33
Farley, Wyoming
Her hair changed. When Red called her fire, touched it to the cuff on her wrist andmeltedthe damn thing, she started to glow. A faint orange burnish around her edges. A low pulse moved through the air, like a shock wave, and her hair lifted, settled, and flared, sun-bright. Then it was red again, all the dye burned away.
She looked like someone the ancients might have carved a tribute to in stone. All flame, and light, and warrior hope. He loved her hair that way: real. As fiery as the tender, sweet heart she tried so hard to hide.
She would have made one hell of a Marine.
If she wasn’t…
If she didn’t…
Gunshot.
Blood.
No!
Red!
Rooster woke with a start, dragging a huge breath into his lungs, pushing himself upright, battling through the awful lethargy that always followed a strong dose of her healing power. His eyes were blurry, but he grabbed at his hip, under his arm, fumbled down his legs toward his boots…which weren’t there. Searching for a gun.
“Whoa, whoa, easy, son,” a familiar voice said off to his right.
Rooster lashed out with his bare hand…and overbalanced, toppled off wherever he was laid out and onto the floor. He landed face-down, thick carpet pile going up his nose.
“Well that was graceful,” Jack said.
“Fuck you,” Rooster panted, pushing up on his hands. Both arms held his weight; the healing had worked. He shook his head, and his vision cleared.
Jack sank down on his haunches with a wince and a pop from both knees. His expression was drawn, grave. He looked five years older than the last time Rooster had seen him. “I wasn’t part of it, kid, I swear to you.”
Semper fi, Rooster thought. It was a fellow Marine across from him; the glint in his eyes was one of angry honesty.
“Bullshit,” Rooster said, because he had to.
“Look at me. Do I look like someone who’d let a buncha assholes take a sweet little girl?”
Rooster looked.
He grunted and sat back on his ass, legs out, arms braced across them. It hurt to breathe, and it had nothing to do with old injuries. “They took her.” His voice came out cracked and weak.
“They did,” Jack agreed, face twisting with disgust. And something more urgent. “Motherfuckers.”
Rooster glanced around and found that he was in a bedroom – a guest bedroom at Jack and Vicki’s, if he had to guess. White shiplap walls; a single bed with a patchwork quilt; purple flowers in a vase on the dresser.
“I,” he said, and fell silent.
Jack looked at him steadily. “What do you need?”
“I gotta get her back.”
“I know that, idiot. What do you need todo that?”
~*~
Dan, the iron-haired speaker from the VA meeting, was seated at the kitchen table, along with a few other vets, all of them closer to Rooster’s age than Jack’s.
