Page 55 of Ghost’s Awakening

The van's side door rolled open. Three more climbed out, big, loose-shouldered, one cracking his neck, and the five of them stood in the dead ground between the pillars around a gurney with straps on it.

Five.

Something in me had been going hot and tight since Vega said the word transfer, and now, looking at that gurney, it went very still. Gravedigger had reached for Liam because Liam was the last handle he had on Caleb, and these five had been handed a sleeping man with a tube in his throat as a night's work, and every one of them had said yes. They'd looked at those straps and said yes.

I thought about Caleb waking up in my bed in three hours to a phone call about an empty room on the second floor, and my hands closed on their own, and I let them.

Blade was already looking at me. I looked at Santos, at Vega, at Valkyrie, and every one of them gave me the same small nod.

Blade went first. Blade never announced.

He went around the pickup at a walk that became something else with no gear between, and the nearest uniform didn't hear him until it was too late.

Blade's forearm took him across the throat and drove him into the van with a boom that shook the whole panel. Blade leaned his weight into it and held him there.

The other uniform was mine. He'd turned at the boom and his hands were up before his eyes found me, which told me everything. Trained. Feet under him. A jab came at my face and I wasn't in it.

The three from the van came off the gurney at once. Santos met the first with his fists up. Vega tackled the second head-on and I heard the impact of it from fifteen feet. Valkyrie went for the third and he was faster than she'd read. His front kick took her square in the stomach, all his weight behind the ball of his foot, and it folded her and sent her stumbling back three steps into a pillar with the air leaving her in one sound.

Everything in me went toward her. One of ours, hit first, hit hard, by a man who'd come here to strap a sleeping kid to a board.

But I couldn't help. My man was on me, and if I turned my back to help her I'd have his fist in my spine, and I hated every half second I spent slipping punches while she was bent over that pillar hunting for her breath.

My man threw a hook. I slipped it. A cross behind it, and I turned it off my forearm, the jolt running up into my shoulder, and gave him a heel to the inside of the knee on the way past. He staggered. Came again. A boxer's hands, and behind them a face going red because he'd thrown four and landed nothing.

"Stop fucking moving, you brat!" Spit flew with it.

"You came for a man who can't move." I wasn't where he'd aimed. "Try one who can."

Left of me, the uniform against the van dropped his chin, got both hands on Blade's pinning arm, turned his hips and planted a knee in the middle of Blade's chest that sent him two steps back. Then they were trading blows. Hands up, both of them, fists and kicks going both ways. Blade's shin slammed into the man's thigh, and the man took the hit without complaint. The man went with a straight right that caught Blade full on the cheekbone, Blade eating it and answering with an elbow that opened the man's eyebrow like a zipper.

Santos was bleeding from his lip. Vega had blood running from his nose down over his chin, but he was still swinging.

Valkyrie had come off the pillar and the man who'd kicked her was on her again. I saw what he was between one slip and the next. Muay Thai.

Elbows, knees, shins, fists, all of it coming in combinations, his hands on the back of her neck for half a second and a knee driving up into her body before she tore free. She was landing hits too. A boot into his thigh that would've dropped a smaller man, a fist that turned his head. But he was landing more.

Every one of them was trained. Pit fighters, the men Caleb had told us about at the war table. They were carrying, too. I'd seen the print of a pistol under the first uniform's shirt when Blade folded him against the van, and I'd seen him ignore it, because a man who'd won with his hands trusted his hands more than steel.

But they fought alone.

Five men and not one of them looked at another. Each had his fight and stayed in it, head down, like there was nobody on that concrete but the Phoenix in front of him.

We didn't fight like that.

I dodged an uppercut from the boxer when I saw Valkyrie move to get outside her enemy's next elbow, her feet going right, and the space opened up behind her and I saw the whole thing at once, the way my head saw a room.

My boxer threw another right. I slipped it going forward instead of back, and my fist was already on its way, short and fast, straight into the point of his chin. His head turned with it and his whole body turned with his head, and I was gone before he finished turning.

"Valkyrie!" I was running. "Duck!!"

She went down without a question, folding at the waist, both hands flat on the concrete, and the man who'd kicked her was already coming for her fast, kick loading for the finish.

Her back was my step. My boot hit her shoulder blades and I went up and over her, out and forward into the air with a knee up in front of me. The last thing I saw before I hit him was his eyes going wide.

My knee landed square in his face.

His head snapped back. His legs kept going forward without him, all his weight thrown the wrong way at once, and he went over backward and landed flat across his upper back on the concrete with a sound I felt in my own spine. I came down rolling over my right shoulder, came up on my feet, and I turned fast to see what I'd left behind me.