by J. R. Ward
After a moment of dead-fish silence, Red Sox cleared his throat, and the patient pulled on his glove and shut his eyes.
“Thank you,” she muttered. “Now, you boys mind if I do my job so I can get out of here?”
She gave the patient a shot of Demerol, and within moments his tight eyebrows eased up like someone had loosened the screws on them. As the tension left his body, she stripped off the bandage on his chest and lifted the gauze and packing off.
“Dear…God,” she breathed.
Red Sox looked over her shoulder. “What’s wrong? It’s healed up perfect.”
She gently prodded the row of metal staples and the pink seam beneath them. “I could remove these now.”
“You need help?”
“This just isn’t right.”
The patient’s eyes opened, and it was obvious he knew exactly what she was thinking: Vampire.
Without looking at Red Sox, she said, “Will you get me the surgical scissors and the grips in that duffel? Oh, and bring me the topical antibiotic spray.”
As she heard rustling from across the room, she whispered, “What are you?”
“Alive,” the patient replied. “Thanks to you.”
“Here you go.”
Jane jumped like a puppet. Red Sox was holding out two stainless-steel implements, but for the life of her she couldn’t remember why she’d asked for them.
“The staples,” she murmured.
“What?” Red Sox asked.
“I’m taking out the staples.” She took the scissors and the grips and hit the patient’s chest with a mist of antibiotic.
In spite of the fact that her brain was doing the twist in her skull, she managed to cut and remove each of the twenty or so metal clips, dropping them in the wastepaper basket next to the bed. When she was finished she swabbed up the tears of blood that welled at each entrance and exit hole, then hit his chest with some more antibacterial spray.
As she met his brilliant eyes, she knew for sure he was not human. She had seen the insides of too many bodies and witnessed the struggle to heal too many times to think otherwise. What she wasn’t sure of was where that left her. Or the rest of the human race.
How was this possible? That there was another species with so many human characteristics? Then again, that was probably how they stayed hidden.
Jane covered the center of his chest with a light layer of gauze, which she then taped in place. As she finished up the patient grimaced, and his hand, the one with the glove, went to his stomach.
“You all right?” Jane asked as his face drained of color.
“Queasy.” A line of sweat broke out over his upper lip.
She looked at Red Sox. “I think you’re going to want to take off.”
“Why?”
“He’s about to be sick.”
“I’m fine,” the patient muttered, closing his eyes.
Jane headed for the duffels for a bedpan and talked at Red Sox. “Go on, now. Let me see to him. We aren’t going to need an audience for this.”
Goddamn Demerol. It worked great on pain, but sometimes the side effects were a real problem for patients.
Red Sox hesitated until the patient groaned and started to swallow compulsively. “Umm, okay. Listen, before I go, can I get you something fresh to eat? Anything in particular you want?”
“You’re kidding me, right? Like I’m supposed to forget the abduction and the mortal threat and give you a drive-thru order?”
“No reason not to eat while you’re here.” He picked up the tray.
God, that voice of his…that rough, hoarse voice with the Boston accent. “I know you. I definitely know you from somewhere. Take the hat off. I want to see your face.”
The guy went across the room with the wilted food. “I’ll bring you something else to eat.”
As the door shut and locked she had a childish urge to run at the thing and pound on it.
The patient moaned and she looked at him. “You going to stop fighting the urge to throw up now?”
“Fuck…me…” Curling over on his side, the patient began retching.
No bedpan was needed, because he didn’t have anything in his stomach, so Jane hauled herself into the bathroom, brought back a towel, and put it to his mouth. While he gagged miserably, he held on to the center of his chest as if he didn’t want to pop his wound open.
“It’s okay,” she said as she put her hand on his smooth back. “You’re healed up enough. You’re not going to tear that scar open.”
“Feels…like…I…Fuck—”
God, he was suffering, his face strained and red, sweat all over him, body heaving. “It’s okay, just let it roll through you. The less you fight it, the easier it will be. Yeah…there you go…breathe between them. Okay, now…”
She stroked his spine and held the towel and couldn’t help but keep murmuring to him. When it was over, the patient lay still, breathing through his mouth, his hand with the glove clenched around a tangle of sheets.
“That was so not fun,” he rasped.
“We’ll find you another painkiller,” she murmured, brushing his hair from his eyes. “No more Dem for you. Listen, I want to check your wounds, okay?”
He nodded and eased onto his back, the expanse of his chest seeming as big as the damn bed. She was careful with the adhesive tape, gentle as she lifted the gauze. Good lord… The skin that had been perforated by the staples just fifteen minutes ago was completely healed. All that remained was a small pink line down his sternum.
“What are you?” she blurted.
Her patient rolled back toward her. “Tired.”
Without even thinking about it she started stroking him again, the sound of her hand smoothing up and down his skin making a hushed noise. It wasn’t long before she noticed that his shoulders were all hard muscle…and that what she was touching was warm and very male.
She took back her palm.
“Please.” He caught her wrist with his unmarked hand—even though his eyes were closed. “Touch me or…shit, hold on to me. I’m…all adrift. Like I’m going to float away. I can’t feel anything. Not the bed…not my body.”
