Forged in Ash (17 page)

“So what happened?” Kait prompted.

“Yeah.” Demi shook her head. “It was the craziest thing. Some crazy lady tried to shoot him.”

“
What?
”

“Yep.” With a grimace, Demi waved away another plume of diesel exhaust. After an irritated glare toward the idling van, she nodded. “Tried to shoot him like three or four times.”

Another cloud of diesel fumes rolled toward them, and Demi spun toward the van. “Come on, lady.” She stalked over to the driver’s door and pounded on the window, going up on her tiptoes to glare through the glass. “Either shut the damn thing off or park somewhere else. I’m choking on your fumes.”

The woman behind the glass turned her head with mechanical precision and stared at the two of them, and then just as slowly faced front again.

Demi stepped back, suddenly silent. “That’s weird,” she said after a long moment.

Kait raised her brows at the odd tone in her friend’s voice. “What?”

Demi backed up even farther. “The woman in the van. I think it’s her.”

“Who?”

“The crazy lady who shot up your friend’s truck.”

Kait turned, in what felt like slow motion, and stared at the woman sitting hunched over in the driver’s seat. “Are you sure?”

With a slow nod, Demi backed all the way up to her cart, as though she were afraid the woman was about to thrust open her door, jump out of the van, and attack. “I only saw her from the back, but she has the same wild brown hair and heavy beige coat. I mean how many people wear wool coats in a ninety-degree heat wave.” She shook her head. “Crazy.”

Kait took a cautious step forward, peering through the driver’s window. The woman was staring straight ahead with absolute concentration. Kait followed the woman’s gaze. One of the clusters of people down the sidewalk turned around and headed back into the lobby, which opened a path down the sidewalk. Cosky, Zane, and Mac came into view.

Ice slid down the back of her neck, and the hair on her arms lifted. The woman was staring with fixed intensity at the three SEALs. There was something chilling about her unwavering focus. Something sinister. It was enough to convince her Demi was right.

Turning, she headed at a fast clip toward the nearest cop, who happened to be halfway down the sidewalk, talking to a group of bystanders. If she yelled a warning, it might alert the woman, spook her into running. Better to notify the cops quietly and let them handle things.

But she’d barely covered ten feet when the ominous roar of a revving engine rumbled behind her, and she knew with absolute certainty she didn’t have time to reach the cop. Instead she stopped dead and took a deep breath.

“It’s her. In the van. The shooter,” Kait screamed the warning as loud as she could, hoping it would reach both the cops and the three men on the corner.

And then she watched, with her heart in her throat, as the van swerved around the cop cars parked beside her. The scream of brakes and blare of horns from the oncoming traffic drowned her cry of warning. She cupped her hands to her mouth and yelled again.

Swerving, the van’s front left tire hit the curb and popped with an explosive hiss of escaping air. The vehicle jolted onto the sidewalk, the front tire flattening with every rotation of its wheels. As it straightened out, its tail end swung left and clipped the front end of the first cop car. The cruiser bounced hard and pivoted on its rear tires toward the building, where Kait stood amid clusters of bystanders.

As she leapt back, people scattered in all directions. Screams and curses lit the air. The van accelerated, riding the sidewalk with its left tires. A greasy cloud of diesel exhaust slicked everything, obscuring the van beneath a smoky veil.

But Kait didn’t need to see the vehicle to know it was barreling toward Cosky, Zane, and Mac.

“So you’re saying it’s a coincidence,” Mac roared, his eyes flashing black and livid. “It’s pretty fucking obvious you were visiting some damn woman in this complex, and now Aiden’s Goddamn sister just happens to be sharing the sidewalk with you? Yeah, that’s some motherfucking coincidence.”

Cosky gritted his teeth and took a limping step forward until he and Mac were chest to chest, squaring off. “I said,” he snarled back, “that it’s none of your business!”

