Forged in Smoke (A Red-Hot SEALs Novel Book 3) (21 page)

“Your heartbeat feels strong. But you’re flushed,” he said, some of the reserve giving way to concern. “Maybe you should lie down. Rest for a while. Accordin’ to Jude, their base has a full medical facility. They’ll be able to check your heart out and refill your prescriptions.”

“Okay,” Faith said, watching the detachment solidify on his face again.

A sharp sting of loss rose. It was so strange—she’d only known the man for a week, and until yesterday, she hadn’t spent any time alone with him. There was nothing between them except a fragile friendship. There was no reason to feel like she’d lost something special.

Yet, she did.

“Although, I don’t think I need any medical attention. I feel pretty phenomenal considering I died less than an hour ago.” She held his gaze, willing him to recognize the apology. Which was beyond cowardly. He deserved the words. “I’m sorry. I should have believed you.”

He rocked back on his heels, intently studying her. And then his face softened. Heat flared, burned blue in his eyes.

“I promised myself somethin’ if you came back to me,” he said, his tone a cross between haunted and determined. His focus dropped to her mouth and his blue eyes started to glitter.

“What?” she asked, although from his intense concentration on her mouth, she could guess. A flush scorched her cheeks. “Reserved” certainly didn’t describe him now.

“This.” Rough hands rose to cup her hot cheeks and he lowered his head.

His lips were tender against hers. Gentle. Like she was breakable. Or fragile—to be handled with care.

She didn’t want gentle. She didn’t want temperate. She wanted that fiery rush of sensation he’d given her before. She wanted to feel him. Every aspect of him from tenderness to lust, and every shade of hunger between.

Her surroundings fading away, she offered a soft moan and opened her mouth, inviting him inside.

“Finally, it’s about fucking time. I don’t get what you see in the broad, but Jesus, just get her into a dark corner and out of those clothes already.”

The disgusting comment crashed into Faith’s head, disrupting the tantalizing, sensuous haze.

“Excuse me!” She jerked her mouth from Rawls’s and planted her palms against his chest, shoving him back. Twin volcanoes of embarrassment and fury spewed inside her.

Although the voice hadn’t sounded quite right, the asshole who’d ruined the mood had to be Mac. Nobody else was so loud and mouthy and grossly unpleasant.

“Faith
. . .
” There was the oddest look on Rawls’s face. Shock, only a hundredfold stronger.

“Look, I don’t care if he is your commander. I don’t have to put up with that kind of crap from anyone. Not even him,” Faith snapped, shooting to her feet.

“What the hell are you talking about?” Mac asked from across the hub. He sounded baffled. “I didn’t say, or do, a damn thing to you.”

Okay, maybe she’d jumped the gun a bit there. The two voices weren’t the same at all.

“Faith.” Rawls snagged her hand and drew her to his side, motioning Jude toward them with his other hand. “Sweetheart. That’s not Mac.”

“I know that now,” she told him impatiently. “But that doesn’t make the asshole who said it any less an asshole.”

Rawls choked on a shout of laughter and gave her a hard, quick hug. “That you got right, darlin’.”

“What the hell are you two yammering about?” Mac growled, stomping toward them, Jude hard on his heels.

Rawls released Faith and nudged her to the right until a thin man, his forehead sheathed in a bloody bandage, came into view. She froze, her mouth dropping open in startled shock. She could see the cavern wall, and Zane and Beth, through his translucent frame.

“Would you look at that?” An ugly smile spread across his transparent face and sank into vicious, muddy brown eyes. “We got a new member in our exclusive club.”

The cavern went eerily silent. A hollow pit opened up in her belly. Her legs went weak and shaky. And then an electrical buzzing took over her brain.

Her gaze dropped to the big black knife sticking out of his chest, and her legs shook harder.

The ghost laughed, his bald head gleaming wetly beneath the reflection of multiple flashlights.

“Boo!” It lunged at her and laughed harder as she shrieked and cringed back.

A howling, spinning storm spun through her mind. Slowly an image took shape. A memory.

