Page 37 of Four Calling Birds

I stuck the blade into his side, right between the second and third rib, into his heart. His blood mixed with the water right away, covering my vision in wine red as his weight fell limp on top of me, dragging me down to the murky, cold blackness below.

I couldn’t push him off. I couldn’t. I tried. But the darkness was coming. Shit. I didn’t want to go like this. I didn’t.

I tried to conjure amber eyes, and a lopsided grin. Of large hands that reached out through the darkness towards me.

I would go out as someone’s wife. Ashiswife. And there was something special about that. There was something about the name on my epitaph readingCharlotte Elizabeth McClanahan - Beloved Wife.

I knew that’s what Mack would put there. That was just his way. He’d probably get an ugly heart-shaped stone too. The kind where two names would go, so that he could be laid to rest beside me.

We could spend eternity as husband and wife.

Husband and wife.

Husband…

22. The Kids Are Batshit Crazy

Lotte

“Lotte?”Thevoicewascoming from far away. The surface of ice broke, and I was pulled from the frigid water into the even more frigid air. The small splashes of water felt like icicles against my skin. “Lotte!”

I was alive. It took a while to figure that out.

I was so cold, but I wasn’t shivering. I was too cold to shiver. I was dripping wet, and even my hair felt pointy against my skin. I felt like I had been rubbed completely raw.

“I lost my rifle,” I whispered, trying to clench my hands to grasp at where the M4 should have been. But it wasn't there, and my fingers wouldn’t curl. It was like the connection from my brain just wouldn’t let it happen. The nerves had been frozen, somehow.

Mack lifted me in his arms, and I felt him dragging his feet through the fast-moving ice melt. He must have been so cold. His boots would be soaked.

“We’ll find the rifle in the morning,” he said off-handedly as he came to the riverbank and laid me across the ground. He pulled off his jacket and placed it around me.

“But you’ll be cold,” I whispered, as my teeth began to chatter.

I looked up at the moon, and the sliver of clouds that flitted before it, casting shadows on the jagged mountains with its bare trees. It looked like the mountain was covered in spikes. The same ones that must have inspired the legend of Sleeping Beauty, when the malevolent witch surrounded the castle with a forest of thorns.

“I’ll be fine,” he tucked me into his jacket, pulling it tight around me. “Are you okay?”

I looked around me. To the team. To Griff with his wound laying before him, the blood gushing down his trouser leg as Taz struggled to staunch the bleeding below the tourniquet she had made with her belt. She wadded up a torn piece of her shirt and was putting pressure on the gaping hole.

“Jesus, woman, you have the bedside manner of a feral gorilla!” Griff let out a low cry of anger and pain as she pressed down on his thigh. “There’s a tourniquet on the damn thing. You can lay off. The bleeding has stopped!”

“Shut the fuck up!” She rolled her eyes. “You haven’t evenlookedat your leg. How the fuck would you know that it’s not bleeding?”

“Because it’sattached to me!”He tilted his head back, grimacing in pain. “I can fucking feel it, okay?”

“Don’t be such a baby.”

“Oh, get a room, you two,” Goose said with a grunt.

Taz pulled off her oversized jacket and tossed it to Mack. The damn thing fit her like a dress. But she had always preferred oversized things. It was as if she was hiding her body from the world. I thought Mack would put it on, but he didn’t. Instead, he wrapped Taz’s jacket around my legs.

“B-b-but you’ll get cold,” I said, my teeth chattering. Then I looked at Taz. She was only in a halter, her muscular shoulders bulging under the strain of putting pressure on Griff.

“I’ll live,” she said, without even looking at me.

“I’m getting the four-wheeler so we can get the walking wounded out,” Mack said, cupping my cheek in his large hand. His palm was so warm, I leaned into it, almost shutting my eyes.

Then he got up and slung his rifle over my shoulder, carrying it with the barrel pointed upward.

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