“Professor, did you not ask Gillian to help because she was the best at what the two of you do?” Pavel asked quietly.
“Yes, but I should have planned better,” Helmut responded.
“I understand that, but if you had not brought her in, and the rest of you had tried to handle this on your own, would it not have been much worse for everyone? If the entity had behaved the way it did with us . . . Would not more have died?”
Helmut met the Lycanthrope’s eyes and saw that Pavel wasn’t trying to rescue his feelings; he was legitimately trying to be logical about the situation.
“I supposed you’re correct, Pavel. But it doesn’t make me feel any better that anyone lost their life.”
“No one thought it would, Professor, I simply wanted to point that out to you.” The blond Wolf turned away to stand by Jenna.
“And nobody is going to have a massive pity party over this. Those people knew what the risks were before they went in there,” Jenna said flatly. “They knew there were risks and had signed waivers against death or bodily harm, so you two are not going to go into mournful mode and that’s final or I will kick your asses, respectfully, of course, Captain.”
Jenna glared at all of them. She was a soldier, like Gillian. She was well aware of risks, potential problems and consequences in everyday decisions, as well as unique and dangerous situations. Bemoaning what had happened was not like Gillian; Helmut she didn’t know, but she knew her Captain. There was something else going on here because the short blonde was teetering dangerously on vulnerable. A mopey Captain was an ineffective leader, and they couldn’t afford that.
“So, tell me what’s really bothering you.” She smirked at Gill, intending to draw a response. She wasn’t prepared for the one she got.
“Jack was here,” Gillian said out of the blue.
“What!?” Jenna nearly shrieked then quickly lowered her voice, unconsciously twitching her fingers in anticipation of grabbing a weapon.
“Right here, at my bedside. He informed me that he’d performed the surgery on me to remove the shaft of wood that went through me.” Gillian’s voice was just a trifle bit tighter than normal. No one else but Jenna heard it.
“We’re getting out of here. Professor, go sign whatever discharge papers you need to. Pavel, go with him. I’ll get Gill out of here.”
“Who is—” Helmut started but Jenna cut him off.
“Now, Helmut. Go. Now. Talk later.” She shoved him toward the door, where Pavel grabbed his arm and hustled him down to the nurse’s station.
Jenna disappeared out the door for a few moments, then hobbled back in wearing a white lab coat with a radiology badge on it, pushing a wheelchair. Gillian didn’t want to ask where the hell she’d gotten everything on the spur of the moment. Jenna was always resourceful, just like a good Marine.
Reaching into her pocket, she produced a roll of gauze and some first aid tape. Within minutes she had Gillian’s entire head swathed in the white material. Unceremoniously she dropped the head of the bed flat.
“Ow!” Gillian grumbled, regretting her hasty decision about the milder painkillers.
“Shut up, I’m getting you out of here,” Jenna hissed, helping her friend into the wheelchair and disconnecting Gill’s IV. She piled Gillian’s overnight bag, along with hers and Pavel’s, onto the patient but, seeing the discomfiture it caused, helped Gillian up and stuck all the bags back into the chair, with Gillian shakily perched on top, a hospital blanket tucked around her.
A quick look out the door showed her that Helmut and Pavel were still arguing with the charge nurse at the desk. Jenna didn’t waste time, wheeling Gillian out into the hall and into the nearby stairwell.
“Stairs? Are you nuts?” Gillian gasped, momentarily dizzy from trying to turn her head back to look at Jenna.
“You wanna meet Jack shut up in an elevator?”
“No.”
“Then shut the fuck up and let me do this.”
Jenna positioned herself behind the wheelchair, lowering Gill stair to stair, as quickly as she dared. Every bump and bounce sent searing agony through Gillian’s battered body but she gritted her teeth and kept it to herself. There was no way in hell she was getting out of that hospital alive, with Jack in charge of her care. At least not through the front doors. Exiting horizontally through the morgue was not on her list of things to do so she suffered through Jenna’s hastily devised escape plan.
