Page 53 of Wellspring
“I don’t want to fire on you, but I will if you don’t come with me.”Tatum wasn’t under JR’s thumb, as far as Cade knew, but that was probably because Reichardt hadn’t needed anyone but Lutz to do his dirty work.
“Maybe we should go with him.”Javier looked green as he handed his gun to Chel.“One shootout was more than enough for me.”
“I won’t let anything happen to Erick,” Chel promised Cade.“Right now you haven’t done anything illegal, but if you don’t go with Tatum, it’ll make things harder when Mac and the new marshal get here.”
Cade looked back at Tatum, weighed his chances of getting to Erick before Tatum shot him, considered the likelihood of Erick getting hurt worse in the ensuing scuffle, and decided this wasn’t a fight he could win.
He gave a last, longing look toward the door to Doc Lillard’s clinic, aching at how close Erick was while still being so far out of reach.Javier’s words were little consolation when all Cade wanted was to hold Erick’s hand, feel his heart beating, however weakly, watch his chest rise and fall.Maybe kiss him, even though he wouldn’t be aware of it, if no one was around to see.He swallowed all that down, keeping his face impassive as his brothers had taught him.Fucking Tatum thinking he was the fucking sheriff now that Lutz was gone.Who’d gone and elected him anyway?
“Whatever.”He stalked ahead of Tatum toward the sheriff’s office at the other end of the street.He might be going, but he wasn’t going to pretend he was under arrest.He hadn’t done a damn thing wrong.
“I’ll need your weapons,” Tatum said when they entered the office.Cade handed him his bow and the quiver of arrows from his back, then unstrapped his gun belt and handed that over too.He still had a knife in one of the seams of his leathers, but Tatum didn’t seem ready to search him and Cade wasn’t about to offer it up.
“I gave my gun to Michele.”Javier held out his arms to show he didn’t have any other weapons.Tatum prodded them into the building’s one cell and turned the lock, then set the bow, quiver, and gun belt against the far wall.
“If anything happens to my bow, I’m taking it out of your hide,” Cade growled.Tatum must have felt braver with inch-thick bars between them, because he just rolled his eyes and settled in behind the postmaster’s desk.
The cell had two flimsy cots with chamber pots beneath them and nothing else.“Tell me about Erick,” Cade demanded as soon as they’d sat down, facing away from Tatum.
“It’s not a pretty story,” Javier said grimly.“Remember that he’s still alive, and it gets more likely he’ll recover with each passing hour.”
Cade hadn’t expected it to be anything but horrifying, but to have Javier lay it out so bluntly made it even harder to sit in that cell instead of breaking out and going to Erick’s side.“Tell me,” he repeated.
“Doc Lillard worked on him for hours,” Javier said.“He had to open him up pretty deep to find the bullet, and the way it was lodged, he had to cut from the front to get it out.It punctured a lung and shattered a few ribs.”
Bile rose in Cade’s throat at the thought of Erick’s strong chest torn open from behind and cut open from the front.He knew the damage a bullet could do, but he hadn’t expected it to be this bad.
“Once he had the bullet out, he did something to patch up the lung and stitched Erick back up.He used some kind of suction thing to get the air back in Erick’s lung, but he’d lost so much blood by then that Lillard didn’t think he’d make it.”
Much of the explanation went over Cade’s head.“But you said he’s still alive.”His voice sounded desperate to his own ears.
Javier gave him a sympathetic look and nodded.“He is, I promise.Or at least he was when you arrived.I asked the doc if there was some way I could give him some of my blood.Doc said it was risky, that it was as likely to kill him as it was to help.We figured since chances were he wouldn’t make it unless we tried, it was worth the risk.”
Cade reached out to squeeze Javier’s hand.Fuck, he’d known things were bad, but he’d hoped….He didn’t know why he’d expected anything less, not after seeing what the bullet had done to Pahayoko, but a part of him had hoped it wasn’t as bad as it had seemed.“You didn’t have to do that, but thank you.”
Javier shrugged.“I don’t know him as well as I’d like, but Erick seems like a good man.And Doc said there wasn’t any risk to me unless he took too much.So we did it, and Doc said it seemed to help.At least it didn’t make things any worse.Doc is keeping him sedated so he doesn’t move around and tear the stitches open.The biggest risk now is if the wound gets infected.So all we can do is wait.”
“Fucking Sanders,” Cade muttered, wishing desperately he could wait by Erick’s side, no matter the outcome.“If Erick dies, I’m going to find a way to drag Sanders back to life just so I can kill him again.Slowly this time.”If he got out of here before they buried the body, he’d be taking that scalp after all.
Javier stretched out on the cot, hands behind his head.“We may as well try to get some sleep.No telling how long it will take MacRae to get back here, if he’s even able to convince another marshal to come with him.”
Despite his exhaustion, Cade felt too keyed up to sleep, but he followed Javier’s example and lay down on the hard cot.He hoped Mac was successful, because if he wasn’t, Cade would need to start planning a jailbreak.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
THE FIRSTtime Erick awoke, the pain piercing through his chest was so agonizing that he welcomed sinking back into blissful oblivion.
The next time he woke, the pain was still there, but it felt as though all his senses were muted.He could hear voices nearby but couldn’t tell if one of them was Cade’s.He struggled to open his eyes but wasn’t able to force the lids apart.He drew in a breath to call Cade’s name when the pain lanced through him so sharply that though he fought against it this time, he again lapsed into unconsciousness.
The third time he woke, it was to the sensation of fingers twined with his.His eyelids felt crusted together, but he was finally able to pry them open, only to find not Cade but Michele sitting beside him.He blinked, but the image didn’t change.He didn’t remember much after being shot, but he remembered urging Cade to warn Wellspring of the JR attack.Michele had been at Wellspring, so if she was here, at least some of Wellspring’s hands had survived.But if Cade wasn’t here, did that mean…?The thought was too dreadful to even finish.He drew a shallow breath, just enough to rasp out “Cade?”
“He’s safe.”Michele squeezed his hand and brushed the hair back from his forehead gently.“He killed Sanders, though, and Javier killed Lutz, after they both shot at us first, so Tatum has them cooling their heels in jail until Mac gets here with a new marshal.He’ll be thrilled to know you’re awake.When the doctor gets back to check on you, I’ll go tell him.”
“He got to Wellspring in time?”His chest burned when he spoke, but he needed to know his friends had survived.
“Of course he did,” she said, her fondness clear in her voice.“He would have killed himself and his horse getting there before he let us down.You know that.”
“How many hurt?”He couldn’t ask if anyone had died.How quickly he’d come to care for these men and women who’d been strangers only months before.
