by Cherry Adair
They talked business as their meals were served. The Lima hotel across the street opened in ninety days. William did an amazing job keeping everything and everyone moving. How he juggled seven projects at once astounded Sara. It was no wonder he’d never married. He was constantly traveling and lived out of a suitcase most of the time.
At a tap on the window beside their table, Sara glanced up.
“Just in time for dessert,” William said dryly, nodding at the architect standing outside.
In his mid-forties, Aarón Guerrero was already a legend in his industry. The fact that the Chilean architect was barely five-two in his lifts didn’t stop him from emanating power. His thick hair was jet black and hung artistically to his padded shoulders. He was as vain as he was talented, and was dating a famous older Hollywood actress who was a good foot taller than he was. He didn’t have much cause for his personal vanity, but Sara didn’t care. He earned his pride in his work a hundredfold. And for that, she’d tolerate his arrogance.
She waved to him as the waiter removed her plate.
He came inside, pausing to place his lunch order with their waiter on the way over to their table. Full of meaningless apologies, he shook hands with each of them, then pulled out his chair and sat down.
He’d ordered the restaurant’s specialty, ceviche, a dish both Sara and William had just finished. She’d thoroughly enjoyed the succulent raw fish marinated in lemon juice. But now the smell of Aarón’s spicy meal seasoned with chili, onions, and cilantro made her stomach churn and her head throb.
While he talked and ate, Sara subtly downed a couple of aspirin, drank two cups of coffee, and tried to concentrate on the very important conversation. But all she could think about was those eerie, yellow, damned snake eyes on William.
While Aarón went into a lengthy monologue on the pros of his desired location for the Chilean spa, Sara tried to control her breathing and the insanely rapid thundering of her heart. Her entire body was still bathed in a mist of terror-induced perspiration, which she hoped neither man noticed.
Even though she knew she’d imagined the yellow eyes, she couldn’t stop glancing at William to check his eyes surreptitiously.
“I think Sara’s location for the spa will be far more profitable, a crown on the most auspicious building in Punta Arenas,” William said smoothly.
Aarón slapped his napkin down on the table, letting loose a spate of Spanish curses. “No. It is no crown, it is an abomination. The spa will be inside or I will not finish this building.”
Good God, Sara thought. He was refusing only because it was her idea. No woman could possibly be more astute than the great Aarón. One of these days he was going to choke on that stupid male pride of his.
In the middle of a heated exchange with William, Aarón suddenly made a hideous wheezing noise, his face flushing a deep red as he tried to take a breath.
Stunned at how quickly the situation had turned critical, she started to her feet. “Aarón, do you need the Heimlich?”
His eyes watering profusely, struggling to suck in air, he waved his hand. Yes.
Sara shot a frantic glance at the wide-eyed patrons, and the wait staff gathered across the room. Surely a waiter would know something this basic? But while everyone was watching, no one rushed forward.
With one hand braced on the table, Aarón clawed at his throat. Sara didn’t hesitate. Basic first aid had been a mandatory course at her boarding school, and she knew how to do the Heimlich maneuver, even though she’d only practiced it on other students at school what seemed like a lifetime ago.
She reached between the chair and Aarón’s back. Grabbing him around the middle, she hauled him out of his chair. “I can help you, okay? Just try to stay calm. You’ll be breathing in a second. Just hang on.” The chair fell over unnoticed as she positioned her fist above his belly button as she’d been taught, grabbed it with her other hand, and did five hard squeeze-thrusts against his abdomen.
The sound he made put the fear of God into her. Was she doing this wrong? Obviously the obstruction was still in there.
Breathe, damn it.
Sara kept squeezing, but Aarón was almost a dead weight and just about pulling her arms from their sockets. His knees sagged, and both he and Sara went down.
Shitshitshit.
“William,” she said grimly, still squeezing as she tried frantically to remember how to clear his airway. “Call one-one-six.” The emergency number for the local bomberos. The fire brigade could traverse the insane city traffic faster than any other emergency vehicle.
