Page 75 of Forbidden Protector

"Knox had him for a minute. Not anymore." Her hands shake. Her voice doesn't, which is its own kind of miracle. "Heard your channel go dead same as I did. Broke off the bridge, chased headlights off a two-track a half mile north. Lost him past the reservation line." She doesn't look up from the belt. "He's turning around." Her hand slips on the strap, just once. A hitch she covers by cinching it tighter than it needs to be. "Coming back for us instead." Her voice catches on us. She pushes through it anyway. "Don't you dare pass out on me, Blackwater."

"Wasn't planning on it."

Her palm goes flat to my forehead, fast, clinical, reading skin gone clammy and cold under it. "You're grey. You look like a man planning on it."

"I've got a professional opinion on that." The words come out thinner than I want. "I'd know."

"Your professional opinion is currently bleeding through my belt, so forgive me if I don't take it."

That gets a laugh out of me, short and wrecked, and it costs me. A white flare of pain is running up through the wrist that makes the laugh die halfway.

"Don't do that," she says. "Don't make yourself laugh right now. It's tearing the wound open."

"Then stop being funny."

"I'm not being funny. I'm being right, which you're allergic to."

She cinches the belt down hard, and the pain finally catches all the way up, a full white sheet of it that tips the sky sideways for a second. I hear myself make a sound I don't authorize.

"Stay with me." Her palm finds my jaw. The same place mine found hers in that parking lot, except now she's the one holding steady and I'm the one being held. I don't fight her on it. That's the only concession I've got left.

"Right hand," I say, because the only other thing in me right now is unbearable, and gallows humor has gotten me through worse holes than this one. "Could've been worse."

"How, Holt?" Her voice cracks on my name. "You may never shoot straight again. You may never even hold a coffee cup right again. What exactly is the version of tonight you're measuring against?"

"Could've been you."

She goes still over that. Just for a second. Long enough that neither of us hears the creek, or feels the cold coming up off the ground, or remembers there's a man with a rifle still out in the dark somewhere in the valley.

"Don't you ever," she says, low and furious, her thumb dragging once under my eye like she's checking for tears that aren't there yet, "do that again. Do you hear me? Ever."

"Can't promise that."

"That's not what I asked for."

"Wasn't going to give it to you anyway." My jaw tries for a smile and doesn't make the distance. "You'd have done the same. Don't pretend otherwise."

She doesn't pretend. She looks at me with her hands full of my blood and says nothing, because there's nothing true left to say that isn't already sitting in the four inches between us.

"Focus." Her voice drops into the register she used on a deputy at midnight, the one that means she's decided to be the only functioning adult within fifty yards. "Can you walk if I get you up?"

"Yes."

"That's a lie."

"It's the lie you need right now."

I get one boot under me and the world tilts hard enough that her hand flat on my chest is the only thing keeping the horizon where it belongs.

Four hundred yards of scree between here and the truck, downhill, in the dark, and I already know I'm not driving any part of it with a hand that's quit taking orders.

"You've got the wheel tonight. I'll manage the walking."

"You can barely stand, Blackwater. Manage is generous."

"Low bar tonight."

That gets the almost-laugh again, wrecked and real.