Thankfully, they were only on the third floor so she had barely two flights of stairs to contend with. It didn’t keep her from a shaky release of breath when they finally reached the bottom. Jenna checked the hallway, then shoved Gillian’s wheelchair out into view.
“Where is everyone?” Gillian asked. “There’s nobody in the halls.” The whole place looked like a deserted Dr. Kildare set.
“It’s three A.M., that’s why. All the good little patients have taken their comatose medications and are sleeping. We, however, are lurking in corridors trying to avoid your favorite serial killer.”
Without further ado, Jenna limped for it, pushing Gillian in front of her, toward the nearest exit doors. Closing her eyes, Gill just sat back and hoped that her career wasn’t going to be cut dramatically short by Jenna dashing her brains out against a door frame or smashing her face into a cinder block wall.
CHAPTER 8
THEIR happiness in escaping was short-lived as Jenna barreled around the corner of the building, pushing Gillian like a chariot driver in the Coliseum except hopping on her one good leg. Inspectors McNeill and Jardin appeared in their pathway. Both bore evidence of their involvement with Fifty Berkley Square. Brant had a bandage on his forehead and across the side of his throat. Claire looked disheveled and her clothes were torn, but being a Shifter, she had no permanent injuries.
Brant moved to halt the careening wheelchair, staggering briefly as Jenna tried to keep moving through him. “Bloody hell!” the detective exclaimed. “Just where do you think you’re going?”
“Jack the Ripper is a surgeon in this hospital, and you’re standing here quizzing us? Real bright, Sherlock,” Jenna snapped, shoving against Brant’s restraining hands.
“Now get the fuck out of the way!”
“Jenna! Jenna, wait!” Helmut appeared behind Brant and the surprised Claire, flanked by Pavel, whose blue, blue eyes were wide.
Brant wasn’t a Scotland Yard detective for nothing; he assessed and made a determination based on what he was seeing. None of it added up or made sense, but he’d go with it . . . for now.
“Claire, get the car,” he snapped, tossing a set of keys to the Werecheetah, then bundling up Gillian and hurrying after the slender Lycanthrope.
“Get that wheelchair collapsed and into the boot when she brings it round,” he ordered the other three.
Obediently they all scurried after, stopping as Claire power-slid the car close to the side of the building then leaped out to help. In short order they had the wheelchair in the boot of the vehicle and Gillian in the backseat with Helmut, Jenna, Pavel and their bags. Brant motioned to Claire, who liquidly moved around the car to the passenger side as he glided into the driver’s seat.
“Where to now?” Brant asked curtly, wanting this disorganized, irrational, unbelievable situation over and done with.
“France,” Gillian muttered. “We can’t risk public transportation. He’s got informants and spies everywhere, even in immigration.”
“Who?” Brant demanded. “Who has spies everywhere? There is no political body nor terrorist group currently operating with the ability to have that complex a network.”
“Shows what you know, my Fey friend.” Gillian’s words were slurred from exhaustion and from the drugs she’d been on. She didn’t remember that Claire had warned her not to mention the likelihood of Brant’s Fey heritage. Nor did she see him turn crimson then pale.
“We are in a war,” she continued, oblivious to the detective’s discomfort and her verbal diarrhea. “Jack the Ripper is just one
of Dracula’s lieutenants. There are spies, there are informants. That’s how our friend, Tanis— you remember him? Well, that’s how he wound up a prisoner here. It’s not your fault. None of the local or international law enforcement agencies suspect, no matter how integrated they are with Paras. It’s too insidious, too bold.”
“Too stupid,” Brant spat. “You expect me to believe that one of the worst serial killers in history is alive and well and working in a London hospital?”
“Forgive me for insinuating my opinion,” Helmut interjected smoothly while placing his hand gently over Gillian’s mouth in anticipation of a colorful outburst, “but why would these ladies make something like that up?”
That made Brant pause. What made him step on the gas and get the hell out of the parking lot was the appearance of the alleged Ripper, with a large constituent of hospital staff running behind him out of the building and canvassing the parking lot. Well, that and Jenna shrieking behind his left ear.