She looked down at where he held on to her, then measured his biceps and the breadth of his chest. She had the passing thought that he could snap her arm in two, but she knew he wouldn’t. He’d been ready to rip the throat out of one of his nearest and dearest a half hour ago to protect her—
Stop it.
Do not feel safe with him. The Stockholm syndrome is not your friend.
“Please,” he said on a shaky breath, shame constricting his voice.
God, she’d never understood how kidnapping victims developed relationships with their captors. It went against all logic as well as the laws of self-preservation: Your enemy cannot be your friend.
But denying him warmth was unthinkable. “I’ll need my hand back.”
“You have two. Use the other.” With that he curled himself around the palm he held on to, the sheets getting pulled farther down his torso.
“Let me switch sides then,” she muttered as she slid her hand out of his grip, replaced it, then laid her newly freed palm on his shoulder.
His skin was the golden brown of a summer tan and smooth…boy, it was smooth and supple. Following the curve of his spine she went up to his nape, and before she knew it she was stroking his glossy hair. Short in the back, long around his face—she wondered whether he wore it that way to hide the tattoos on his temple. Except they had to be for show—why else would he put them somewhere so noticeable?
He made a noise in the back of his throat, a purr that rolled through his chest and upper back; then he moved away, the shift tugging her arm. Clearly he wanted her stretched out next to him, but as she resisted, he eased off.
Staring at her arm in the tight clutch of his biceps, she thought about the last time she’d been entwined with a man. Long while. And it hadn’t been that good, frankly.
Manello’s dark eyes came to mind�
�.
“Don’t think of him.”
Jane jerked. “How did you know who was on my mind?”
The patient released his hold on her and slowly shifted around so he faced away from her. “Sorry. Not my biz.”
“How did you know?”
“I’m going to try to sleep now, okay?”
“Okay.”
Jane got up and went back to her chair, thinking of his six-chambered heart. His untypeable blood. Those fangs of his in that blonde’s wrist. Glancing over to the window, she wondered if what covered the glass panes was not just for security but also to keep out daylight.
Where did it all leave her? Locked in a room with a…vampire?
The rational side of her rejected the thought out of hand, but at her core she was logic driven. With a shake of the head, she recalled her favorite quote from Sherlock Holmes, paraphrasing it: If you eliminate all possible explanations, then the impossible is the answer. Logic and biology didn’t lie, did they? It was one of the reasons why she’d chosen to become a physician in the first place.
She looked down at her patient, getting lost in the implications. The mind reeled at the evolutionary possibilities, but she also considered more practical matters. She thought about the drugs in that duffel bag and the fact that her patient had been out in a dangerous part of town when he’d been shot. And hello, they’d kidnapped her.
How could she possibly trust him or his word?
Jane put her hand in her pocket and felt for the razor. The answer to that one was easy. She couldn’t.
Chapter Fourteen
Up in his bedroom at the big house, Phury sat with his back against his headboard and his blue velvet duvet over his legs. His prosthesis was off, and a blunt was smoldering in a heavy glass ashtray next to him. Mozart drifted out of a set of hidden Bose speakers.
The book of firearms in front of him was being used as a lap easel instead of reading material. A thick sheet of white paper was laid out on top of the thing, but he hadn’t made any marks on it with his Ticonderoga No. 2 for a while. The portrait was complete. He’d finished it about an hour ago and was working up the courage to wad it up and throw it out.
Even though he was never satisfied with his drawings, he almost liked this one. From out of the blizzard-thick blankness of the page, a female’s face and neck and hair had been revealed by strokes of lead. Bella was staring off to the left, a slight smile on her lips, a strand of her dark hair across her cheek. He’d caught sight of the pose at Last Meal this evening. She’d been looking at Zsadist, which explained the secret lift to her mouth.
In all the poses he’d drawn her in, Phury always sketched her with her eyes elsewhere. If she were staring out of the page, at him, that just seemed inappropriate. Hell, drawing her at all was inappropriate.
He flattened his hand over her face, prepared to crumple the paper.
At the last moment he went for the blunt instead, craving some artificial ease as his heart beat too hard. He was smoking a lot lately. More than ever. And though relying on the chemical calm made him feel dirty, the idea of stopping never crossed his mind. He couldn’t imagine getting through the day without help.
As he took another hit and held on to the smoke with his lungs, he thought of his brush with heroin. Back in December the backflip off the H-cliff had been prevented not by his making a good choice, but because John Matthew happened to pick the right time to interrupt.
Phury exhaled and stared at the tip of the blunt. The temptation to try something more hard-core was back. He could feel the urge to go to Rehv and ask the male for another Baggie full of deep nod. Maybe then he’d get some peace.
A knock went off on his door and Z’s voice said, “Can I come in?”
Phury stuffed the drawing into the belly of the firearms book. “Yeah.”
Z walked in and didn’t say another word. With his hands on his hips, he paced back and forth, back and forth, at the end of the bed. Phury waited, lighting up another blunt and tracking his identical twin as Z wore out the carpet.
You didn’t push Z to talk any more than you’d try to coerce a fish onto the business end of a hook with a lot of chatter. Silence was the only lure that worked.
