Page 1 of Twisted Steel

Chapter One

Blood On The Pavement

Harper

Blood has a smell.

People like to pretend it doesn’t, because pretending is easier than admitting the body is just meat, heat, and chemistry when it splits open.But blood smells like copper and fear.Like pennies held too long in a sweaty fist.Like panic under fluorescent lights.And tonight, it smells like gunpowder too.

“Harper!”

I snap my head up as Milo slams the ambulance into park, tires skidding against cracked asphalt hard enough to rattle the cabinets behind me.Jesus fuck, it’s chaos already.

The call came in as multiple casualties near an industrial strip off the east side.Possible gang activity with a possible active shooter.Which is dispatcher speak for we have no fucking idea what the hell we’re sending you into, but good luck.

I grab my trauma bag and shove the back doors open.Heat hits me first.Then screaming.Then bullets.Not close enough to tear through me, but close enough that the sharp sounds pierce straight through my bravado.My body locks for half a second, every survival instinct demanding I get back in the rig, close the doors, and let people with guns handle people with guns.

Then someone groans from the pavement twenty feet away, and my training wins.It always does.

“Stay behind the engine block!”I shout at Milo.

“Harper...”

“Now!”

I don’t wait to see if he listens.He will.Milo likes breathing.I sprint low across the lot, boots slipping on loose gravel, one hand clamped around the strap of my bag.There are bikes everywhere, big chrome monsters laid over on their sides.There’s glass glittering under the sick yellow security lights, a body near the chain-link fence, and another slumped against the brick wall.

Men are shouting, but not the police, not yet.

The first patient is on his back beside a black motorcycle, both hands pressed to his abdomen, blood pumping hot and fast between his fingers.He’s huge, bearded, wearing leather, and swearing with the kind of creativity that tells me his airway is intact.

Good for him.

“Move your hands,” I order, dropping to my knees.

“Fuck you,” he grits.

“Romantic, but we just met.”

His blood-slick fingers twitch away enough for me to see the wound in his lower left abdomen.Ugly, but not instantly fatal if the bullet hasn’t shredded anything important.

“Through and through?”I ask.

He bares his teeth.“How the fuck should I know?”

“Because you’re the one leaking.”

His eyes focus on me for the first time.There’s pain there, rage too, but mostly confusion, like he can’t decide whether I’m insane or useful.

I yank gauze from my bag and pack the wound hard, and he roars.

“Good,” I say.“Still alive.”

Another shot cracks across the lot, and I flinch, but I don’t stop.A shadow moves at the edge of my vision.Big, fast, and wrong.Someone grabs the back of my vest and hauls me sideways.My world tilts just as a bullet hits the pavement where my knee was a second ago, spitting concrete chips against my cheek.

I hit a wall.No, not a wall.A man.A massive, tattooed, shaved-headed wall of a man with a scar cutting along his jaw like someone tried to split him open and failed.He pins me behind the bulk of his body, one hand locked around my upper arm, the other holding a gun pointed toward the dark mouth of the alley.

For a second, I forget the blood.The screaming.The bag at my feet.All I see is him.