“That’s him! That’s the asshole!”
“Sit back and do be silent!” he ordered her.
“Roll down the window, I’m going to shoot the son of a bitch!” Jenna growled, trying to fumble under Gillian to get into her bag.
“No—” Brant started to yell, but Claire interrupted him.
“Please, Jenna, just sit back and let Inspector McNeill get us out of here. We will have our chance to track him down, but first we must get away.”
“Why France?” Brant wanted to know.
“Not a lot of Vampires,” Gillian mumbled around Helmut’s hand.
“I thought there were a lot of them that were my Countrymen,” Claire chimed in.
“Hollywood myth in action,” Helmut informed them, “Most are Eastern European, British, East Indian, Greek, Egyptian and South American. French Vampires are no more elegant, cultured nor powerful than any of the others. They simply get better press.”
Gillian started to giggle at Helmut’s sarcasm and winced. Pavel, who hadn’t taken his eyes or nose off her, noticed immediately.
“She is bleeding and in pain.”
“Well, give her something for the bloody pain, patch up the bleeding and keep her still!” Brant was in no mood for another crisis at the moment. “We need to get out of London, find a nonobvious road to Dover, traverse the Chunnel, and locate a hideout in Calais. If she needs medical attention, I have no clue as to where we are going to locate a doctor if your alleged Vampire Army has spies stationed in major medical facilities.”
Jenna and Gillian exchanged a look. They’d been in worse battlefield and covert mission conditions than this: wounded, without supplies or backup, no ammo and their adversaries hot on their heels. What was he freaking out over?
“You haven’t done this before, have you?” Gill mused from the backseat. She tried, but couldn’t quite keep the smirk out of her tone. Brant caught it.
“Done what? Helped former U.S. military personnel escape from a hospital? Evade and avoid fanged menaces who may or may not be a serial killer from eighteen eighty-eight? Or have a conversation with a recent surgical patient who by all accounts should still be unconscious or at least malleable due to the painkillers she ought to be taking?”
Brant paused for a breath, “No, Dr. Key, I have not done any of those things before. I don’t expect that you would have training programs for any of it, have you?”
He’d meant his remarks to be snarky and cutting, but to his surprise, Gillian and Jenna applauded. Jenna, a little more enthusiastically than Gillian, who discovered that any additional bouncing hurt.
“Very good, Brant,” Gill quipped. “Spoken like an honest-to-Goddess smart-ass. We’ll make one out of you yet.”
“Lovely,” he bit off, realizing that he still wasn’t winning any victories.
“Trouble ahead,” Claire purred softly.
Pavel echoed her statement. “Turn off, Detective . . . Take another road. I can scent them, as can Claire. There are several waiting in ambush to attack the car.”
“Hijack,” Jenna said slowly to Pavel. “If you are going to hang with us, you should know the right terms.”
“Why are you greeting Jack when he is not here?” Pavel looked confused.
“Why am I . . . I’m not saying ‘Hi’ to Jack, nimrod. I am saying ‘hijack.’ It’s a term used to describe ambushing a vehicle,” Jenna said impatiently.
“Language barrier. He is Russian, you know,” Gill said helpfully.
“Shut up, you’re supposed to be resting.”
Brant jerked the wheel and they skidded around a corner on two tires. He punched the gas, shifted like a rally driver, and they hauled ass. All the time he was alternatively praying and swearing. How had Gillian guessed his darkest secret? An empath was what Dr. Gerhardt had said. She couldn’t read minds, so it must be something inherently “different” about him. His stomach twisted.
He had suspected he was a changeling but had it confirmed by blood work several years before. Brant didn’t want to be different. He wanted to be a normal policeman, with normal abilities. Everyone had hopped on the Paramortals Are Brilliant bandwagon, and he did not like attention that did not come from his duties and abilities as an Inspector. No one in the department talked about it or brought it up, knowing that he was sensitive about his looks.
