Forged in Ash (A Red-Hot SEALs Novel)

by Trish McCallan

  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 fr
ont of the building.

  Where Kait had been standing.

  * * *

  Chapter Eight

  * * *

  KAIT WATCHED COSKY’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.

  Sounded good to Kait.

  She reached for Demi, who’d frozen again, but before either of them could escape into the lobby, the van struck the cop car.

  The crash was so loud the sound seemed to swell in her ears until all she could hear was that horrific boom, followed by ringing. The ground shook beneath her feet. The windows and glass doors behind her shattered. She didn’t hear the collision; she felt it instead as stinging fragments of glass rained down on her.

  Amid that percussion ringing in her ears, the squad car slid past them, pushed by the van’s blunt tail end. It hit the coffee cart, which crumpled beneath the impact. A spray of coffee jetted into the air, but vanished almost immediately.

  The van’s sliding door came into view.

  Mac leapt for it and tried to wrench it open. When it didn’t budge, he dove for the driver’s door.

  “Shoot her!” Kait screamed, the memory of that maniac driving directly into a crowd of people fresh in her mind.

  He had his gun out. Why wasn’t he using it?

  The driver’s door didn’t budge either. The van slowed, but inexorably rolled forward, shoving the cruiser along in front of it.

  Using the butt of his pistol as hammer Mac shattered the driver’s window and leaned forward, halfway through the shattered window, reaching for something—probably the keys. The woman slammed her elbow into his face, wrenched the wheel to the left, and gunned the engine, angling the nose of the van toward the building.

  Mac rocked back as her elbow struck his face, but held on with silent, grim determination. If he didn’t let go and jump back, the van would crush him against the side of the building when the recessed alcove ended. Kait leapt forward and grabbed the back of his shirt, yanking as hard as she could.

  The shirt split beneath the force of her pull, but he staggered back out of range just as the van accelerated backward again, and the shattered window slammed into the edge of the building.

  “What the fuck do you think you’re doing?” Mac roared, swinging toward her, frustration and fury flashing like black lightning in his eyes.

  His words wavered, first loud, then hushed, then loud again.

  “Saving you from getting crushed,” Kait snapped back.

  He turned a grim look on the van and the edge of the building, before snapping at her. “Get in the lobby.”

  This time his demand was crystal clear as her hearing adjusted.

  Kait pushed Demi through the shattered doors, broken glass crackling beneath their feet, and into the lobby as what sounded like a hundred sirens started wailing in the distance. The officers on the scene must have called for backup, and judging by the increasing volume of the screaming, their brethren were coming fast.

  Thank God.

  Through the empty lobby doors, Kait watched the van come to a sudden jolting stop with only its nose visible. Mac stood there in the middle of the alcove, waiting, his body tense. He fired twice at the front tire and brought his weapon up again.

  “Why doesn’t he do something?” Demi whispered in a shrill voice.

  Good question.

  Why wasn’t he targeting the driver instead of the car? It made no sense. It was drilled into first-year plebes to take out any potential threat immediately. This woman was a definite threat. To Mackenzie, Cosky, Rawls, and Zane, but also to the dozens of bystanders. She apparently didn’t care who she hit or crushed in this insane vendetta against Cosky and his teammates. Commander Mackenzie knew better. So why wasn’t he stopping her by any means necessary?

  Just what was going on here?

  Of course there wasn’t much he could do at the moment. If he bolted in front of the van in an attempt to line up a shot, he ran the risk of her hitting the accelerator and running him down before he could hit his mark.

  But there had been plenty of opportunities before this to bring her rampage to a quick end. Why hadn’t he taken them?

  Was it because she was a woman?

  Because she was a civilian?

  The front tires cranked to the right.

  And the van shot forward again, its sides scraping against the building as it cut hard toward the street; once its back doors faced the lobby entrance, it screeched to a stop and shot backward, roaring straight toward Mac.

