Over the coms, Preston heard Glen Echo from the cockpit of the other Black Hawk.
“Gecko-four-zero, this is Gecko-prime. We are taking off to give you room. He’s got five dogs. Get them and get the fuck out of there—he’s going to be racing the goddamned fire.”
Oh fuck.
Spencer didn’t even wait for Glen to leave the helicopter pad Preston had installed for Damien when he was commuting. He landed the fucking helicopter in the middle of the mown field Preston used to train the dogs. Roughly the size of a football field, it was not a lush green, but it was watered twice a week to help pack down the dirt and keep it from getting dry. Spencer was too freaked-out for finesse. He and Elsie dropped the Black Hawk down like a ton of bricks, and he left her in the cockpit.
“Get out if you have to,” he muttered.
“Fuck off.”
He paused as he unhooked his harness and looked her in the face. “Get. Out. If. You. Have. To. Love you, boo.”
She nodded, because they only said that when things were really in the shit. “Love you back, boo.” Before she’d found Josh, before either one of them had found Gecko Inc., they’d been the odd-people-out in flight school, and they’d had each other’s backs. Spencer had lost track of all the leave they’d taken together because they didn’t have another soul they felt comfortable with. He wasn’t going to sacrifice her to tilt at a windmill, even if it was her windmill too.
He ducked until he’d cleared the propellers, and ran to open the side door, and then greeted Preston, who was struggling with the dogs.
“They’re afraid,” Preston said flatly, his own voice practically robotic because he was clamping down his own fear.
“I understand.” Spencer dropped down to his haunches and petted the dogs Preston was trying to manage with just the collars. He knew these dogs. They weren’t Colonel, who was the dog he wanted to live with, but he’d played with them, thrown the stick, held the bait, followed Preston’s interminable rules to help them be working dogs. These dogs had all failed at working, and Spencer was okay with dogs that failed at working. He’d pretty much failed at working too. All he could do was fly, and apparently all he could do was fly with Elsie and work for Gecko, but he would have appreciated some help out of the flames too.
He got a tentative lick on the face and then another, and he stood and gently disentangled Preston’s white-knuckled hands from three of the dogs and ran off at a trot toward the copter. Preston followed, and while the dogs whined as they got near the blades, Spencer didn’t take shit, and he tugged them firmly, prompting them with “Go on, there,” until they hopped into the back compartment. Spencer had just closed the door when there was another bark from the direction of the truck.
“The actual fuck!” Preston’s voice was almost tearful. The heat and the noise, the smoke and the ash, all of it was horrific, and it was closing in fast.
“Colonel opened the truck door,” Spencer said, and for the first time—the absolute first time—he could see why Preston got so mad when his working dogs misbehaved.
But Colonel didn’t go tear-assing into the flames or barking around the field. He made a beeline for Spencer, who opened his arms and let the 90 lb. German shepherd mix leap into them.
“Go!” Spencer told Preston. “Dammit, go. It’s getting too close. I’ve got him. Preacher’s staying in the truck. Go. Just go!”
Preston took a look around, and Spencer saw how much this cost him. His face, strained and wet with tears, showed nakedly that he was about to leave his whole world.
“The dogs in the truck are getting hot,” Spencer said. “You gotta get them to the hangar and get them water.”
Preston nodded briefly. “Gotcha.”
The dogs would do it, Spencer knew.
He kept his arms around Colonel and walked around the front of the Black Hawk, grateful that there was just a little bit of room between the two seats in the cockpit. He set Colonel down there, closed the door, and was strapping himself in as Elsie lifted them out.
She headed for the hangar, which was about twenty miles away from the leading edge of the fire with acres and acres of mown grass or dust between. Spencer grabbed the stick once they were in the air and he was fastened in, but not before he gave Colonel a reassuring pat on the head.
“That dog was not going to let you go,” Elsie said, her voice on the edge of quivering.
“Well, you know. Dogs, they got no sense.”
Neither of them looked back. If the flames took over either of the houses, it would hurt too much. If they didn’t, the devastation left by the flames on the woodland and brush had already broken their hearts as it was.
THE conditions at the hangar were pretty grim. Glen and Damien had killed their engines and unloaded the dogs from their hold. Belinda and Oscar were in the midst of making sure every dog had water, and all of them were watching the road.
“He left okay?” Damien asked nervously for what was possibly the fifty zillionth time.
Spencer—who could admit to himself that he was a complete asshole with an irritation threshold of zero—nodded. “Yeah, Damie. He was in the truck, heading this way. We couldn’t follow him. The crosswinds were—”
“Terrifying,” Damien conceded. “Yeah. I know. But the flames were close. And it looked like he had a lot of clearance on the road but….”
They knew. They all knew. Casualties from the Paradise fires a couple years back had brought home how horrifically fast the flames could move.
“He was driving like a bat out of hell,” Spencer told him. “I….” He swallowed, heartsick. “It was hard for him to leave, but, you know. He had to get the dogs to safety.”
Damien nodded, his eyes red-rimmed and bright. “I know,” he said hoarsely. “I know.”
But Spencer was doing the numbers in his head just like Damien was. It usually took Preston forty-five minutes to get to the hangar because the road wound a bit, and he would be driving fast, so it would probably take him half an hour. Spencer and Elsie had made it in ten minutes, but that meant nothing.
Preston was the love of Damien’s life, and he was Glen Echo’s brother and Oscar and Belinda’s best friend since high school. However long it took him to get there, it was going to be forever in dog years because Preston was so important to all of them.
“He had Preacher with him,” Spencer said as logically as he could. “He’ll get here safely because he wouldn’t risk Preacher.”
Damien allowed a smile to sneak through. “How is it that you have Colonel with you?” he asked. Spencer and Oscar had put the other giant dogs on leads and staked them in the shade near the hangar, making sure they had water to drink too. Colonel followed at Spencer’s heels, clinging so tightly that Spencer had almost tripped more than once. He didn’t yell, though—the poor dog was worried and sad, and Spencer had shown up and saved him from the worry and the sad. Spencer wasn’t going to yell and take that away.
“He opened the passenger door to the truck and jumped into my arms,” Spencer told him, and while he wasn’t sure why that made Damien chuckle weakly, he thought that this sound was possibly better than the bleak anxiety he’d seen a few moments ago, so he went with it. “Do we have any people food?” he asked. “Are there supplies in the hangar? I don’t know about you guys, but I’m starving. I think we need food.”