Vaguely she heard the susurrus of voices surrounding her, but she was completely focused on the unconscious man.
Sara prayed the paramedics would get there in time.
“COME ON! WHAT’S TAKING so long?” Sara paced the worn linoleum floor of the waiting room at Clínica San Pedro. The noises and smells associated with any hospital were the same, Lima or London. Despair. Industrial-strength cleaners. They always gave Sara the same welling of nausea, trepidation, and uncertainty.
She hated everything about hospitals. She’d been admitted on two occasions, and both were indelibly engraved in her brain: once when she was treated after the fire that killed her parents, and the second time when she’d miscarried.
You’re not helpless or frightened now, she reminded herself. And this wasn’t about her. Put the past in the past, and concentrate on Aarón.
“This is Lima, darling, not the States. They probably have one doctor for this entire floor. It could be hours. Are you sure you want to stay?” William asked.
God, she hated not knowing if Aarón was going to be all right. Both of the extremely young-looking nurses at the desk had assured her that as soon as the doctor had a moment, he’d come out and give her an update on her friend’s condition. They’d admired her Manolo Blahniks, and the conversation had killed five minutes.
It already felt like an eternity ago to Sara.
She was worried about Aarón, but she was also worried about Jack. She wanted to call and check on him, but he’d been so white-faced and exhausted, she didn’t want to wake him.
She should call Dr. de Canizales and ask him about Jack’s condition. Thank God none of those snakes had been poisonous. If Aarón’s doctor didn’t come out and talk to her in the next fifteen minutes, she’d let the nurses know she was going outside, and she’d make that call.
Sara absently fiddled with her string of large freshwater pearls, running them through her fingers like worry beads as she walked from the door to the window and back again, her heels clicking impatiently on the tiled floor.
“Bloody hell, Sara, sit down. You pacing isn’t going to speed up the doctor.”
“They’d cleared his airway, and he was breathing when they took him.” The paramedics had managed to dislodge the piece of fish blocking Aarón’s windpipe while he was at the restaurant, but by then he was unconscious.
“If we’d driven rather than walked, we could have gone and come back by now,” William said, tapping his bottom lip with his thumb.
A frisson of annoyance raced along Sara’s skin. She’d refused William’s offer of a ride because walking was quicker than fighting the traffic.
William glanced at his watch, then stood up and caught her hand. “Unfortunately, I can’t stay. My flight leaves in an hour, and I have an appointment in Chile I can’t miss. I need to go get my car. I’ll let Grant know you’re here and about Aarón’s incident. Are you certain you’ll be okay here alone?”
She pulled her hand from his and walked back across the empty waiting room, sat down in a chair, and picked up a handful of magazines. “I’ll be fine, I’ll just look at these.” She waved them at William.
“Call Grant as soon as you know about Aarón’s condition. He’ll want to know you’re on your way home.”
Sara nodded. “You’d better hurry or you’ll miss your flight.”
William winked. “It would be for a good cause, since I got to spend time with you.
”
“Flirting with me isn’t going to hold your plane.”
He kissed the tips of his fingers, then waved them at her as he walked down the hall to the elevators. The two pretty nurses at the desk watched his progress.
Sara checked the clock on the waiting room wall. How could it have been only fifteen minutes? A cursory glance at the magazine covers caused a familiar pain that made her hastily replace the parenting publications on the table.
Every picture, every advertisement, commercial, or flesh-and-blood baby she saw, was like a knife to her heart. She wondered if that would ever ease, if she’d ever be able to look at another woman’s child and not think of the baby she’d lost.
It always struck her as ironic that she’d already mourned the child for longer than she’d had time to love him. Was that “accident” on her shoulders too? The idea had been running around inside her head for months, ad infinitum.
Was Aarón Guerrero’s accident, like Jack’s, her fault? She’d been annoyed that he’d been running late and by his flat refusal to consider her ideas; had her anger transferred to him, causing him to choke? Absently she rubbed the pain in her temple.
