Page 43 of Crowe
“That’s all? He’s good.”
I looked at him. He looked back, completely comfortable, the faint suggestion of something amused around his eyes.
“He’s settling in,” I said. “Better than I expected. Better than I think he expected.”
“And you two?”
“We’re figuring it out.”
“Crowe.”
“Hawk.”
He set his coffee down. “Eight years,” he said. “I’ve known you for eight years. In those eight years, I’ve watched you care about exactly three things… the camp, your brother, and Blackbird. And now there’s a fourth thing, and you’re sitting here telling me you’re figuring it out.”
“That’s what we’re doing. Someone is out to get him, Hawk. Now isn’t really the time for us to figure out our future plans.”
He shrugged. “Actually, I think that makes now the perfect time for that.”
“Oh, you think so?”
“Yep, nothing like a little hope to get you through,” he said.
“Maybe,” I grumbled.
It wasn’t that I thought he was wrong; it was just that it was too soon for me and Noah to be talking about a future together. We’d been together for such a short time. Of course my grandfather liked to say that the day he met my grandmother for the first time, he’d known she was the one and never looked back.
“I’m just noting that when you left HQ this morning, you looked like a man who was leaving something important behind.”
I looked at my sandwich. “I told him I’d be here for a few days. He knows.”
“Does that make it easier?”
“No.”
Hawk smiled, not a large one, just the corner of his mouth. “No,” he agreed. “It doesn’t.”
We ate for a while without talking. One of the deputies had started telling a story that was getting a lot of reaction from the others.
“Don’t you worry. I’ll stop in and check on your boy tonight.” He picked up his coffee again. “Mika’ll feed him. You know how he gets when someone needs taking care of.”
I did know. It was one of the things about the Three Bears I was sure of. The way they folded in around whoever needed it without making a production of it. Noah had been folded in whether he’d asked to be or not, and from what I’d seen, it was doing him good.
“He said something,” I said, “when we were out here the other day. That he was lucky to have all of us. That he didn’t know how he’d get through this without Three Bears at his back.”
Hawk was quiet for a moment. “What did you say?”
“I said good thing he didn’t have to find out.”
Hawk nodded slowly. “That’s right,” he said. “That’s exactly right.”
The afternoon session ran long.
Knife defense always did. There was more to cover, the stakes were higher, and people felt that. The energy shifted in the afternoon, the way it always did when the training moved from something theoretical to something visceral. Everybody had seen what a knife could do. But especially this group. Their department had lost a guy last year to a knife attack. That knowledge sat in the room with us.
Hawk and I did the knife demonstrations. He came at me with the marker blade—chalk-tipped, metal handle—and I ran the blocks and the counters while the group watched, talking through each one, explaining not just what I was doing but why. The X formation with the wrists. The way you moved into an attacker rather than away from them. The ground control that followed a successful disarm.
“In a knife attack, odds are you’re going to get cut,” I said, after the third demonstration. “Accept that now. The goal isn’t to avoid getting cut. The goal is to make sure that if youdoget cut, it’s somewhere you can survive it. Wrist facing you, not away. Inner forearm, not outer. Muscle, not artery.”
