Some Gave All Read Online Free PDF

said reflexively. He kept his face neutral and respectful.
    But when he turned his attention to Vincent, his face sagged, and it was obvious to everyone in the room that he was not fine.
    “I’ll be back as soon as I can. With answers,” Vincent promised.
    The man exhaled, as impatient for those answers as Cat was.
    As she and Vincent left the house and retraced their steps on the path, Mr. Riley shuffled out after them. With a pair of gardening shears, he snipped off the single exquisite red rose and presented it to Cat.
    “Be careful, Detective,” he told her. “Live a long time. Longer even than me.”
    She took the rose with a faint sad smile. Her professional distance already sacrificed to her instinctive need to protect, she put her arms around the old man. He melted against her, utterly bereft.
    “I’ll be in touch soon,” she promised him.
    “Answers,” he pleaded. “Justice.”
    Cat said, “I won’t stop until we’ve laid this to rest.”
    Vincent remained silent and stared at the snow as it tumbled from the sky. Then he walked to the car, a towering figure all in black, moving with the stealth of an animal.

CHAPTER THREE
    A FGHANISTAN , 2002
    T he beast that was Specialist Vincent Keller bared his teeth at the flaming debris plummeting from the smoke-choked sky. He growled at the fiery rain, then threw back his head and shrieked as a burning ember sizzled against the fresh gouges in his cheek. He slapped his bloody hand against the wound as he waggled his head in rage, grabbed the nearest object, and flung it hard.
    It was a soldier.
    Others came and ran beside him as they reached the blazing building. Somewhere deep, beast-Vincent knew that this was a sacred place, the house of the sick. Infirmary. But the beasts’ roars drowned out any rational thought and his heart, his muscles, his life’s blood were screaming at him to rip, to shred, to destroy.
    Against all logic, ammo had been stored in the same building as the wounded, and as the flames reached mortars and grenades, the building detonated like a bomb. The blowback knocked the beasts off their feet. Beast-Vincent landed hard on his back, bellowing, devoid of any sense of fear.
    Lacking any sense at all.
    Then from the fragmenting structure, something ran. It was on fire, and chains dangled from its wrists. It was a pillar of smoke and bright orange flames; its screams shattered the eardrums of the human soldier it charged. The man blasted machine gun fire at the ground in front of it, a warning.
    Impossibly, it kept coming.
    The man shouted a name and dove to the ground.
    The thing ran over him, crackling feet thudding hard on his back. His lungs compressed, the man groaned once, and then he collapsed into the embers and ash.
    * * *
    “And that’s what I remember,” Vincent said to Catherine. They were headed back to the precinct. Catherine was driving and Vincent rode shotgun while she expertly wove in and out of the busy New York traffic. “About that day.”
    “Oh, my God,” Catherine said. “That’s horrible.”
    “Yes,” he said. And there were other days, days that he hadn’t discussed, and he knew that she could tell he was holding something back.
It’s all right to tell someone your darkest secrets.
Catherine hadn’t said that. Her little sister Heather had. But at that time, Heather had had no idea just how dark the world could be.
    Sad to say, her eyes had been opened.
    “And you think that the man the… burning creature… trampled might have been this ‘Private X’?” Catherine put on her left-turn blinker and swerved around a street sweeper. She huffed and activated lights and siren. Tess had called again to share a few more details about the newest homicide. Even Vincent, a hardened soldier and an ER doctor, had been sickened by what they’d heard.
    “I don’t know,” he said. “I do remember that there was something familiar about him. I think I’d seen him in the infirmary hovering around Lafferty,