by Anna Abner
She stood at the barricade watching EMTs care for Connor, bracing his neck, starting an IV, and checking vitals. He and Maks were bundled up and rolled into twin ambulances headed for Las Vegas’ only major trauma center.
It was the first time since his infection that Connor seemed defenseless. Since transforming into a blood-drinking vampire, he’d been terrifying, inhumanly strong, and unpredictable. But not since the day she and Roz had discovered him, beaten and bleeding out, behind a strip mall after an encounter with Oleksander had Ali been this scared for him.
Roz ran up panting, Lukas on her heels. “Oh, my God,” she said, staring wide-eyed as they closed the ambulance doors on Connor. “What are we going to do?”
Ali glanced around, checking for eavesdroppers. As the crowd dispersed, no one seemed to be paying attention to her. Ali turned on Roz, catching her by the shoulders. “We have to get them back. You could do it. You could confuse the staff. Lukas could wheel them out of the hospital.”
“You want me to stage a hospital escape? Are you insane?”
Ali tried unsuccessfully to shush her.
“How?” Roz exclaimed. “We can’t carry them. There will be security. They’ll take blood samples immediately. We have a very short window to retrieve them before someone discovers they’re infected.”
“Exactly,” Ali agreed. “So, you’ll help me?”
There wasn’t time for Ali and her team to return to their war room on the fifty-first floor of the Le Sort Hotel and plan an escape. By then, Connor and Maks would be flagged as infecteds and their security would quadruple, if they weren’t simply swept away by men in black suits and never heard from again.
“I swore to Connor I’d protect him to the very end.” Her face drawn with worry, Roz said, “So, let’s do this.” She climbed behind the wheel of the pickup, and Ali scampered after her. Before Ali had even snapped on her seatbelt, Roz veered off the curb and into traffic, earning herself several annoyed horn blasts from the vehicles around her.
Roz activated the hands-free function on her phone. “Julia,” Roz barked, all business. “Give us an update.”
“I got Ali’s seven harried texts.” Dr. Julia Burke’s German accent echoed through the speakers. “I called around, pretending to be a visiting physician. Connor and Maks will be treated at Desert Valley Hospital on the eastern edge of the city. We’re wasting time talking. You should get there ASAP.”
“We will,” Roz said. “Is the jumper okay with Markus?”
According to the young shapeshifter’s latest group text, the woman who’d fallen into Volk’s arms was unconscious but stable.
“She didn’t jump,” Ali murmured half-heartedly.
“You don’t have a choice, do you?” Julia countered. “You need every one of us to rescue Connor.”
“And Maks,” Ali added.
“If you say so,” Julia answered with more than a hint of attitude.
“Okay, ladies,” Roz interrupted. “We all know our roles, yes? Lukas’ first priority is,” she took a shaky breath as she spoke her boyfriend’s name, “get Connor out. Julia will purge any medical records. And Ali will focus on Maks. I,” she exhaled, “will somehow conceal us so we can slip in unseen. We’ll meet you at the emergency room entrance.”
Roz drove the F-350 pickup fast and loose through town, narrowly avoiding several fender benders. She screeched to a halt in the Desert Valley Hospital’s parking lot and the two women hopped out. Lukas and Julia arrived in a taxi moments later.
“This is a big spell.” Roz worried at her fingernails. “I’ll try, but…”
Lukas bent over his girlfriend, his mouth near Roz’s ear. “You can do this,” he whispered. “You’re powerful and scary.”
Boy, was she ever. Roz had once been a witch on the fritz, but something had been set loose inside her. She’d not only broken a hex draining Lukas of life, but she’d somehow destroyed the vampire infection in a vicious killer named Carly.
Roz was no longer a wannabe spellspeaker, but a full-fledged witch with power to spare.
Ali had no doubt Roz could handle this spell and lots more. But they needed to hurry.
“We can’t delay any longer,” Ali prompted them. “They’re already inside.” She nodded toward two ambulances parked in the receiving bay, doors open. She caught the eye of her friend and tried to telegraph all her fear and hope into the look. “You know what to do.”
