“Tell me. Get started. I got the rooks up there, Libby and Stovic. Keep ’em straight.”
“You got it.”
Rowan dug, cut, beat, hacked and sweated. Hours flashed by. She sliced down snags, the still-standing dead trees the fire would use for fuel. When she felt her energy flag, she stopped long enough to stuff her mouth with the peanut-butter crackers in her PG bag, wash it down with the prize of the single Coke—nearly hot now—she’d brought with her.
Her clothes sported the pink goo from a second drop of repellent, and under it her back, legs, shoulders burned from the heat and the hours of unrelenting effort.
But she felt it, the minute it started to turn their way.
The massive cloud of smoke thinned—just a little—and through it she saw a single hopeful wink of light from the North Star.
Day had burned into night while they’d battled.
She straightened, arched her back to relieve it, and looked back, into the black—the burned-out swatch of the forest the fire had consumed, the charred logs, stumps, ghostly spikes, dead pools of ash.
Nothing to eat there now, she thought, and they’d cut off the supply of fuel at the head.
Her energy swung back. It wasn’t over, but they’d beaten it. The dragon was beginning to lie down.
She downed a dead pine, then used one of its branches to beat out a small, sneaky spot. The cry of shock and pain had her swinging around in time to see Stovic go down. His chain saw bounced out of his hands, rolled, and the blood on its teeth dripped onto the trampled ground.
Rowan let her own drop where she stood, lunged toward him. She reached him as he struggled to sit up and grab at his thigh.
“Hold on! Hold on!” She pushed his hands away, tore at his pants to widen the jagged tear.
“I don’t know what happened. I’m cut!” Beneath the soot and ash, his face glowed ghastly white.
She knew. Fatigue had made him sloppy, caused him to lose his grip on the saw or use it carelessly enough, just for a second, to allow it to jerk back.
“How bad?” he demanded as she used a knife from her pack to cut the material back. “Is it bad?”
“It’s a scratch. Toughen up, rook.” She didn’t know either way, not yet. “Get the first-aid kit,” Rowan ordered when Libby dropped down beside her. “I’m going to clean this up some, Stovic, get a better look.”
A little shocky, she determined as she studied his eyes, but holding.
And his bitter litany of curses—a few of them Russian delivered in his Brooklyn accent—made her optimistic as she cleaned the wound.
“Got a nice gash.” She said it cheerfully, and thought, Jesus, Jesus, a little deeper, a little to the left, and bye-bye, Stovic. “The blade mostly got your pants.”
She looked him in the eye again. She’d have lied if necessary, and her stomach jittered with relief she didn’t need the lie. “You’re going to need a couple dozen stitches, but that shouldn’t slow you down for long. I’m going to do a field dressing that’ll hold you until you get back to base.”
He managed a wobbly smile, but she heard the click in his throat as he swallowed. “I didn’t cut off anything essential, right?”
“Your junk’s intact, Chainsaw.”
“Hurts like hell.”
“I bet.”
He gathered himself, took a couple slow breaths. Rowan felt another wave of relief when a little color eked back into his face. “First time I jump a fire, and look what I do. It won’t keep me grounded long, will it?”
“Nah.” She dressed the wound quickly, competently. “And you’ll have this sexy scar to impress the women.” She sat back on her haunches, smiled at him. “Women can’t resist a wounded warrior, right, Lib?”
“Damn right. In fact, I’m holding myself back from jumping you right now, Stovic.”
He gave her a twisted grin. “We beat it, didn’t we, Swede?”
“Yeah, we did.” She patted his knee, then got to her feet. Leaving Libby tending him, she walked apart to contact Gibbons and arrange for Stovic to be littered out.
Eighteen hours after jumping the fire, Rowan climbed back onto the plane for the short flight back to base.
Using her pack as a pillow, she stretched out on the floor, shut her eyes. “Steak,” she said, “medium rare. A football-size baked potato drowning in butter, a mountain of candied carrots, followed by a slab of chocolate cake the size of Utah smothered in half a gallon of ice cream.”
“Meat loaf.” Yangtree dropped down beside her while somebody else—or a couple of somebody elses by the stereophonics—snored like buzz saws. “An entire meat loaf, and I’ll take my mountain in mashed potatoes with a vat of gravy. Apple pie, and make that a gallon of ice cream.”
Rowan slid open her eyes to see Matt watching her with a sleepy smile. “What’s your pick, Matt?”
“My ma’s chicken and dumplings. Best ever. Just pour it in a fivegallon bucket so I can stick my head in and chow it down. Cherry cobbler and homemade whipped cream.”
“Everybody knows whipped cream comes in a can.”
“Not at my ma’s house. But I’m hungry enough to eat five-day-old pizza, and the box it came in.”
“Pizza,” Libby moaned, then tried to find a more comfortable curl on her seat. “I never thought I could be this empty and live.”
“Eighteen hours on the line’ll do it.” Rowan yawned, rolled over, and let the voices, the snoring, the engines lull her toward sleep.
“Gonna hit the kitchen when we get back, Ro?” Matt asked her.
“Mmm. Gotta eat. Gotta shower off the stink first.”
The next thing she knew they were down. She staggered off the plane through a fog of exhaustion. Once she’d dumped her gear she stumbled to her room, ripped the wrapper off a candy bar. She all but inhaled it while she stripped off her filthy clothes. Barely awake, she aimed for the shower, whimpered a little as the warm water slid over her. Through blurry eyes she watched it run dingy gray into the drain.
She lathered up, hair, body, face, inhaling the scent of peaches that apparently tripped Gull’s trigger. Rinse and repeat, she ordered herself. Rinse and repeat. And when, at last, the water ran clear, she made a halfhearted attempt to dry off.
Then fell onto the bed wrapped in the damp towel.
The dream crept up on her in the twilight layer of sleep, as her mind began to float back from the deep pit of exhaustion.
Thundering engines, the whip of wind, the heady leap into the sky. The thrill turning to panic—the pound, pound, pound of heart against ribs as she watched, helplessly, Jim plunge toward the burning ground.
“Hey. Hey. You need to wake up.”
The voice cutting through the scream in her head, the rough shake on her shoulder, had her bolting up in bed.
“What? The siren? What?” She stared into Gull’s face, rubbing one hand over her own.
“No. You were having a nightmare.”
She breathed in, breathed out, slitting her eyes a little. It was morning—or maybe later—she could tell that much. And Gulliver Curry was in her room, without her permission.
“What the hell are you doing in here?”
“Maybe you want to hitch that towel up some? Not that I mind the view. And, in fact, could probably spend the rest of the day admiring it.”
She glanced down, saw she was naked to the waist, and the towel that had slipped down wasn’t covering much below either. Baring her teeth, she yanked it up and around. “Answer the question before I kick your ass.”
“You missed breakfast, and you were heading toward missing lunch.”
“We worked the fire for eighteen hours. I didn’t get to bed till about three in the morning.”
“So I hear, and good job. But somebody mentioned you didn’t get to eat, and have a fondness for bacon- and-egg sandwiches, with Jack cheese. So...” He jerked his thumb at the bedside table. “I brought you one. I was going to leave it on the nightstand, but you were having a bad one. I woke you up, you flashed me—and just let me