  The woman would have crushed him too, if she’d judged the distance better. But rather than sliding between the two sides of the alcove, the van slammed into the right wall. It stopped dead and jolted forward.

  The building shook. The floor bucked beneath Kait’s feet.

  Mac aimed for the back tires and fired.

  The screams of sirens pulled closer.

  Mac edged slowly back, into the lobby. Kait and Demi backed up as well, easing to the right, out of the line of fire and behind the safety of the lobby’s wall.

  Another massive collision. The building shook again. Plaster rained down from above. A crash sounded behind, along with the crackle and tinkle of falling glass. Kait spun around. A chandelier had hit the ground maybe fifteen feet behind them. She glanced up at the chandelier swinging wildly overhead and grabbed Demi’s arm, dragging her back.

  Some of the sirens were close now. Very close.

  The van’s engine revved again, barely audible beneath the wail of the approaching sirens, and then it shot past the lobby window.

  Kait just stood there, shaking, staring hard at the window to see if it came back, while Mac bolted for the street.

  “Do you think she’s gone?” Demi whispered in a quivering voice as a black-and-white cruiser went screaming past the lobby window.

  “I think so,” Kait whispered back as her arms and legs started trembling. Suddenly she went light-headed and weak as a newborn.

  Mac appeared in the window, his fists on his hips, staring in the direction the van had hurtled. Another cruiser screamed past him, flashers painting the lobby walls blue and red, before vanishing, still screaming, into the distance.

  Zane skidded to a stop next to Mac. Talking intently, the two turned and jogged back down the sidewalk toward the parking lot.

  Kait took a deep breath. Regrouped.

  Zane and Cosky had hit the ground hard and while Zane seemed little the worse for wear, Cosky had flopped back down to the pavement when he’d tried to rise. It had taken both his buddies to drag him to safety.

  While the man put “ass” in the word asshole, and she had no intention of ever openi
ng herself to him again in either a physical or emotional capacity—that didn’t mean she wanted to see him physically hurt, certainly not crippled.

  If Demi had been right, and her abbreviated healing had helped his knee enough to alleviate his limping, maybe a second, more intensive healing would provide some benefit, give his leg a healing boost she feared it was desperately going to need.

  Because God help her, from the way his leg had flopped so uselessly beneath him as Zane and Rawls dragged him to safety, he was going to need all the help he could get.

  Cosky braced his palms against the hood of his Ford, watching the sidewalk. The unmistakable shriek of the van’s engine was fading, a clear indication the vehicle was in flight. A cop car, its siren wailing, raced past them.

  “Go check on Mac and Zane,” Cosky ordered Rawls, without tearing his gaze from the sidewalk.

  Kait was back there. So were Zane and Mac. His chest tightened. He couldn’t see a damn thing with the building in his way. All three of them could be crushed. Dying. Because of that crazy bitch’s vendetta against him.

  He’d brought this danger to Kait’s door. Him.

  He needed no further evidence that his profession, along with the shit he was currently swimming in, made it unwise in the extreme to establish a relationship. He had no business getting involved with anyone. Let alone Kait.

  “Let’s wait a second,” Rawls said, his Southern drawl absent, tension radiating from his long, lean frame.

  He wanted to go. Cosky could feel Rawls’s need vibrating in the air between them. But he wouldn’t. At least not yet. Because he was intent on protecting Cosky instead.

  Frustrated rage exploded through Cosky, and seared him from the inside out, leaving him raw. “Goddamn it, I don’t need a babysitter. Go!”

  “Not yet.” Rawls’s voice was calm.

  “She’s gone,” Cosky snarled, his fists clenching on his truck’s hood. “Hell, Mac riddled her tires and engine block with bullets. She’s got half of Coronado’s police force after her. She’s not coming back.”

  Rawls shot him a flat, unbending look. “You know damn well it takes time for air to leak out of tires. Same with the radiator fluid. She could double back. You can’t walk, let alone run. Mac and Zane know what they’re doing.”