“Bullshit.” The words hit the air with a lethal rattle, until it sounded like Mac had swallowed a hive of wasps. “I’m still your fucking commander and you—”

“No. You aren’t,” Cosky snapped back, immediately wishing he could strangle the words out of existence.

Dead silence fell.

Son of a bitch.
That had been a low as hell blow. But the words were out now. Hanging there. No calling them back.

He should have stayed in Zane’s van, instead of joining Zane and Mac’s huddle in the corner of the parking lot, while Rawls attempted to pull prints off the sedan.

Cosky stepped back and ran tense fingers through his hair.
Shit.

With a slow shake of his head, Zane frowned. “There’s something else going on here. Cos knows better than to target one of our own for a drive-by booty call.” He turned to Cosky, cocked his head, and scrutinized him with a quizzical glance. “Just spill it.”

Like hell. His chest tightened. The thought of letting his teammates in on his desperation, and just how far his desperation had driven him, made his skin itch.

“There’s nothing to tell.” Cosky bit the words out, as a heavy-duty engine revved somewhere near the apartment complex’s glass entrance.

Mac opened his mouth, the disbelief stamped across his face, and Cosky braced himself for another tirade. But a shrill scream drowned out the new spate of overkill and overreaction.

What the hell?

He turned in the direction of the scream. The clusters of bystanders clogging the sidewalk along the side of the building swung around too. The crowd shifted slightly, and Kait appeared. From the hands still cupped to her mouth, it was pretty obvious she’d done the screaming. As he watched, she screamed something again, but the roar of an engine hijacked the words.

“What the fuck,” Mac said.

A white delivery van parked in front of the coffee cart suddenly squealed forward, swerving into oncoming traffic. Brakes squealed. Horns blared. The two cars on a collision course with the van swerved into the other lane. More brakes squealed. More horns blared.

The van shot past the two cop cars parked in front of the lobby doors. As the hood cleared the last police car, the vehicle jerked to the left, its rear clipping the cruiser’s front end. The squad car bounced.

“Kait,” Cosky shouted, lurching forward, ice pooling in his stomach as the cruiser spun toward the tall, frozen blonde standing mere feet away.

Kait leapt back as the cruiser swung toward her.

Zane grabbed his arm, hauling him back. “You won’t—”

The words choked off, and Zane froze, his hand clenching around Cosky’s bicep.

Cosky shot him a quick look.
Un-fucking-believable. A Vision? Now?

The van barreled toward them, the left front and rear tires riding the sidewalk. Clusters of people dove out of its way, their screams competing with the roar of an overtaxed engine.

“What the motherfuck—” Mac reached for the weapon stashed at the small of his back beneath his T-shirt and dropped into a shooter’s stance.

Cosky caught a glimpse of scraggly brown hair behind the oncoming vehicle’s windshield, and knew immediately who had their asses in her sights. Jesus, the crazy bitch had come back for round two.

“Stand down,” he yelled at Mac. “We need her alive.”

Mac lowered his weapon slightly, targeting her tires and engine compartment; which wouldn’t stop the damn thing before it smeared them all over the pavement, sure as hell not with Zane’s feet frozen to the pavement.

Cosky wrenched his arm free, grabbed Zane’s left arm, dragged it over his shoulders, anchoring it in place with his left hand, and wrapped his right arm around his buddy’s waist. With Zane pinned to his side, he swung them both around and hobbled as fast as his knee would allow toward the cop cars blocking the parking lot’s entrance.

A cop, weapon drawn, raced past him screaming, “Police. Police.”

A cacophony of shots lit the air behind him. The van kept coming. He could hear it gaining on them. He focused on the barricade the cop cars made.

He wasn’t going to make it.

“Cos,” Mac roared, and another volley of shots peppered the air.

At the last possible moment, with the heat of the van’s engine compartment steaming his ass, Cosky shoved Zane as hard as he could to the right and threw himself to the left. A huge white bullet skimmed past him.

Jesus, had he pushed Zane far enough out of the way?