Roz frowned, her eyes fluttering with anxiety. “We’re going to save them both.” An unseen wind whipped up from nowhere, swirling around her and mussing her long black hair.
“Invisible,” Roz said succinctly. “We’re all invisible, silent specters.”
Ali didn’t feel any different, but Roz could make things happen other people only dreamt about. Trusting Roz, she rushed toward the hospital entrance.
She burst through the sliding doors, her friends right behind. First, she spotted nothing but visitors, waiting patients, and hospital staff in scrubs. She needed to find the triage area. A woman in a white coat swiped her card through an ID scanner, and a sealed door opened.
“Bingo,” Ali breathed and ran for it. She slipped her fingers in a second before the door closed. She popped the door open for Julia, Roz, and Lukas, and then took off through a circular room with gurneys fanning out from a central nurse’s station. She scanned bed after bed of battered and ill people—a woman with a head injury, a man curled nearly in half, and one patient who was nothing but legs emerging from a flock of people in scrubs shouting and moving medical equipment.
She stumbled upon Maks in the next curtained area stretched out on a gurney, his clothes partially cut off, gauze and wires sprouting from his head. She was too anxious to find Connor, though, to dwell on her adopted father’s condition.
In the next bed, Connor lay, pale and still. The ventilator attached to a tube down his throat gave her pause for a moment, but he was breathing, and she kept his long-standing promise close to her heart. Nothing short of decapitation would kill him.
Flinging herself across his bare chest, Ali ran her fingers through his dark hair, down his neck, and finally across his face. With a little blood and rest, he’d heal. The infection swimming through his veins would insist upon it. Holding tight to that hope, Ali kissed his cheek and eased away from his bed.
A nurse approached, though he didn’t see Ali under Roz’s invisibility spell.
Lukas loped around the nursing station. Catching his eye, Ali gestured for him to hurry. He was the only one among them who could carry Connor.
Lukas glanced nervously at the nearest nurse and mouthed the words, “We need a distraction.”
Roz appeared at Lukas’ heels. “Invisible,” she hissed. “We’re all invisible.” Sweat beaded on her forehead, and her hands shook with the difficulty of the spell. She may not be able to hold it for much longer. They had to hurry.
Dr. Julia Burke rushed to the gurney of an unruly and very upset patient across the room. She tapped rapidly on her cell phone.
Ali received her message a moment later.
I’m going to be the distraction, and you all get the hell out of here. I’ll stay and clean up the blood samples.
Without waiting for an answer, Julia pulled all the patient’s leads and then loosened his soft restraints. Alarms buzzed and dinged from the medical equipment circling his head. Smart enough to take advantage of his sudden luck, the patient rolled out of bed. Most of the staff stopped what they were doing to chase him down a hallway.
Ali looked to Roz. Now or never.
The witch’s eyes turned neon blue, and her next words emerged bright squiggles of pure witchy mojo from between her lips. “Connor and Maks are invisible. We’re all invisible.”
Lukas disconnected Connor and then swept him over his shoulder. Ali grabbed Maks under the arms, Roz grabbed him under the knees, and they hustled for the door, leaving Julia messing around behind the nurse’s station scanning computer files, paper charts, and lab requests.
“Whoa,” said the nearest nurse. “Where did my patient go?”
Not hanging around to hear how the staff explained losing two patients, Ali quick-stepped it out of the hospital. Lukas rolled up into the ambulance bay in the F-350 with Connor unconscious in the bed. The shifter swapped places with Roz, and the girls clumsily climbed into the cab with Maks between them. He didn’t move. In fact, he lay against Ali’s side like a giant wet towel, motionless and loose-limbed. She twisted, tweaking her back under Maks’ weight, to check on Connor, but all she saw was Lukas talking to him below her eye line. Please, God, let Connor be awake and chitchatting.
Roz stomped on the gas, and the truck took off like a rusted red bullet.
Gripping the panic bar to stay seated, Ali pulled her cell phone when it chimed. Julia Burke’s name popped up on the screen.