Male Fey had a problem with Humans assuming they were all gay due to their incredible, almost feminine beauty. Brant was straight and a bit of a homophobe. It pissed him off to no end to have someone question his orientation. He kept his hair cut short, trying to play down his looks, but you couldn’t hide those winged dark eyebrows against the platinum, shimmering hair or the starlight in his blue eyes.
Maybe he should talk to Gillian if they had a moment when they weren’t being hunted. Give her a chance, let her try to help him figure himself out.
“Look out!!” Jenna yelled.
“Verdammen Sie es!” Helmut threw his arm across Jenna and Gillian as a dark shape landed on the car hood.
Brant braked and it tumbled off only to bounce back to its feet and make a quick gesture with its hands. The car engine abruptly died. The two Scotland Yard Inspectors had guns out and were moving out of the vehicle when a silky familiar voice called out.
“Gillyflower? Are you well?”
“Trocar!!” Gillian squeaked from a dry throat, “Don’t shoot, guys, he’s on our side, remember?”
Visibly sagging in relief, Brant nodded, holstering his gun. “I thought you guys didn’t carry,” Gillian remarked, struggling to sit up more.
“This is a special circumstance, Dr. Key,” Brant retorted.
“Aw, you’re special!” Jenna quipped, earning an icy look from the Fey Inspector.
“He rode the little bus to Inspector school,” Gill giggled. It was either laugh or cry from the pain that was seeping through her best blocking efforts.
“Do shut up, Petal, and allow me to assess your wounds.” Trocar practically took the car door off its hinges in his haste to get to Gillian. The tall Dark Elf knelt and, with uncharacteristic tenderness, placed a hand on Gillian’s forehead and one on her abdomen.
As incongruous as the rest of their culture, Grael Elves had as much ability to heal as to harm. All you had to do was befriend one of them and you had a friend for life. A trained healer could do amazing things and Trocar had paid attention in his studies. Wizard, assassin, healer, warrior; he was well versed in many skills after three thousand years.
Trocar had many friends over the ages and had made as many enemies. Gillian had earned his respect and loyalty long ago. The Blood Pact they shared would have kept him loyal even if he disliked her, but since he held her in high esteem, with as much affection as one of his kind could hold for a Human, he would cross any obstacle to aid her.
“Thanks, Trocar,” Gillian whispered and visibly relaxed under the Elf’s touch.
“My pleasure, Petal, now hush.”
Gillian felt the warmth immediately. It was almost painful as he forced
healing into her tired and bruised body, but she endured it. Trocar, Jenna and Kimber were three people she literally trusted with her life. The women had gone through all aspects of the military with her and remained her stalwart friends despite her being their commanding officer.
The Elf had become their friend and companion and remained so, evoking some jealousy among the Special Ops unit they worked in. It was sort of a political coup to have an Elf in your command and Gillian had two. Mirrin, the High Elf Prince, had been reliable and friendly but he had only gravitated toward Gillian and Trocar.
Trocar had surprised himself by giving both the Humans and the High Elf a chance. Friendship, real friendship, didn’t come easy to his kind but he tried it and found out he got back everything he invested and more. Gillian was his friend, and he had come to help her. Aleksei had contacted Kimber Whitecloud when he didn’t hear from Gillian. Kimber was still in Russia, overseeing the platoon assigned to the cleanup of the damaged area. She had known the best man for the job of finding her former Captain was an Elf and had gotten in touch with Trocar before he vanished into the Doorway in Finland.
He’d left at once, opening a Portal and stepping through to London. Gillian had been fairly easy for him to locate. Hospital privacy policies were no match for a stealthy Grael who was computer literate with his own brand of ethics. Randomly choosing, he’d visited several searching for her, then narrowed the choices down to one of three. He had literally gotten lucky when he saw the car with Gillian in it tear out of the parking lot of his latest selection. He’d run diagonally across the lot to catch up to the speeding car before it rounded another corner and got away from him.
“Did you Portal here?” Gillian asked quietly.
“Yes. Feeling better?”
“A lot, thank you.”
“Do not move, Captain. My healing is warring with the Human medication in your system. You may feel disoriented or even ill.”
Key to Conspiracy Page 10
