my country had been at stake. Frankly I preferred those circumstances to these. I murmured them now, concentrating on Dave’s face, his high forehead, stern green eyes, unsmiling lips, and dark brown hair touched with just a hint of red.
I shot from my body like a rocket. I’d forgotten how fast I could move outside physical being, or what a rush flying across time and space with so little to slow me down could be. I followed that yellow streak of lightning right to Dave’s shoulder. And if I’d been a little more corporeal when he turned his head to pull a breath before leaning back down to continue CPR, he’d have literally seen right through me.
The woman who needed his air was one of his, a sun-bitten veteran whose blond ponytail splayed across the dirty floor of the deserted house like a lotus floating on a pond full of scum. A tourniquet had been wound around her mangled thigh and a bloody bandage encased her head. She lay on the ground floor in the corner farthest from a bank of windows. Five guys and a woman wearing desert gear and armed with M4s kept up a steady barrage from those openings. A couple of them had taken damage as well.
I heard more assault weapons, including a SAW, ripping off rounds from upstairs. It looked to me like they’d planned a raid and had either been ambushed or outgunned. Either way, they’d had to pull back to this position. The firing slowed as, one by one, Dave’s unit picked off their targets. He evidently trusted them to do their jobs without direct oversight, because his mind was so elsewhere.
“Come on, Sergeant,” Dave said desperately as he compressed her chest with the heels of his hands. “Come on, Susan. Stay here. Stay with us.”
I had said the same words to Matt, begged him as I wept over his body the night Aidyn Strait had stabbed him to death.
My brain seemed to split. I wanted to scream from the pain of it. At once I hunched in the past, my heart exploding as I called for Matt to return to me. And I stood beside Dave, wishing I had eyes to weep when I saw Susan’s exquisite crystalline soul lift from her body. Like Matt, she had somewhere else she needed to be. And, as my love had left a part of him behind, so did she. The azure jewel that comprised her being spun and split. Nine gems separated from the whole, sought out and found each of her brothers and sisters in arms. Those who shared the room with her paused to gaze at her one last time. And then the main part of her flew up, up into the sun. A- mazing.
“She’s gone, Dave,” I said.
He looked up at me, his green eyes startling against his taut brown skin. I took it as a sign of his utter distress that he wasn’t even surprised to see me. “Son of a bitch! She was our fucking medic!” He wasn’t mad they’d lost their doc. Just that she could’ve maybe saved any of the rest of them if they’d suffered the same injuries. I crouched beside him. The gunfire had almost ceased. The sound of approaching helicopters signaled imminent rescue. In a few minutes they’d land, Dave’s unit would clear out, and life would move on. For now we sat beside Susan’s body, mourning her, yeah, but grieving for the rest of our dead as well. We’d racked up way too many in our lives. Mom and Granny May. Matt and Jesse. The Helsingers.
“Did I tell you I was one of the casualties at the Helsinger massacre?” I asked him. “Aidyn Strait broke my neck.”
“Yeah.”
“I did?”
“Yeah. When I called.”
“When was that?”
“The day Dad told me you were in the hospital.”
“I’m sorry. I don’t remember that.”
“You were pretty far out of it. They had you on about as much morphine as you could handle.”
“We’ve met,” he said dryly. He pulled Susan’s jacket closed. Smoothed her hair. “About a month after I joined up I was shot and killed during a live-fire training session,” he told me quietly enough that his men couldn’t hear. “As they tried to resuscitate me, I went to some sort of middle place, though it sure looked like a hotel room outside of Vegas to me.”
“So Raoul gave you a choice?” I asked, trying to clarify Dave’s experience in my boggled brain.
“Yeah.”
“And you chose to come back. To fight.”
“I’m here.”
“I . . .” Geez this was hard to say. “I’ve been having some problems sleeping. Actually, sleeping’s okay. It’s what I do while I’m asleep that’s not so cool.”
“Like?”
“Jumping out of second-story windows.”
His eyes shot to mine. He looked me over hard this time and, by the way his brows dropped, didn’t appreciate what he saw. He shook his head. “We are damaged goods, Jazzy.”
“I can’t go on like this much longer. But coming here, seeing you lose Susan, at least I’ve figured out my main problem.”
He waited.
I shrugged miserably. “I believe after Matt died, he talked to Raoul just like you and I did. Only he decided not to come back. He didn’t love me enough to stay. Subconsciously I’ve known this for a while and, well, it’s killing
