Lace & Lead

Callie shook her head. “Don’t you trust me?” she challenged.

“Sure, I do. I just don’t trust those dumbasses to help you move the Crawler without doing more damage to it,” he shot back.

“Fine!” She threw up her hands, exasperated. “I’ll wait until you drag your sorry butt back here to help me.”

“Deal.”

Mock-argument over, Callie couldn’t help giving in to the smile that was tugging at the corner of her mouth. It was infectious and once it was there on her face, he couldn’t help grinning back.

“Good to know we still hate each other,” she joked.

“All brothers hate their little s

isters,” Peirce said. “Always getting in the way, messing with our shit.”

“Stopping you from hooking up with Sergeant Bailey?”

Peirce shrugged. “It didn’t work out.”

“You dumped her because she talked bad about me at mess.”

“She was a bitch.”

“She didn’t know you were related to me.”

He shrugged again. “No skin off my ass. She’d have been a lousy lay anyway.”

Callie grimaced. “There are some things I should never know about my brother. Your sex life is definitely on that list.”

He was really going to make her squeamish when the radio crackled to life. Two minutes later, he was avoiding the rotating blades of an Eagle and scrambling in beside the rest of his assault team and two medics.

“See you tonight!” he hollered to Callie over the downdraft of the propellers.

“Love you, brother!”

It always irked him how she’d call that to him every time he took off. Made him feel like he was seven or something and she was chasing after him on his way to school, stopping at the corner of the sidewalk that she wasn’t allowed to go beyond, a tiny blonde thing in mismatched clothes calling how much she loved him to the world.

He was on the battlefield, ignoring the bullets ricocheting off the metal as he worked to get the Stallions back up and running. The medics and he had their hands full; IEDs had stopped the convoy dead in its tracks. At least eight men down, one Stallion unfit for anything but parts.

He got the other two back in order, running back and forth from the dead vehicle with stripped parts, maps, data chips, anything that could be used by the enemy, while the medics loaded up the wounded in the Eagle and the backs of the other two Stallions. Finally, they took off back toward Cordova.

He could remember the conversation. Jacob Miller’s wisecrack about how long it took Peirce to get the Stallions back in order. His retort that most gods had days to do what he’d done in seven minutes. Jacob’s next joke was cut off by the rumble that shook the entire Stallion.

The fireball in the distance.

He could hear her screaming.

Peirce jolted awake, lost in the fog of the nightmare. Normally he didn’t wake until he was thrown to the ground by his commanding officer while trying to run into the burning rubble of the garage to find Callie. Until he felt the hot metal and burning wood searing his hands, blistering them, leaving him to wake up with phantom pain from wounds long since healed.

But this time was different because someone was actually screaming.

He ran to the bedroom, adrenaline surging, and shook Emmaline as she scissored on the bed.

“Emma! Emma, wake up!”

She stopped once his hands were on her, his fingers digging into her shoulders with enough force he worried she’d be bruised. She stared up at him blankly.

He didn’t know why, but it felt right to press his forehead to hers, stroke her hair, run a hand up and down the column of her throat as he whispered promises that she’d be okay, that the nightmare would fade. Gradually, she stopped whimpering with every breath she took in. Her pulse stopped fluttering in her neck like a bird flinging itself against cage bars. She rolled to her side and buried herself against him, wrapping his huge body over her tiny one like he was some kind of blanket.