It seemed she’d spent half her life controlling her temper and the other half compensating for what her temper did to her powers.
She hadn’t been attempting to use magic this time, though. Perhaps Aarón’s situation was purely an accident? God, she hoped so. She’d never forgive herself if she’d caused Aarón harm, even inadvertently. The thoughts went around and around in her brain like gerbils on a wheel.
Going to the nurses’ station, she told the young brunette she was stepping outside to make a phone call and would be right back. Outside, she called Grant’s Lima office and ended up talking to Yumi. She asked her to let Grant know she was still at the hospital, and that she had to postpone their drinks date. That done, Sara called Dr. de Canizales, but had to be content to leave a message with his service.
She went back inside the too-cold building, back to the waiting room. Back to wait.
She wasn’t used to sitting around doing nothing. She had her briefcase with her, but she had no interest in looking at color swatches for the bar and grill at the Santa Marta project, nor did she want to go over the figures Pia had put together for her from the San Cristóbal pool bar.
Forcing herself to sit down, Sara flipped through a two-year-old fashion magazine, then got up to pace. She went to the machine and bought a thin cardboard cup of coffee-flavored, lukewarm water, then placed it on a table and forgot to drink it.
Finally, after almost an hour, she went back to the nurses’ station. “Are you certain the doctor has no update?”
“The doctor will come to you as soon as he can.”
“He’s a busy man.” And she understood that she wasn’t a priority. But a quick “Your friend is going to make it” would go a long way toward lowering her guilt factor.
“Sí.”
“I’ve heard some wild stories about some kind of sickness in San Cristóbal that makes people go loco then they die. The sickness hasn’t traveled down here to Lima, has it?”
The brunette’s eyes widened. “Sí. Do you know that in the last month alone, we’ve had four men and a woman brought in?”
Not to be outdone, the redheaded nurse chimed in, “My brother-in-law, who is with the policía, he says people they go loco up and down the west coast. The doctors don’t know what it is, but they are concerned it might be contagious.”
Asking as many casual questions as she thought would get answered, Sara was afraid to push her luck too far. She and Jack were going to have to make another trip to the Council to report all these developments. She hoped they’d put together a task force of people who knew what they were doing. Jack was better at this than she was.
It was starting to get dark out, and the nurses’ shift was almost over. “Be careful on your way home tonight. Have you been reading the papers about all the missing girls?” Sara asked. “I have to tell you”—she didn’t really have to fake the shudder—“they freaked me out. I haven’t gone anywhere alone at night for weeks now. Does the hospital give you any protection when you go to your cars?”
The two nurses glanced at each other, then looked around to see if a supervisor was within earshot. “We know,” the red-haired nurse said conspiratorially. “There’s a woman on the second floor, she was brought in yesterday. Her brother-in-law is with the policía too and said she’d been missing from her home in Colombia for a week. Then she turns up wandering the streets of Lima in rags.”
Sara felt a surge of hope. Was it possible that this young woman could give her any clues to what was happening in San Cristóbal? She leaned over the counter, lowering her voice. “Can I see her?” She had no idea if, or how, the missing women were connected, but it was worth asking.
“She is—how you say?” The little brunette looked at the other nurse for help.
The redhead lowered her voice. “Una locura. Loco.”
The dark-haired woman nodded, eyes darting down the corridor again to ensure that no one else overheard her. “She say to the police, to the doctor, to her family, she is violada—raped, yes? Por una serpiente muy grande,” she whispered with relish.
Sara’s knees buckled, and she had to grab the edge of the wooden counter so she didn’t fall. “She said she was raped by a snake?” It took everything in her to sound incredulous instead of stunned.
“Sí.” The two nurses tried to conceal their amusement. They didn’t imagine that what they’d heard could be true. The girl was out of her mind, babbling about rape and a giant snake, and no one believed her.