A wood-grained kitchen . . . a man bound to a kitchen chair, his bald head gleaming beneath the dim lights . . . shouting . . . raging . . . blood pooling on the floor.

“Looks like you remember me,” Rawls’s ghost said with a smirk.

Of course she remembered him. She’d watched him die. That wasn’t something a person forgot.

“What the hell’s wrong with her?” she vaguely heard Mac ask.

Maybe she was simply dreaming, because she could swear she heard concern in his voice.

“This will be so much more fun with you in the mix.” Pachico grinned, his teeth sharp and menacing in the flickering light. He took a threatening step toward her. “Look how much fun we had in the kitchen yesterday. You remember that, right? Remember how hard you screamed?”

“—there’s this possession thing he’s got goin’.”

Alarm flared across Jude’s face, pulled the muscles of his face tight. “It has skin-walked?”

Possession. Skin-walking. That agonizing acidic pain flashed through her mind.

Oh . . . God
. . .
her stomach heaved. Revulsion rolled through her. This
. . .
this thing had been inside her? She’d never feel clean again. Drinking a dozen gallons of bleach wouldn’t come close to washing away the loathing.

“Yeah, well you’re not so peachy yourself, you condescending bitch,” the thing that used to call itself Pachico said. Its muddy, inhuman eyes promised retribution and agony. It took an ominous step forward, the hub’s stone walls shimmering within its translucency.

Possibly she should have tried to mask her revulsion and horror.

“Rawls?” Faith stumbled backward, a film of sweat, cold as ice, slicking her skin.

“Jude!” Rawls’s arms slid around her, dragging her tight against his chest.

“Here.” Jude’s voice, much closer.

Pachico’s expression darkened with rage. “You—”

His transparent image flickered, in and out, like a hazy satellite image. And then it was gone.

Still shaking, Faith turned her head. Her gaze locked on Jude’s tight, uneasy face. Slowly, her eyes dropped to his chest. A slight bulge against the fabric of his T-shirt hinted at the location of the weaving that carried his ghost-protection spell.

The
hiixoyooniiheiht
that had protected her too.

“You want to tell me what the hell just happened?” Mac asked, his sharp question echoing through the chamber.

How odd
. . .
the commander’s voice—which until now had always sounded too loud and hard and twitchingly angry—sounded comforting. Familiar. Safe. Downright trustworthy.

“What happened”—Faith’s voice climbed shrilly. She scanned the cavern for a translucent monster—“is that I tapped into Rawls’s hallucination.”

And she wanted to believe that. She wanted to believe that so bad. Shared delusions existed after all. They’d been studied. There was plenty of empirical evidence to back them up.

“You tapped into my hallucination
. . .
” Rawls repeated dryly. He tilted her chin and stared into her eyes, a combination of amusement and irritability on his face. “You’re not gonna seriously go with that.”

“Hey, it happens. Read up on Point Pleasant back in 1966. Shared delusions are an accepted psychological phenomenon.” She tried to interject rock-solid certainty into her voice—but alas, it faltered.

“Which you don’t believe in.” Rawls’s voice was impossibly gentle.

“I want to,” Faith whispered, scanning the hub again.

“I bet you do.” His arms tightening around her, he leaned down to kiss the top of her head.

“Does anyone have a fucking clue what these two are talking about?” Mac sounded more confused than angry now.

With a sigh, Faith straightened in Rawls’s embrace, and realized for the first time that everyone was watching them. Everyone. She glanced from curious face to curious face.

Uh-oh.
She’d just exposed Rawls’s secret to everyone. Well, not the exact secret, because nobody knew they were dealing with a ghost—except for Jude, of course—but now everybody knew Rawls was seeing something invisible to the rest of them.

So was she for that matter.

“I’m sorry.” As hard as he’d tried to keep this information from his teammates, she should offer him more than an apology. Maybe cooking for him for the rest of the month would make it up to him.

He shrugged good-naturedly. “You didn’t tell them anythin’ they didn’t already suspect.”

Okay, that news surprised her.

