Forged in Smoke (Red-Hot SEALs #3)(73)
Cosky’s eyebrows beetled. He studied Rawls’s face intently before turning his head slightly and pinning Faith with implacable gray eyes. “And you? You see it too.”
God help her, but she wanted to say no. No, she didn’t.
Instead, she squared her shoulders and took a deep raw breath. “Yes. Yes, I did. I do.”
For a moment it felt like she’d stepped off a ledge and her body was in free fall, no sense of gravity to cradle her. But then Rawls’s hand contracted, stopping her midflight.
The tension vanished from Rawls’s muscles and a hoarse breath sounded in her ear. That’s when she realized her reaction had been as important to Rawls as his teammates’ had been.
Maybe even more important.
With Faith’s hand held tight in his and her admission that she’d seen Pachico warming his chest, Rawls faced off against his teammates. So far the revelation had gone exactly as he’d envisioned—blatant disbelief from Mac, questioning and concern from Zane, and frozen neutrality from Cosky. While the timing of the disclosure could have been better, such as not in front of the entire damn camp, it could have gone much worse too. At least his ghost hadn’t grabbed one of the rifles hanging off his teammates’ shoulders and sprayed the cavern with semiautomatic gunfire. Talk about a brutal introduction to Ghosts 101.
Bracing himself, he waited for the avalanche of questions to resume. The fact that someone like Faith, a scientist driven by logic and empirical data, had admitted to seeing the ghost too, might have bolstered his position—assured everyone he wasn’t crazy. Assuming his teammates didn’t simply pin her with a crazy tag too.
“A ghost,” Zane repeated slowly, his forehead crinkling. His eyes narrowed, as though he were measuring the possibility. “That’s what’s been going on with you? A ghost?”
Rawls shrugged, using his free hand to scratch his forehead. “I’m surprised y’all never figured that out, what with all the shoutin’ at empty air.”
“That’s because we were holding on to the hope you hadn’t gone f*cking crazy,” Mac interrupted, his voice surprisingly calm. He ignored the quelling look Zane shot him. “You do realize that ghosts don’t exist.”
“What I realize,” Rawls fired back, “is that most people can’t see them.”
“No shit.” Mac’s voice rose, along with his eyebrows. “So you and the good doc just happen to be two of the lucky ones? Why’s that?” His eyebrows climbed even higher as he crossed his arms across his chest and rocked back on the heels of his boots. “From that earlier kiss, it’s obvious you two are involved. Let me guess. That’s the secret? Since you’re intimately involved, you two can see the ghost while nobody else here can?”
With a snort, Rawls shook his head. “Don’t be an ass, Commander. If intimacy had anything to do with it, Zane and Beth and Cosky and Kait would see the damn thing too.”
“Then why you two and nobody else?” But it was Cosky’s flat voice that asked the question.
“Because they have walked the other side and returned. You have not,” Jude said coolly.
“Walked the other side?” Zane asked, his attention skipping between Jude and Rawls with periodic trips toward Faith.
Rawls ran a hand over his head and shrugged. “He means Faith and I both died and then returned to our bodies, while the rest of you managed to avoid that particular nasty journey.”
“Died?” Zane shot a glance at Cosky. “Admittedly, from what Cosky and Kait said, Faith didn’t have a pulse back there in the tunnel, at least not until Kait did her thing. But you—” He shook his head, his green eyes almost regretful. “Sorry buddy, you had a heartbeat.”
“Did I?” Rawls turned his head to stare at Cosky. “I watched everythin’ you and Kait did from outside and above my body. Watched you two heal me. Felt myself sucked back into my body. That’s how I ended up with Pachico, he hitched a ride back into this world when you healed me.”
Silence fell, and every eye turned to Cosky.
“Hell.” Cosky stirred and shook his head. “I don’t know. I thought I felt a pulse, but it was faint, erratic. There one moment, gone the next. It could have cut out when I lifted my fingers.”
A memory slipped through Rawls’s mind.
“What the hell do they think they’re gonna do?” Pachico asked. “Bring you back from the dead?”
Cosky hissed. “I got a pulse.”
Pachico laughed again. “Wishful thinking on your buddy’s part. If you had a pulse, you wouldn’t be all floaty beside me.”
His heart had stopped beating several seconds before Cosky’s arrival on the scene, as evidenced by Rawls’s front-row seat in that silvery otherworld. He wouldn’t have been watching the drama, all disembodied there beside them, if his heart had still been beating—would he?
He frowned, the question a sharp itch. Hell, he couldn’t make the assumption that he’d been dead. Maybe Cosky had felt a pulse. Despite the fact that he’d spent several minutes there, he didn’t know much of anything about that eerie netherworld. Maybe a borderline pulse was enough to get the soul—or essence, or whatever the hell people called that transparent, incorporeal state—ejected from the corporeal body. And then there was Faith. She didn’t have any recollection of dying or playing voyeur outside her body, yet she’d still seen Pachico.