“Everything okay?” Ali greeted.
“Yeah. I deleted the files and collected the blood, but we have a bigger problem. Maybe. I’m not an expert on the limits of vampire healing.”
“What’s wrong?” Ali’s stomach bottomed out. No more bad news.
“I saw Connor’s scans before we left. He has a pretty serious spinal fracture.” It sounded like she was running.
“What does that mean?” Ali asked.
“He’s not breathing so great,” Julia explained more succinctly. “A human man would be paralyzed from the shoulders down, but who knows what Connor can heal through? Just keep him breathing until I get there. I thought I might as well steal medical equipment while invisible. I’ll be there as soon as I can. How are the patients?”
“Both unresponsive. We’re almost to Le Sort,” she said, catching sight of the hotel’s tower in the distance.
“See you soon.”
Ali began to fret for the first time what the two boys had been subjected to before being tossed out the window. She’d been focused on the fall, and the fight hadn’t seemed to last long, but it had been an eternity between the time she watched Connor running into the hotel and seeing flashes of him through the broken third-floor window. Had they been beaten? Stabbed? Shot? It seemed unfathomable that anyone or anything could toss Connor through a window. He was over six feet of solid muscle, broad and tough as a bull.
But someone, or something, had chucked him like a Frisbee.
Roz swerved into the underground parking structure of the Le Sort Hotel on two wheels.
“Maks, we’re here.” Ali twisted to see into his eyes, but his chin rested on his chest.
Roz harrumphed. “Remember when we were trying to kill him? When did that all change, again?”
Ali tested the temperature along the side of Maks’ cool and clammy face. To Roz, she answered, “When we figured out he was my sort-of dad.”
“This is so screwed up.” Roz put the truck in park. “Let’s get him upstairs before he dies in the Ford.”
Lukas slung Connor over his shoulder and keyed their code into the elevator’s control panel. Ali and Roz hefted Maks out of the front seat and followed him into the lift. Thirty seconds later, they were stumbling onto their private floor.
Anton and Natasha had left Roz and Connor a great deal of money upon their deaths. In their recently updated wills, they’d set aside enough money and property to keep the hunters fighting the horde and the Coven for years to come. So, the team could afford privacy, something vampire hunters needed more often than not. This wasn’t the first time they’d carried unconscious people into their suite.
The auburn-haired ragamuffin who’d gotten them all into this mess occupied a bed in Ali and Connor’s new three-bedroom suite, curled like a little mouse between the pillows, which meant Maks and Connor were delivered into the two other beds.
Ali bent over Connor, rubbing uselessly at splattered blood upon his bare shoulders. His breathing had grown progressively weaker and was nothing but a shallow huff and puff. With each inhale, he seemed to struggle harder to function.
He wasn’t doing well.
“Hurry up, Julia,” Ali murmured to their doctor, wherever she might be. “Connor’s worse.”
“Worse than half dead?” Roz clarified. “What’s worse than that?”
“He needs blood,” Ali said, ignoring her snark. “They both do.” With a knife from the kitchen, she opened a vein in her left wrist and pressed it to Connor’s cold lips as she cupped his cheek.
Roz’s phone chirped. “Julia’s downstairs.”
“Lukas, would you mind?” Ali asked, unwilling to move so much as an inch from Connor’s side. Not even to collect the doctor.
“Be right back,” he said.
Ali kept her wrist to Connor’s mouth even as her gaze moved from him to Maks’ room across a short hall. From her position, she could see him through their open, adjoining doorways.
Without his ancient eyes or his ageless charm, Maks was nothing but a lanky teenager. Ali’s chest constricted in sympathy. Oleksander the Destroyer had infected little more than a child and thrust him into a world of monsters, fiends, and killers. Once upon a time, he’d been a normal boy. Rebellious, charismatic, smart, yes, but just a boy from the Ukraine.
The infection had made him strong, too, because her adopted father seemed to be improving while Connor languished, every breath a fight to live. His vampirism was working overtime to save his life, but his injuries from the fall may have been too severe to correct.
