Читать книгу Edge of Black - J.T. Ellison, J.T. Ellison - Страница 15

Chapter 6

Washington, D.C.

Alexander Whitfield

Xander didn’t like waiting, even though it was something he was accustomed to doing. In the three years since he’d left the service, he’d been marching to the beat of his own drummer. His background made that an easy choice—his parents had been hippies who lived on a commune, and originally named him, in the trippy-dippy fashion of all their friends, Alexander Moonbeam. He’d taken the necessary steps to reclaim a normal name and was now legally Alexander Roth Whitfield. The Third.

And instead of Moonbeam, which his parents still preferred, he went by Xander.

Xander’s grandfather was a hearty son of a bitch who ran a television enterprise. Xander’s dad had told his father to take the money and shove it, and as such, married Xander’s mom, Sunshine, and had two children in quick succession, Xander and his sister Yellow. They moved their burgeoning little family from San Francisco to a mountain farm in Dillon, Colorado, when Xander was a baby. He’d grown up in the woods, homeschooled, self-motivated and a prodigy. His parents were furious when he enlisted instead of attending Julliard. Dedicated pacifists, they didn’t know where they’d gone wrong. They wanted a life of pleasure for him, a life without hatred or fear. Instead, he ran headlong in the other direction.

When he was eighteen, he didn’t know how to make them understand his point of view. He didn’t want to smoke dope and drop acid and find the universal meanings of life in the shiny swirls of colorful trips. He didn’t want to grow organically or manufacture hemp linens. He wanted to see the world. He wanted to give back to the land who’d given him the freedom to make that choice. Yellow had been a dutiful daughter, opened a metaphysical shop in Modesto, California, carried her parents’ all-natural products. Xander played with guns.

There was something as soothing about disassembling an assault weapon blindfolded as there was in mastering Chopin for him. He knew he was different. Smart, yes, but there was something more. Something he couldn’t put his finger on. His commanding officers called it courage, intelligence, instinct. The school psychiatrists called it genius. His parents called him gifted.

He just saw it as a way to distinguish right from wrong, to use his gifts to milk the world of its incredible beauty. Under his fingers, the piano could render 8400 chords, each of which, when combined with another, told a story with infinite possibilities. Bullets did the same thing, if used properly.

He ended up in infantry on purpose. He could have been a pilot, he just didn’t feel like dealing with all the extra training. It was more enjoyable to be on the ground than in the air, anyway. More chance for a little one-on-one action, instead of floating above it all. He’d actually started the Apache training once, but pulled out to go to sniper school when a candidate had to drop and a slot unexpectedly opened. He was nineteen at the time with a raging hard-on for the Army. Anything they wanted to teach him, he wanted to learn.

Age tempered his enthusiasm a bit, but only just. Ranger School, Airborne, Sniper, Demolition—anything they could throw at him, he jumped at the chance. It was so different from the world he grew up in, so structured, so formal. There were regulations that he was expected to follow, and he thrived in the environment. Of course, he was a rising star, which meant he was getting respect and extra attention along the way, and that helped things a great deal. If he’d been a grunt and been treated like a grunt, dismissed out of hand by his superiors, he may have felt differently. He recognized that, tried to keep his star from burning too brightly so he could at least maintain some friendships along the way. If he hadn’t been an enlisted man, he could have gone pretty damn far.

But he mustered out at First Sergeant and was happy as hell to go. The Army had changed in the years he’d been suckling at her teat, marveling at his toys. A war that he felt was mismanaged, an officer he respected committing the ultimate sin, the constant day-to-day grind that became his life in the desert, fighting for every little thing he could gather up for his men—it turned him sour on the whole enterprise. After the shooting of his friend Perry Fisher, who they’d jokingly called King, it was all over for him. He knew the military would never again have that shine, the excitement that it first held, so he took his gear and his medals and his still-living ass and hurried on home.

Part of him was ashamed, and the other part knew it was for the best. The Army was an ever-evolving beast, and in the intervening years, as he grew from boy to man to warrior under their direction, it had become a different place, a political football. He didn’t feel his skills were being put to proper use, nor those of any of his brethren.

Of course, they were all dead now, too. He was the only one left from his tight-knit unit, and he felt the absence of his comrades keenly. When he mustered out, he found a quiet place in the mountains, away from everyone, his family, his friends. He led a monastic life on the land—something his parents could finally get behind.

The Savage River forest was kind to him. He fished and hunted when he needed meat. He brought vegetables and herbs from the ground when he needed flavors. He picked fruit from the trees when he needed something sweet. He watched the breeze wind sinuously through the trees when he needed a distraction, and used the sun and the moon as his guide when he needed to establish time. He was happy alone, felt safer that way. Since he’d been trained to kill, to be able to take a life without a second thought, he felt the need to repent.

The joke among his brethren, what do you feel when you kill a terrorist? Recoil.

And not the kind that meant your stomach was turned.

Repent wasn’t the right word. Recalibrate was more like it. He was a dangerous man, and he knew it. His mind needed to adjust back to the world where threats didn’t linger in the shadows, where he could sleep without his hand on the trigger.

He wasn’t quite there yet.

And then Samantha paraded into his life, and turned his world on its ear.

Samantha was more than his lover; she was his savior. He hated the circumstances that brought them together, but he’d fallen in love with her almost immediately, though he hadn’t shared that information with her. He hadn’t needed to—she’d felt the same pull. A connection, however faint, however strong, had been made in their first meeting. Pheromones, maybe, or their beings acknowledging kindred spirits. Regardless, something about her made his soul sing. He’d had other women—not many, sex was still a sacred act for him, another anomaly he’d developed in spite of his exceptionally liberal upbringing, where sex and nudity were as natural as the sun rising in the east—but enough to know the difference between lust and love. But Sam, beautiful, smart, good Sam, was different. He finally understood how his father could abandon his entire life and legacy for a woman.

And with that understanding came another—he’d been on the path to becoming an empty soul, devoid of feeling, of being unable to find the splendor in the world anymore. Sam was more than just the aesthetics. She’d brought him back from the near-dead. He would do anything for her.

Which was the reason, while watching the top of the hourly news update and waiting for Sam to confirm why she’d been rushed away by Fletcher, he felt compelled to reach out to a group of people he was familiar with.

The answers were out there.

And Xander might be able to help find them.