the only concession I've got left.
"Right hand," I say, because the only other thing in me right now is unbearable, and gallows humor has gotten me through worse holes than this one. "Could've been worse."
"How, Holt?" Her voice cracks on my name. "You may never shoot straight again. You may never even hold a coffee cup right again. What exactly is the version of tonight you're measuring against?"
"Could've been you."
She goes still over that. Just for a second. Long enough that neither of us hears the creek, or feels the cold coming up off the ground, or remembers there's a man with a rifle still out in the dark somewhere in the valley.
"Don't you ever," she says, low and furious, her thumb dragging once under my eye like she's checking for tears that aren't there yet, "do that again. Do you hear me? Ever."
"Can't promise that."
"That's not what I asked for."
"Wasn't going to give it to you anyway." My jaw tries for a smile and doesn't make the distance. "You'd have done the same. Don't pretend otherwise."
She doesn't pretend. She looks at me with her hands full of my blood and says nothing, because there's nothing true left to say that isn't already sitting in the four inches between us.
"Focus." Her voice drops into the register she used on a deputy at midnight, the one that means she's decided to be the only functioning adult within fifty yards. "Can you walk if I get you up?"
"Yes."
"That's a lie."
"It's the lie you need right now."
I get one boot under me and the world tilts hard enough that her hand flat on my chest is the only thing keeping the horizon where it belongs.
Four hundred yards of scree between here and the truck, downhill, in the dark, and I already know I'm not driving any part of it with a hand that's quit taking orders.
"You've got the wheel tonight. I'll manage the walking."
"You can barely stand, Blackwater. Manage is generous."
"Low bar tonight."
That gets the almost-laugh again, wrecked and real.
She gets her shoulder under my good arm and takes more of my weight than a woman her size should be able to carry. I let her. Some fights a man doesn't win by refusing help. I learned that in a snowbank in February. I'm relearning it now with considerably more blood involved.
"Talk to me the whole way down," I tell her. "I want your voice in my ear. Same as before."
"Bossy, for a man who just lost a fight with a bullet."
"Still won the fight that mattered."
"That's not how any of this works."
"Feels like how it worked."
She talks anyway. Count your steps. Almost there. Don't you dare go down on me now. None of it means anything and all of it means everything, and by the time the truck's shape comes up out of the dark, I've stopped trying to tell the difference between her voice and my own pulse.
She gets me into the passenger seat, slams the door, and comes around fast. Her radio crackles alive in the hand that isn't currently holding pressure on my arm like she's done this a hundred times in a hundred other lives.
"This is Mackenzie Tatum." Her voice doesn't shake.
Not once. "Shots fired. Officer down. No.
Correction." One breath, the only crack she lets herself have, gone as fast as it comes.
"Civilian down. Gunshot wound, right hand, bleeding controlled.
Grain elevator, Birch Creek pullout off Highway 89, Blackwater land, north section. "
A pause on the other end. I can't hear the words, only the shape of a question she doesn't want to answer.
"Tatum. Special Agent." Her jaw sets, steel coming up hard under her voice, blood dried dark across both her hands. "Currently on administrative leave. Reporting anyway."
Her hand finds mine on the seat between us, careful of the belt, careful of everything, and holds on like letting go isn't a thing her body remembers how to do.
"You held the wheel tonight," I tell her. "In every way that counted."
"Save it for when you're not in shock, Blackwater."
She lifts the radio one last time. "Send everyone," she says, into a night that isn't done with either of us yet. "And hurry."
Only then does she set it down.