“They already knew about Pachico?” It didn’t occur to her until the name had hit the air and he’d grimaced that he’d meant they’d known he was hallucinating, not that he was being haunted.

I’m so sorry.
She mouthed it this time, feeling like a complete and utter idiot.

Maybe they wouldn’t identify the name.

Please don’t let them recognize the name.

“Pachico,” Zane repeated, sudden stillness on his face. “Pachico’s dead.” He’d figured it out. Faith could see the realization spreading across his face.

“I know he’s dead.” Rawls paused, shrugged, ran a tense hand through his short, thick platinum hair. “But that hasn’t stopped the bastard from fuckin’ with me.”

Dead silence fell, hummed through the cavern for the count of five.

“A ghost?” Cosky said, his voice neutral. His face flat. “You’ve been seeing a ghost?”

“Pretty much.”

His answer might have been laconic, his attitude careless, but Faith could feel the tension vibrating through him. Their reaction was important to him—vitally important. Stepping closer to him until their arms brushed, she slipped her hand into his and squeezed, and felt, more than heard, the uneven breath he released. His fingers tightened around hers.

Cosky’s eyebrows beetled. He studied Rawls’s face intently before turning his head slightly and pinning Faith with implacable gray eyes. “And you? You see it too.”

God help her, but she wanted to say no. No, she didn’t.

Instead, she squared her shoulders and took a deep raw breath. “Yes. Yes, I did. I do.”

For a moment it felt like she’d stepped off a ledge and her body was in free fall, no sense of gravity to cradle her. But then Rawls’s hand contracted, stopping her midflight.

The tension vanished from Rawls’s muscles and a hoarse breath sounded in her ear. That’s when she realized her reaction had been as important to Rawls as his teammates’ had been.

Maybe even more important.

With Faith’s hand held tight in his and her admission that she’d seen Pachico warming his chest, Rawls faced off against his teammates. So far the revelation had gone exactly as he’d envisioned—blatant disbelief from Mac, questioning and concern from Zane, and frozen neutrality from Cosky. While the timing of the disclosure could have been better, such as not in front of the entire damn camp, it could have gone much worse too. At least his ghost hadn’t grabbed one of the rifles hanging off his teammates’ shoulders and sprayed the cavern with semiautomatic gunfire. Talk about a brutal introduction to Ghosts 101.

Bracing himself, he waited for the avalanche of questions to resume. The fact that someone like Faith, a scientist driven by logic and empirical data, had admitted to seeing the ghost too, might have bolstered his position—assured everyone he wasn’t crazy. Assuming his teammates didn’t simply pin her with a crazy tag too.

“A ghost,” Zane repeated slowly, his forehead crinkling. His eyes narrowed, as though he were measuring the possibility. “That’s what’s been going on with you? A ghost?”

Rawls shrugged, using his free hand to scratch his forehead. “I’m surprised y’all never figured that out, what with all the shoutin’ at empty air.”

“That’s because we were holding on to the hope you hadn’t gone fucking crazy,” Mac interrupted, his voice surprisingly calm. He ignored the quelling look Zane shot him. “You do realize that ghosts don’t exist.”

“What I realize,” Rawls fired back, “is that most people can’t see them.”

“No shit.” Mac’s voice rose, along with his eyebrows. “So you and the good doc just happen to be two of the lucky ones? Why’s that?” His eyebrows climbed even higher as he crossed his arms across his chest and rocked back on the heels of his boots. “From that earlier kiss, it’s obvious you two are involved. Let me guess. That’s the secret? Since you’re intimately involved, you two can see the ghost while nobody else here can?”

With a snort, Rawls shook his head. “Don’t be an ass, Commander. If intimacy had anything to do with it, Zane and Beth and Cosky and Kait would see the damn thing too.”

“Then why you two and nobody else?” But it was Cosky’s flat voice that asked the question.

“Because they have walked the other side and returned. You have not,” Jude said coolly.

“Walked the other side?” Zane asked, his attention skipping between Jude and Rawls with periodic trips toward Faith.