He hit the ground and rolled. Pain ripped through his shoulder. And then his knee collided with the pavement. There was one moment of gut-wrenching agony. His head went light and dizzy and then his leg went numb.

A horrendous crash exploded in front of him—the screech of metal striking and then sheering. Glass fragments peppered him.

He rolled again, and tried to rise to his feet, only to fall back to the pavement, his left leg useless.

Hard hands grabbed him beneath his armpits and hoisted him.

“She hit the police car,” Rawls said grimly.

“Zane?” Cosky spit the grit and blood from his mouth, and chanced an urgent glance in the direction he’d thrown his LC.

“Here,” Zane said as he shoved a bloody shoulder in a shredded T-shirt under Cosky’s armpit and caught him around the waist.

Rawls drove his shoulder under Cosky’s other armpit.

“No.” Cosky tried to knock Rawls’s arm away. “Go after her.”

Where the hell was Mac? The cops?

“No.” Zane’s voice was sharp. “We need to get you out of the way.”

Son of a bitch.

The vision. Had to be. He must have seen Cosky’s death. Again.

Goddamn son of a bitch.

Cosky winced as an ear-splitting screech sank like a spike into his pounding head. He glanced toward the cop cars and his crazy-ass stalker. She’d hit the first cruiser head-on, so hard it had collided with the second one, pushing both vehicles back twelve to fifteen feet. Mangled metal now bound all three vehicles together. Not that the metal tether was going to keep her in place for long. She was gunning the van so hard it was dragging both cop cars backward.

The van jolted back as the two cop cars separated, and shed a roll of tread from its front tire like a snake shedding skin. With another cacophony of tearing metal, it ripped the front bumper loose from the cop car still attached. Dragging the bumper along with it, the damn thing barreled backward toward them.

Ah hell.

Mac raced past them, his arms scuffed and bleeding, his Sig outstretched in torn hands. As though the gun would do any good. Zane and Rawls rocketed forward, dragging him away from the action at breakneck speed.

More shots behind him. The rattle and roar of the van’s straining engine was fainter now, from a distance.

Another horrendous, metallic crash.

Another volley of shots.

Rawls and Zane dragged him behind his pickup truck. In unison they turned, but the corner of the apartment building blocked their view.

“I’ve got Cos,” Rawls said, as if he was some infant they had to babysit, and Zane took off at a dead run.

He could tell from the metallic screeches of sheering metal and the sharp report of shots fired, that the bitch had targeted the front of the building this time.

His blood froze in his veins, and his chest went as cold and numb as his knee.

The front of the building.

Where Kait had been standing.

Chapter Eight

K
AIT WATCHED
C
OSKY
’
S
batshit crazy attacker accelerate, in reverse, down the sidewalk in pursuit of Commander Mackenzie. Holy crap, any second she was going to hit the cop car that sat with its nose facing the apartment building. If this impact mirrored the collision in the parking lot, she and Demi would be crushed when the police car went flying.

With one last glance at her brother’s CO, who was in a flat-out run, but losing ground by the second, she turned, grabbed Demi’s arm, and thrust her toward the recessed entrance to the lobby. Demi, thank God, shook off her paralysis and leapt for lobby entrance.

The clusters of bystanders, which had congested the sidewalk earlier, had scattered at the van’s first run at the SEALs. Most of the men and women had crossed the street, seeking shelter in the park beyond. Several of the injured, who’d been clipped by the van as it barreled down the sidewalk, had been helped into the apartment building. Luckily, none of them had been hurt too badly.

However if she, Demi, and Mac didn’t get to safety pronto, they wouldn’t be as lucky. Apparently realizing that himself, Mac exploded in a last-ditch burst of speed. He vaulted the sideways cop car and ducked into the recessed alcove right behind them. Once behind the
cover of the building, he spun and slammed his back against the wall, his scraped and oozing arms tucked at his side, the gun pointed up. He shot Kait one assessing, flat glance and jerked his head toward the lobby doors. A silent, but clear order to get her butt inside.