Page 19 of Shade

I hit the start.

CHAPTER 6

SHADE

The first round punched through the side of the plane a foot from my head.

Behind me, I heard the starter begin to whine.

She was doing it. Bullets in the dark, Vega twenty feet away, and Mya was sitting in that seat doing exactly what she said she would.

I pulled my gun and dropped to one knee beside her door, and the whole night opened up.

The club fired from the dark. Muzzle flashes lit up the scrub on both sides of the road, quick and bright, and the cartel men scattered for their trucks. Somebody screamed. Glass broke. A man near the crates spun around and went down.

And that starter kept on whining. It went on and on. I’d heard her say it took forever, and she hadn’t been lying. Every second of it, I could see her up there in that blown-out window, a sitting duck in a seat she’d been terrified to get back into.

Then the engine caught.

It went off behind me like a bomb. A deep, thundering roar that I felt in my chest, my teeth and the soles of my boots. The bent propeller became a blur. And everything behind that plane disappeared.

Dirt. Gravel. Stones the size of my fist. Twenty years of dust off that dead airstrip all came up at once and went screaming back across the tail, into the road, into the crates, the trucks and the men standing beside them. It was a wall of it. It hit the first truck so hard the windshield starred white in a second and then caved in. The SUV’s headlights went out. Men threw their arms over their faces and turned their backs and staggered blind, coughing, choking and firing at nothing.

I looked up at her once.

Through the broken side window I could see her. She was leaning forward in that seat with her jaw set and her good hand jammed on the throttle, holding it wide open, her hair whipping around her face in the wind from the propeller and the broken window. A round smacked into the frame beside her head and cracked what was left of the glass.

Her hand stayed jammed on that throttle. She never even blinked.

I’ve served with men who’d have dived for the floor. I’ve known men who’d have frozen solid in that seat. She just sat there in the middle of a gunfight and held that engine screaming, because she’d told us she would.

I’d never been so scared for anybody in my life. Or so damn fucking proud.

That was when the Unholy Few came out of the dark and showed themselves.

I’d pulled my bandanna up over my nose and mouth before the cars ever came. Now I went low and fast, around the wing and into the storm, with my eyes cut down to slits.

I’ve moved through worse than that. A long way from here, in places with no names worth saying, with sand coming sideways and men trying to kill me inside it. My body remembered all of it before my head did.

A cartel man came out of the grit right in front of me with a pistol up and his other arm over his eyes. I took the gun out of his hand and put him on the ground with an elbow, and he didn’t get up. Another one was crouched by the back wheel of the second truck, firing blind toward the plane. Toward her. I put two rounds into him and moved on.

All around me the club was doing the same. Gage put a man face down in the dirt with a knee in his back. Havoc dragged one out of the truck cab by his collar. Switch and Smoke came up the road shoulder to shoulder, taking guns out of hands. Preacher walked through the middle of it like it was any other night.

And then, through all that dust and noise, I saw Vega.

He was going the opposite way from his truck. Hunched over against the grit with his gun in his good hand, heading around the far wing toward the cockpit.

Toward her.

Everything in me went cold, clear and quiet, the way it used to a long time ago. I didn’t feel the gravel cutting my face anymore. I didn’t hear the engine. There was nothing in the whole world but that man and the space between him and her.

I don’t remember crossing the ground between us. I just remember getting there first.

He swung around and saw me. He tried to bring the gun up. I was already on him.

I shot him once, low on the right side of his belly, at a range where I couldn’t miss.

He went down on his back in the dirt beside the wing. His gun went skidding away under the plane. I put my knee in his chest and my weight on top of it and pinned him there.