Turning away, she flattened her free hand against the center of Connor’s chest and whispered, “Can you hear me? You’re going to be okay. We’re going to fix this.” To Roz, Ali asked, “Do we have spare blood bags in the fridge for Maks?”
“I’ll check in a minute.” Roz sat on the opposite edge of Connor’s bed. “They both need healing spells. Connor first, though, sorry. He’s my friend, and Volk is a douchebag.”
“Understood,” Ali said as Roz called her power.
The door to the suite banged open, and Julia rushed into the bedroom carrying two huge duffels of pilfered medical supplies.
“He’s still breathing?” Julia asked, staring at Connor’s bare chest shuddering through another exhale. “Unbelievable.”
“He won’t be for long,” Ali guessed. “Every set of breaths is further and further apart and harder to control.”
“Go wrap your wound,” Julia snapped, brushing Ali aside. “I told you to stop doing that shit.”
Holding her oozing wrist, Ali replied, “And I told you, it’s none of your business.”
Grumbling, Julia produced IV tubing and a blood bag from the first duffel. “He needs blood and breath,” she said to no one in particular. “Blood first. Oh, good. You left his port in.” She quickly attached the blood bag and then thrust it in Lukas’ direction without looking up. “Squeeze gently. We want to push it into him, not pop the bag like confetti. Understood, bear boy?”
“I thought we talked about the nicknames,” Lukas grunted in reply, but did as instructed, holding the bag above the bed.
“He just needs to remember what a real breath feels like.” Without much gentleness, Julia tilted Connor’s head back, exposing his bruised throat, and then covered the lower half of his face with the ambu bag’s mask. She compressed the bag, and Connor’s chest expanded before slowly deflating.
“Is he going to make it?” Ali asked, worrying her lower lip.
“Yes,” Julia said, “but you’re not if you don’t stop feeding him.” She glanced pointedly from Ali’s wrist to her duffel bags. “Roz, Ali needs to lie down.”
“I’m fine,” Ali assured. But simply clamping her free hand over her sore wrist threw her into a dizzy tailspin.
“Jesus,” Roz said, breaking her healing spells to steady Ali. “Come on, I’ll help you to the couch.”
“I don’t want to leave them,” Ali stressed. She couldn’t go into another room and not know what was happening.
Roz caved. “The chair then.” She half carried Ali into an overstuffed armchair.
“Maks is bouncing back,” Julia murmure
d, jogging from one room to the other. “Incredible.”
“And Connor?” Ali queried, watching as Roz’s power rustled the sheets on her bed. She was happy Maks would survive, but she couldn’t live without Connor.
“He’s improving,” Julia said, listening to Connor’s chest with a stethoscope in between squeezing two puffs into his mouth with the ambu bag.
Somehow, her words were not very reassuring, and Ali gripped the edges of the armchair, thinking of the last time Connor had been in bad shape. When Oleksander had stabbed him in the chest and left him—bleeding and alone—behind a deserted shopping center. Connor had almost died. Though Ali had barely known him at the time—she certainly hadn’t loved him yet—the anxiety over whether he’d live or die had torn her up.
He’d survived, thanks to his sparkly new vampire infection. Ali clung to that fact as she watched him struggling to breathe. He’d survived before. He would survive again.
#
Violet twisted uncomfortably, and the silken texture of the fabric only made the grit and grime on her skin more pronounced. Why hadn’t she remembered to shower before bed? On top of that, why did her pillow smell funny? Like earth and blood?
Fractals of memory returned. A monster sinking his teeth into her neck, and then her thighs, and then her wrists. Starving. Begging for water. Nothing but pain, darkness, and loneliness for days. Ivan taking her to a shady hotel in the bowels of Vegas and handing her over to Sergei.
The monster sneered at her. “…make you fly….”
And Maks. Maks catching her as she fell.
He hadn’t forgotten about her. He’d come to save her just as she’d hoped for during the darkest moments of her captivity, when the Four Sons had fed from her and she’d honestly believed they wouldn’t stop until she was a dried-out husk, until her heart ceased beating.
