Reese knew the man with white hair and sculpted mustache. Last time Reese saw him, he’d worn fatigues. Now he dressed in a nice shirt and dark jeans.
“Did they fire you?” Reese’s broken whisper grated the air even to his ears.
Harrington laughed. “The Army doesn’t fire you.” He put a hand on Reese’s shoulder. “You had us worried for a while.”
Why? Reese had only been lost in the—
A gunshot rang out. Crimson sprayed Reese’s cheek. The cold smile of a man with a gun flickered past. Then the darkness raged, erupting from human flesh, transforming into otherworldly darkness walking on two legs.
“Here.” Harrington poured Reese a cup of water. He tried to take it, but what strength he’d had already fled.
Harrington hit the button on the remote tethered to the bed, and the upper half raised with a motorized hum. When it stopped, he held the cup to Reese’s lips. The first drop cooled his tongue, the rest flowed down his throat washing away what felt like years’ worth of morning breath.
Reese drained it. “More.”
“Let that settle, or you’ll vomit.” Harrington set the cup beside the pitcher.
Reese sank back into the pillow. It crunched with all the subtly of wood chips. “You’d think with as much as hospitals charge, they could at least give me a comfortable pillow.” Reese closed his eyes, but the man’s stare might as well have been a sharp stick.
“I know you’re tired, Reese, but can you tell me what happened?”
It was the way Harrington said it that made Reese doubt the man meant the bunker, Luca, Nash Kelli. AKA Nox.
He cracked his eyelids. “I’m not sure.” Not a complete lie. After all, maybe it had been a dream. Unlike the monster walking on two legs, the rush of cold, the darkness, the momentary campfires, it didn’t seem real. So, yeah, it could have been a complete figment of his imagination.
“You don’t have any idea?”
“Do you?”
“You told me you were going to wait in the SUV. That was the last I saw you. We found the body of an Anubis in the woods and what looked like several sets of footprints, including yours.”
“Oh.”
“You didn’t wait in the SUV, did you?”
“I guess I didn’t.”
Harrington scowled. “We couldn’t locate you for five days. You simply went off the radar.”
Reese wrinkled his nose. “What do you mean ‘off the radar.’”
The colonel cocked his mouth to the side.
“You had a tracking device on me?”
“In your boots.”
“Isn’t that some kind of violation of my—” Reese pushed up, remembering his bad shoulder too late. He gritted his teeth waiting for the pain, but it didn’t happen. His arm wasn’t in a sling. He touched his shoulder. Bumps of scar tissue ran down to his pec deep enough to feel through the gown.
Harrington watched Reese. He cleared his throat and put his hands in his lap.
The crunch of bone was as bright as the gunshot snuffing out Luca’s life in his memory.
“You okay?”
Reese nodded. “Yeah, I must have strained something. Shoulder’s a little stiff.” And there should have been shattered bones and ravaged flesh. The burn of Dekker’s saliva had all but set Reese’s nerves on fire. “If I went off the radar how did you find me?”
Harrington pressed h