Chapter 26 #2
“I can’t find her! She’s not in the house or the barn.” But I knew she’d want us to rescue the animals first and worry about her later.
This was all connected to Carter Hollis. There wasn’t an ounce of doubt in my body.
I grabbed a kennel with two cats inside and carried it clear. Went back for another. Every time I came out, I scanned around, expecting Lark to come running up.
She didn’t.
Tova was a nuisance, constantly pulling at me with the steady, deliberate pressure I knew from nightmares, when she climbed onto my chest and held me there until my breathing matched hers. That wasn’t what I needed now, but I couldn’t make her see that. “I’m fine, girl. Leave me alone.”
She wouldn’t stop. Not only would she not stop, she grabbed my pant legs with her teeth and actively pulled me away from the barn.
“Tova, no. I’m okay.”
She nipped at my hand.
I jerked back, totally shocked by her behavior. She’d never shown any sign of aggression. Not that this could really be called aggression either. I’d barely felt it. But, still.
“No, Tova.”
To my surprise, she turned away, walked over to the corner of the yard, and looked out toward the back property. She began to whine.
I didn’t have time to deal with a dog having a temper tantrum, but I had to admit I wasn’t expecting this sort of behavior from her. It was completely out of character.
The fire had reached the center of the barn, and the team was running out of time to get the remaining animals clear. Every hand mattered. I could hear sirens in the distance.
I started back toward the flames, but Tova ran over to me one more time, again pushing me in the direction she’d been staring at in the yard. I looked that way but couldn’t see anything but darkness.
But this dog had been trained by Lark. She had been inside the house all evening while whatever happened to Lark happened, and damn it, she was probably smarter than I was.
She was trying to tell me something.
I followed her.
Immediately, she stopped pushing at me and led, now that I was doing what she wanted me to do. I moved along the south boundary toward the back of the property, the same access road the drug runners had used.
Tova moved steadily, not running but urgent. She knew where she was going. She kept looking over her shoulder to make sure I was still with her.
The access road curved through the tree line. The fire lit the canopy behind us. Ahead was dark.
I saw it before I understood it.
A vehicle off the road, on its roof, crumpled and resting in the grass at the edge of the tree line. The windshield was shattered, and metal was twisted and bent in ways that metal should never bend. Nothing inside was moving.
Smoke hung in the air around it. The firelight from the barn caught on the exposed undercarriage, on broken glass, on chrome that threw the light back in fragments. The air carried the smell of burning timber and hot metal and…
The convoy and the IED. The vehicle that had been whole and then wasn’t. Sergeant Pruitt, whom I had pulled at, reached for, dug at the crumpled door until my hands bled, and couldn’t get to in time. The one who didn’t make it.
Every detail mapped onto every other detail, and my brain did what it had always done.
The access road dissolved. The dirt under my boots shifted and wasn’t Montana dirt anymore; it was convoy road, hard-packed and foreign, and the smoke was the column that had climbed the sky straight and wrong after the IED tore through the second vehicle.
The wrecked car was the Humvee that had folded inward with a man still inside.
The distant roar of the burning barn stretched and compressed into something concussive, something that punched my chest and left my ears ringing, and the light was coming from an angle that did not exist on this continent.
The ground tried to take me. I could feel it pulling, the decade between here and there collapsing until both places existed at once, layered on top of each other, and I was standing in the convoy and on the access road, and the vehicle in front of me was destroyed and the person inside was still, and I already knew how this ended because I had lived through it and carried it every day since.
My legs locked. My knees went rigid and my hands seized at my sides and my breathing broke into something shallow and fast that couldn’t fill my lungs.
I was standing ten feet from the car, and I could not close the distance because my body had decided that the convoy had already taught me what happened next and there was no reason to reach the door again.
The burning metal, the body I couldn’t reach, the ending I already knew.
Tova was against my leg. Her weight, her warmth, her shoulder pressed into me with the same pressure she used when she pulled me out of the dark. I could feel the dog and I could feel the convoy, and both were fighting for the same space inside my skull and the convoy was winning.
But the person inside that car was Lark.
She wasn’t a memory or a ghost. She wasn’t Reid, wasn’t Sergeant Pruitt. She was Lark.
Little bird.
I would not lose someone else because my mind took me somewhere I wasn’t.
The convoy didn’t let go. It didn’t break or dissolve or release me like some sort of movie. It stayed, screaming from every direction, trying to fold me into a memory I could not survive again.
My hands were shaking and my vision was split between two countries and the smoke in my lungs was smoke from two fires a decade apart, and my brain was insisting that this had already happened and I already knew the ending.
No.
I unlocked my knees. I forced my right foot forward and it landed on ground that was trying to be somewhere else, and then my left, and every step was a war against ten years of wiring that said I was too late, that the door was too crumpled, that the person inside was already gone.
I was not too late.
I dropped to the ground beside the passenger side.
The door was buckled but the window was gone, and I could see Lark through the opening.
She hung upside down, suspended by the seat belt, blood on her face, her arms loose below her head, her wrists fucking zip-tied together.
She was not conscious, but her chest rose and fell in shallow, uneven pulls.
She was alive.
Carter Hollis was in the driver’s seat, unconscious, bleeding from a gash above his eye, his body crumpled against the steering column. I registered him, and he did not matter.
I reached through the window and found the seat belt release.
It took three tries because my hands were still shaking and the mechanism was jammed at an angle.
On the third try, it gave and Lark’s weight dropped, and I caught her.
I guided her through the window frame, supporting her head, pulling her clear of the metal and the glass and the car that had nearly killed her.
I laid her on the grass and knelt beside her. Her face was swollen. Blood at her nose and at her lip where it had split. Her wrists were marked with the raw red lines of zip ties that had been cinched too tight.
But she was breathing. She was here. I had gotten to her in time.
I dug my knife out of my pocket and cut the zip ties, tossing the plastic to the side.
Tova pressed against us both, her nose against Lark’s open palm, and I put my hand on Lark’s cheek and held it there.
Headlights came down the access road a few minutes later. Hunter’s voice first, then Lachlan’s, then doors and boots on gravel and the two of them moving toward us.
“Isaac saw you take off with the dog,” Hunter said. He dropped beside me, and his eyes went to Lark and then to the overturned car and then back to me. “Ambulance is six minutes out.”
“The animals,” I said.
“We got them out. Every one. Even that damned alpaca, who was spitting at me the whole time.”
Lachlan moved past us toward the car. He looked through the driver’s side window and went still, and then he pulled his radio from his belt and called it in. His voice was very quiet and very controlled, and I stopped listening because it didn’t matter.
Lark was all that mattered.
I didn’t let go.
I stayed on the ground with Lark’s head in my lap and my hand on her cheek and Tova’s nose against her palm.
The convoy was still at the edges, where it would always be.
But I was here. On this road, in this night, with this woman whose breath I could feel against my wrist and loved with every fiber of my existence.
The real enemy had always been inside my head. And this was where I beat it. I didn’t conquer it. I didn’t make it disappear.
I just chose to stay.