Page 47 of Crimson Moon Falling

He sighed, and the bond vibrated between us, a little stronger than before. “Keep the sat phone on you if you head out again.”

“I will. You be careful too. Washington is full of another kind of predator.”

I stood in the cold parking lot for a few minutes after disconnecting. Jamie had been seriously injured because of me. The implant noted the guilt and filed it away. I got a strange sense that the thing considered guilt a useless emotion.

Shaking my head, I turned and walked back inside. Freda looked up when I came in, her eyebrows raised in question.

“I talked him into staying in D.C.”

She nodded. “Good call.”

The next morning, I pushed Gunnar’s hospital door open with my hip, two coffees balanced in one hand and a bag of donuts from the vending machine in the other. The coffee smelled burned and tasted worse, but it was hot and caffeinated, which was all that mattered at seven in the morning.

Gunnar lay on a bed that looked like a child’s mattress. His massive shoulders spilled over one side, and his feet hung a few inches off the end. Bandages covered the left side of his chest and shoulder, and an IV line snaked into a thick vein in his forearm. His skin was pallid, and he had dark circles around his eyes.

“You look better,” I lied, setting a coffee on the rolling table beside him.

He grunted, reaching for it with his good arm, and wincing as he pulled at his stitches. He took a long sip and grimaced. “That’s terrible.”

“I know.” I abandoned my own coffee and pulled a chair closer.

Gunnar eyed the packet of powdered sugar donuts. “Those for me?”

“Yep.” I unwrapped them and set the package on the table in front of him.

A nurse bustled in, checked his vitals, and adjusted his IV. She eyed the donuts, but didn’t say anything. Gunnar scowled when she left the room.

“They keep waking me up every two hours to take my temperature and blood pressure.” He picked at the edge of the bandage on his shoulder. “I told ’em I heal fast, but they don’t listen.”

“That knife came a quarter inch from your subclavian artery. You were this far from bleeding out on that mountain.” My voice was colder than I intended, the implant filing away the clinical facts, but raw fear lurked beneath the surface. “And the doctor said your blood type is rare. They had to fly it in from Bozeman.”

He shrugged his massive shoulders and immediately regretted it, his face tightening. “I’ve had worse.”

“Name one time.”

“I fell off a cliff in Glacier when I was twenty and broke a leg and an arm. My cousin had to carry me seven miles back to the trailhead. This is nothing.” The donut between his fingers looked tiny.

“Jamie’s in Salt Lake. The bullet fragmented near his optic nerve.”

Gunnar went still, a donut halfway to his mouth. “Damn it. Is he gonna lose his eye?”

“I don’t know. The doctor here said it’s light-responsive, which is good, but there’s extensive damage. Freda’s with Beau, going through the gear we removed from the operatives. Military-grade weapons, body armor, and comms equipment. Nothing traceable, but it’s more evidence that Apex Mentis is running operations with the engineered operatives.”

“Langston’s gonna have a field day with this.” Gunnar’s massive hand curled into a fist on the blanket. “Three dead operatives in a national park. The Feds will be all over us.”

“Let them come. We were ambushed, and they shot first.”

He gave me a long, assessing look. “You talked to Marlowe. Did he really stick a damn implant in himself and figure out how to duplicate Cognizant abilities? My brain is struggling to process that bullshit.”

“Yes.” I watched him eat the last donut in one bite.

He absently wiped his fingers on the front of his blue hospital gown, smearing powdered sugar all over. “If it were anyone but you, I’d think they were making this shit up. According to everything I know about Cog abilities, they’re innate. You’re either born with them, or you’re not.”

I tried another sip of coffee and set it back down. “He stood ten feet away and told me to come to him. My foot moved before I could stop it.”

“Jesus.” Gunnar ran a hand over his face. “This is worse than we thought.”

“Much worse. He’s heading to whatever is at those coordinates, and now he knows we are too.”