Finally the brother stopped. “She’s bleeding.”
Phury’s heart jumped, and he splayed his hand out over the cover of the book. “How much and for how long?”
“She’s been hiding it from me, so I don’t know.”
“How’d you find out?”
“I found a thing of Always stuffed in the back of the cabinet right next to the toilet.”
“Maybe they’re old.”
“Last time when I got my buzz razor out, they weren’t there.”
Shit. “She has to go to Havers’s, then.”
“Her next appointment isn’t for a week.” Z started up with the pacing again. “I know she’s not telling me because she’s afraid I’ll freak out.”
“Maybe what you found is being used for another reason?”
Z stopped. “Oh, yeah. Right. Because those things are multifunctional. Like Q-tips or some shit. Look, would you talk to her?”
“What?” Phury quickly took a drag. “This is private. Between you and her.”
Z scrubbed the top of his skull-trimmed head. “You’re better with shit like this than I am. The last thing she needs is for me to break down in front of her, or worse, yell at her because I’m scared to death and not being reasonable.”
Phury tried to take a deep breath, but he could barely get the air down his windpipe. He so wanted to get involved. He wanted to walk down the hall of statues to the pair’s room and sit Bella down and get the story out of her. He wanted to be a hero. But it was not his place.
“You’re her hellren. You need to do the talking.” Phury stabbed out the last half inch of the blunt, rolled up a new one, and flipped open his lighter. The flint wheel made a rasping noise as the flame jumped up. “You can do it.”
Zsadist cursed, paced some more, then eventually headed for the door. “Talking about this whole pregnancy thing reminds me that if I lose her, I’m fucked. I feel so goddamned powerless.”
After his twin took off, Phury let his head fall back. As he smoked, he watched the blunt’s lit tip flare and wondered idly if it was like an orgasm for the hand-rolled.
Jesus. If Bella was lost, both he and Z were going to go into a tailspin the likes of which males didn’t come out of.
As the thought occurred to him, he felt guilty. He really shouldn’t care that much about his twin’s female.
As anxiety made him feel like he’d swallowed a swarm of locusts, he smoked his way through the emotion until he caught sight of the clock. Shit. He had to teach a class on firearms in an hour. He’d better hit the shower and try to get sober.
John woke up confused, vaguely aware that his face hurt and that there was some kind of bleating going off in his room.
He lifted his head out of his notebook and rubbed the bridge of his nose. The spiral binding had left behind a pattern of dents that made him think of Worf from Star Trek TNG. And the noise was the alarm clock.
Three fifty in the afternoon. Classes started at four P.M.
John got up from the desk, wobbled into the bathroom, and stood over the toilet. When that felt too much like work, he turned around and sat down.
God, he was exhausted. He’d spent the last couple of months sleeping in Tohr’s chair in the training center’s office, but after Wrath had put his foot down and moved John up to the big house, he’d been back in a real bed. You’d think he’d be feeling great with all that legroom. Instead, he was whipped.
After he flushed, he turned on the lights and winced in the glare. Damn. Bad idea to lose the darkness, and not just because his eyes were killing him. Standing beneath the recessed lighting his little body looked horrible, nothing but pale skin over evident bone. With a grimace, he covered up his thumb-sized sex with his hand so he didn’t have to look at the thing and killed the lights.
>
There was no time for a shower. Quick brush of the teeth, little splash action on the puss with some water, and he didn’t bother with his hair.
Out in his bedroom he just wanted to go back between the sheets, but he pulled on jeans that were junior-sized and frowned as he zipped up the fly. The things were loose on his hips, baggy though he’d been trying to eat.
Great. Instead of going through the transition, he was shrinking.
As another round of what-if-it-never-comes-for-me? rolled him over, his eyebrows started to pound. Crap. He felt like there was a little man with a hammer in each of his eye sockets, bashing the shit out of his optic nerve.
Grabbing his books off his desk, he shoved them into his backpack and left. The instant he stepped into the hall he put his arm over his face. The sight of the brilliant foyer made his headache roar, and he stumbled back, bumping into a Greek kuroi. Which made him realize he hadn’t put a shirt on.
Cursing to hell and gone, he went back to his room, threw one on, and somehow made it downstairs without tripping over his own feet. Man, everything was getting on his nerves. The sound of his Nikes across the foyer was like a band of squeaky mice following him. The clicking of the hidden door into the tunnel seemed loud as a gunshot. His trip through the underground route to the training center went on forever.
This was not going to be a great day. His temper was flaring already, and going by the last month or so, he knew that the earlier it kicked in, the harder it would be to hold.
And as soon as he walked into the classroom, he knew he was really in for it.
Sitting in the back row at the loner table John had called home before he got tight with his boys was…Lash.
Who now came in the economy-size asshole package. The guy was big and filled out, built like a fighter. And he’d gone through a G.I. Joe makeover. Before he’d worn flashy couture clothes and a vault’s worth of Jacob & Co. jewelry; now he was dressed in black cargo pants and a skintight black nylon shirt. His blond hair, which had been long enough to pull back into a ponytail, was now military short.