“Take me to her,” Sara begged urgently. But the nurses, perhaps realizing that revealing so much about a patient could get them fired, suddenly clammed up. And before Sara could push, the doctor arrived with an update on Aarón’s condition.
JACK FROWNED DOWN AT the information on his monitor. He’d set up his laptop on Sara’s desk in her office a couple of hours ago. The twins, who’d been playing naked in the floodlit pool right outside the window, had been shrieking and giggling for a solid hour. They must be damned good in the sack, because they were as annoying as hell out of it.
The fragrance of ginger and lemon drifted into the room, and a second later, Sara materialized near the door. She looked good enough to eat in a tight, deliciously short skirt, a figure-hugging jacket, and very high heels that made her legs look a mile long.
“Hey,” he said softly.
“You’re up,” she said, surprised to see him there. She removed the sunglasses she’d pushed up on top of her head, then deposited them with her briefcase on a fabric-covered table. The slim, cherry-red leather briefcase he’d given her for her thirtieth birthday.
Jack raked his fingers through his hair. “Dr. de Canizales gave me a clean bill of health.”
She turned to look at him, expressive eyes opened wide. “Really?”
“Really.” Jack dragged his attention away from her exceptional legs to look at her face. She was beautiful there too. “How’d your meeting go?” He had plenty to digest before he shared what he’d learned in his research. In the meantime, just looking at Sara was enough to give him a hard-on.
“Dramatic,” she said ruefully, peeling off her jacket and going to a narrow closet, where she hung it on a padded hanger. Very Sara. The thin black top she wore did very nice things to her breasts. Jack relaxed back in her very comfortable office chair and enjoyed just looking at her.
“But before I go into that particular drama, I have other news. Five people with symptoms matching the description of the wizard ‘sickness’ were brought into Clínica San Pedro in Lima in the past week. Five, Jack.”
Five in one hospital. How many more that they didn’t know about? “I’ll call Edge and let him know.”
“You have the Wizard Council on speed-dial?”
He took out his phone. “As a matter of fact, yeah.”
“Wait! There’s more.”
His lips twitched at her delivery. “A Ginsu knife?”
“Another young woman claiming to have been raped by a snake, just like the village girls. They have her in the psych ward at the same hospital.”
He gave her a look of concern. “What were you doing in a hospital? Are you okay?”
“I’m fine. I didn’t imagine what happened to me.”
“I never thought you did.”
She rubbed her arms. “I thought I did.”
“I repeat, what were you doing at the hospital?”
“Our architect, Aarón Guerrero, nearly choked to death at lunch.” She sounded strained.
“Let me talk to Edge, then you can fill me i—Duncan? Slater.” Jack gave the Head of Council as much information as he could. “No, I didn’t get that. Where did you … I’ll ask Sara. But I don’t think so.” He listened with dawning horror. “Jesus! No shit? Christ, that’s bad. … Yeah. Yeah, I hear you. … That would be excellent, yeah. Thanks. … Right, we will. See you then.”
He disconnected, shoving the phone back in his pocket. “Edge sent people to every hospital up and down this coast. He knew about the five in your hospital in Lima—actually, there were seventeen throughout that city alone. He has reports of more than a hundred and forty wizards either dead or dying within a two-thousand-mile area. They have an infirmary set up in—hell, wherever the Council is. He says the Council has been sending us an updated list every day.”
Sara frowned. “I haven’t seen anything. Where did he say he’s been sending it?”
“Here.”
“Hang on, let me check with Pia.” She leaned over the desk to pick up the phone. “Pia? Hey, did I receive any communications with a list of names and hospitals? … Oh. Okay. Thanks. … Just a project I’m working on with Jack. … No problem. Shoot that to my personal e-mail, will you, please?” She disconnected. “They sent the updates to my business e-mail. Pia had no idea what the lists were. Odd. That’s not like her to get something and not tell me about it. Anyway, she’s forwarding them to me. We should have them in a minute.”
