I dialed in a daze, only snapping to attention when I heard his voice.
“I’m sorry about the last-minute warning,” he said in way of a greeting.
“That’s not why I’m calling.” My voice sounded strange even to my ears. “And it’s all right. It’s part of your job. I just had to tell you before you were unreachable for a while…”
Shit. Maybe this was a bad idea. Did you tell a man this type of news over the phone?
“Tell me what?” He instantly sounded concerned. “Are you okay?”
“I’m fine.” Even as the debate over telling him or not continued to war inside of me, I decided not to delay. “I might be pregnant.”
Less than a second after the word left my mouth, I heard a curse. Two. More. Yelling. Not just Eoin.
And then everything went silent.
“Eoin? Eoin?”
Nothing.
He was gone.
Ten
Eoin
The screech of tires.
Shouting.
Light reflecting off metal and glass.
Curses.
A jarring impact sending vibrations through every bone.
Crunching.
Breaking.
Dizzy.
Falling.
Pain.
The flashes going off in my head were like individual snapshots I didn’t only see, but heard and felt. Each one was barely a second in actual time, but they all seemed like an eternity.
Logically, I knew every minute contained sixty seconds, and every properly run clock counted a second out the exact same way, but experiencing time wasn’t always like that. It changed depending on the circumstances. I knew that from too much experience.
And then I was hurtling back in time.
A loud bang and flying through the air, tumbling, crashing.
Gunfire sending little sparks into the air, the sound echoing, filling my head. It was so loud.
And hot.
Smokey.
My lungs burned, and every breath just made it worse. Burned through my mouth, down my throat, filling my lungs with fire.
The world was hazy, edges blurred. Bodies were shadows and outlines running across my vision. Legs moving, running. The sound of boots on sand and rock.
Loud popping. Gunshots. Semi-automatic. Handguns. Rifles. Automatic. Everything.
An explosion rocked the world, shook the ground.
No, the roof. Not the ground. I was upside down. Blood rushing to my head. I couldn’t move. I could see everything. But I couldn’t move.
My ears were ringing. The world was muffled and loud.
I could see everything.
Bart, lying there with his eyes fixed on the sky. Mouth wide open, as if he’d been screaming. In pain. For his mother. That he didn’t want to die. But he was dead. Neck clearly broken.
While he screamed.
I could see everything.
I could hear him screaming, blaming me.
Doto, pinned to the driver’s seat. Blood pouring from his mouth. He screamed too. Cursed me for letting him die.
More explosions, more screaming, more gunfire, more of everything. And I still couldn’t move.
Someone was screaming my name.
Leo.
“Eoin! C’mon, man.”
Not Leo.
Cain.
“Wake up, you fucking bastard! I can’t yank your huge ass out on my own!”
Cain.
I opened my eyes to find Cain leaning over me. He looked like hell. Scratches on his face. Blood.
I blinked, wondering if I was seeing things. I had to be. There was no reason for Cain to be here, and no reason for him to be bloody.
Here.
Wait. Where was here?
I blinked again, and nothing changed.
Except I now realized that he was upside down.
“What…” I cleared my throat and tried again. “What happened?”
Cain ignored my question and asked one of his own. “Can you move?”
“Yes.” Even as I said it, I frowned as I realized something important. I didn’t actually know if that was the truth. Something was wrong, although I couldn’t figure out what it might be. I couldn’t understand what was going on or where I was.
“Eoin!” Cain snapped his fingers in front of my face.
I blinked again and started doing what I should have been doing already. Thinking. I wiggled my toes, then moved my legs. Some pain, but I didn’t think anything was broken. Arms were the same.
As if providing evidence, I wiggled my fingers. “I can move.”
“Great.” Cain moved out of my field of vision before a pair of hands latched onto mine. “Use your legs.”
I did it without really thinking, and between Cain pulling on my arms and me pushing with my legs, I moved. It wasn’t until I saw the sky above me that I realized I was outside and that there was something wrong with why I was out here. Why I was on my back, staring up at the clouds.
As I sat up, I realized that the ringing in my ears was partly sirens. Dazed, I looked around, trying to separate what had actually happened from the flashback Cain’s voice had pulled me out of.
One thing was very obvious. No one was shooting.
That helped me separate my flashback from real life, but it didn’t tell me what was going on right now.
The agency’s SUV was almost completely upside-down, and a moving truck was on its side.
We were in the street. An intersection, I realized as I focused in on the stoplights. No. That wasn’t entirely accurate. I wasn’t in the street. I was on the sidewalk. And so was the SUV. The moving van was on the actual street, and someone was directing traffic around it.
Fever. That’s who was standing out in the middle of the street. Pollard Fevrier was a large and scary man, which was probably why none of the passing drivers were honking or shouting as he showed them where to go.
Or it could’ve been the second man walking up next to the first. Desmond “Dez” Ambler was a terrifying son of a bitch too. Even from where I was sitting, I could see that both of them sported some blood, but it didn’t look like they were actually hurt. Then again, they were both marines, so they could’ve had a couple broken bones and were just ignoring them. They were almost as tough as an army.
“You look like shit.”
I didn’t have to see Bode Monroe – “Bruce” – to know he was grinning. He was always grinning.
Sure enough, when I looked up, the first thing I saw were those nearly blinding teeth. “Can’t see what you look like with the sun reflecting off that smile.”
The comment was automatic, out of my mouth before I thought about it.
“How bad does your head hurt?” He crouched in front of me, and now I could see that, despite the smile, he was worried.
I frowned. “My head?”
“Dude, your head broke your window.”
“Broke a window?” I looked over at the SUV, and my brain started working again.
Or, rather, it started realizing that it wasn’t working correctly.
Because I just realized that I didn’t know what happened. I could put together from the visual clues that there’d been a car accident, and I’d been with the agency when the collision took place. And it was daytime.
“Shit.”
“What’s wrong?” Bruce asked.
I scowled. “My memory is fucked up.”