Page 74 of Brawler
A gray cloak closed around him. Static prickled his skin, whispers slithered past his ears in voices he almost knew but couldn’t name. Snatches of words in French, in Iroquois, in Latin, in tongues older still. Each phrase slipped away before he could pin it down.
His brain fought back, disciplined and trained.Classify. Orient. Act.That’s what SEALs did. But nothing fit. Not combat. Not trauma. Not the familiar cold edge of fear. This wasn’t survival training. This wasn’t war as he understood it.
A white-hot refusal rose in him. He wouldnotsurrender to something he didn’t understand. His fists clenched, though his body never moved.Fight it. Push back. This isn’t real.
The blackness split.
The smell hit him first. Black powder and sweat, iron tang of fresh blood, smoke clinging to trees. He was crouched low in a wilderness not unlike the jungles he knew, but colder, sharper. The ground was hard with pine needles and frost.
His hands gripped wood. A musket. Its weight was wrong, primitive, awkward compared to the weapons his muscles knew by heart. He looked down and saw rough buckskin stretched across his arms, fingers callused in ways not his own.
Voices rose around him. A battle cry in a language that pierced his chest like a blade. Muskets cracked. The forest erupted in chaos, shadows darting between trunks. For a moment he thought he’d been dropped into some historical reenactment, but the fear was too raw, the violence too close. This was no illusion.
Where the hell was he? He searched his mind, lungs dragging in air that wasn’t really air. French voices clashing with English. The sharp crack of muskets, the sting of powder smoke. Men in buckskin melted into the forest, Iroquois war cries splitting the silence. The press of trees, the disorientation of ambush, blood on snow. His gut clenched with recognition. The French and Indian War?
He knew it. mid-1700s. A brutal wilderness conflict fought before America was even born. Britain against France, each pulling Native tribes into the struggle. Not just territory at stake,but the seed of a nation’s future. The first time this soil tasted the kind of war that would define it.
Why was he here? His brain rifled through possibilities. Was he stroking out? Oxygen-starved again? TBI? He searched his body, ran the checks the way he’d been trained, motor control, memory recall, sensory input. Everything fired. No slur, no blackout, no gap. His brain seemed intact, fully functional. So why the fuck was he standing in the middle of a forest ambush with a musket in his hands?
Something blurred at the edge of his vision, dark, shifting shapes crawling just beyond the combatants. Not French. Not British. Not Native. Shadows that didn’t belong in any world he knew. They slid between the men, unseen, feeding the rage, the bloodshed.
The musket fired in his hands, the recoil jerking through him. A man fell in the underbrush. His heart lurched. Had he been shown this for a reason? Was there a message?
He staggered, chest heaving, forcing himself to stand. He wanted to shoutWho am I? Why am I here?But his mouth wouldn’t form the words.
A tomahawk flashed. Instinct drove him to duck. He heard the blade whistle past, felt bark shatter against his cheek. He pivoted, rammed the musket forward like a spear, catching an enemy in the chest. The impact rattled his bones.
Around him, the forest was a living hell. Smoke curled between the trees, men shouting, all the languages melding. Under it all, the whisper of something that not only fed it but fed on it. The sense that if these warriors faltered, if they broke, something ancient would bleed through and tear the world apart.
Then he turned and saw a big man fighting, a wolf at his heels, teeth flashing. He was attacked from several sides.Brawler? His brain rejected it. This was the eighteenth century,but his brother-in-arms stood there like he’d always been, musket in one hand, tomahawk in the other, fighting as if history itself had carved him into the moment. Was it him or the idea of him? Was the bond between them so deep it reached through centuries? He blinked. He fought like a frontiersman, savage, wild, and determined. The heart of a country that was starting to beat, starting to understand what was at stake here. Starting to understand who they were.
He threw off his attackers, wielding his musket and his own tomahawk, all that formidable muscle covered in buckskin.
He reached him. “What the hell are you doing? Fight man. That’s why we’re here. That’s why we’re always here.”
Then he was past, gone into fawn smoke and savage fire. Flash looked around, and those tendrils he’d seen connecting him to his brothers during that unrelenting jungle attack were the same link to them all.
He gasped, chest heaving, as the vision blurred at the edges, pulling him away, the battle distant, but the warrior in him fought to hold on.
This wasn’t about muskets or alliances. It was about survival in a wild land, how fragile beginnings could be, how quickly shadows could consume men when they didn’t yet know who they were fighting for. But through it all, warriors would heed the call to battle, as if they were one.
By the timeEmily got back to her apartment, her legs barely carried her. She shoved the door shut, dropped her bag, and stood staring into the hollow quiet.
She should have collapsed straight into bed. Her body screamed for rest. But the silence pressed too hard, the imagestoo vivid. Flash’s scream. Brawler’s kiss. The jungle still clung to her, damp and heavy, like she’d dragged it inside with her.
Emily folded to the floor, crossing her legs, her phone on speaker. One hand kept raking through her hair as she dialed number after number.
“State Department Operator.”
“This is Emily Shade. I was just in Ecuador with a team of Navy SEALs?—”
“I’m sorry, ma’am, that information is classified. If you have concerns, please contact the Office of Public Affairs.”Click.
She stared at the phone, jaw tightening, then punched in the next number.
“Navy Personnel Command.”
“Yes, I’m trying to locate a service member…Petty Officer Christian Beckett. I?—”
