by Davis Bunn
“What’s the matter?”
“Something is wrong.” He stopped and raised his voice. “Bernard!”
“He hasn’t seen us. Let’s just get—”
“He hasn’t seen us because he isn’t looking.” Raphael spun her about. “Move back up the stairs.”
The feel of his lips lingered like the tendrils of deep sleep. Her mind simply refused to accept the change. “But that’s—”
He pushed her, rougher now. “Go!”
Raphael’s features were taut with feral alarm. He bundled her up, lifting her off her feet like she was weightless, and ran for the club entrance.
Over his shoulder, Storm saw a man rise from the car. Instantly she recognized the attacker from Cirencester. “That’s him!”
It was not the clearest alarm she had ever spoken. But it was still enough to spur Raphael to greater speed. The attacker settled his arm upon the Rolls’s roof and aimed a pistol at them. The bangs were as sharp as the light, hard flashes of sound and flame.
Raphael jerked and coughed and literally tossed her behind the first pillars.
He collapsed half inside the alcove’s protection. Granite chips splintered from the column above Storm’s head. She scrambled across the landing before her feet actually found purchase on the wet granite. Someone shouted from the doorway behind her. Storm heard a scream closer at hand. And realized she had made the noise.
The car door slammed and the vehicle sped away. Raphael clutched at his shoulder with one hand and reached toward her with the other.
Storm slipped down beside him, gripping him as hard as she dared. Her hands and her body felt drenched by a slick lava. Raphael arched up, as though the top stair’s corner cut into his back.
“I’m a doctor. Are you hurt?” The voice came from above her.
Storm knew she should respond. But it would have meant turning a fragment of her attention away from Raphael.
“Step away, miss. Give me room.”
She did not move so much as allow herself to be slid back. She made no protest until her grip on Raphael’s hand was threatened. She must have complained, because the hands allowed her to remain where she was. But she heard nothing. There was no room for anything except Raphael’s face.
He blinked slowly, his lashes long nets that captured the misting rain. His eyes tracked her, even as the doctor and two footmen shifted him slightly so as to inspect his back. He tried to speak. She saw him shape her name. Then his gaze drifted up and away.
And he saw no more.
THIRTY-FIVE
THEY HAD TO RESTART RAPHAEL’S heart twice on the ride to the hospital. Storm refused to let go of his hand even while the doctor and the ambulance aide worked on him. The ambulance was one of the newer versions that in an emergency could serve as a pre-op unit. Storm knew this because the doctor told her. He was the same man who had knelt beside her on the Athenaeum’s front steps, a member of the club who happened to be inside when the shots sounded. He was an older man and quite stout. He had difficulty bending over his belly to work on Raphael. But work on him he did, and with a dogged tenacity that Storm found reassuring.
The second time he applied the paddles, the doctor got down tight in Raphael’s face and shouted so loud his voice broke, telling Raphael to hang on. The ambulance aide worked alongside the doctor. His face was bone pale in the flashing lights. Storm gripped the stretcher’s steel railing with her free hand and knelt on the vehicle’s metal flooring. She was tossed about every time the top-heavy vehicle took a corner. Up ahead a police car wailed, ramming through the city traffic and the rain. Storm knew she shouted at Raphael as well, begging him not to leave her. But she still could not hear her own voice. She could hear everything else perfectly well. But the only way she knew she was shouting was that her throat hurt worse than her knees.
When they pulled up in front of the hospital, two orderlies threw open the doors and hauled her bodily from the back. “Are you hurt, miss?”
“Leave her,” the doctor barked. “This is the one you want.”
One orderly helped the doctor and the ambulance aide pull out Raphael’s stretcher and extend the wheels. But the other man remained by Storm’s side. He spoke with a Caribbean accent. “The blood here, miss. Is any of it yours?”
Storm looked down at herself. The silk dress clung to her body. The front was black from neckline to hem.
The strength in her legs simply departed.
The orderly was both experienced and strong. He caught her easily and settled her onto the ambulance’s broad rear step. “You steady up, now. Your man in there needs you to be strong for him, you hear?”
Storm watched the stretcher roll through the emergency room doors. “I’m okay.”
“You’re more than that, lady. You been strong all this night. You rest easy there; you can’t go with him now anyway.” He reached into the ambulance and came out with a blanket that he settled around her shoulders. “You’re not hurt?”
“No.” The rain coalesced at the edges of her eyes. “He shielded me.”
“So now you do the same for him, hear?” The orderly pointed to where two police officers hovered. “There’s some hard people looking to ask you some hard questions.”
THE POLICEMAN’S ATTITUDE TOOK A turn for the worse when he established that Storm was linked to an earlier shooting and possible abduction. Storm could not have cared less. “Are you aware that the police have been trying to contact you, miss?”
“Can we please go inside? Raphael is—”
“When we’re done.” He was big boned and muscular but so fleshy as to erase all angles. “Wouldn’t it seem obvious that someone involved in a shooting should make themselves known to the authorities?”
“I was out of the country.” Storm heard the rain speak to her then, a sibilant whisper that anything she said would only trap her further. She turned toward the hospital’s urgent-care entrance.
The policeman’s firm grip anchored her to the night. “Not so fast.”
A voice shrilled, “Hold it right there!”
As soon as Storm heard Emma’s voice, she released her own tight hold on control. She was already sobbing so hard she could not draw breath when Emma shoved herself between Storm and the policeman and said, “Steady.”
“They shot—”
“I know. Muriel called. She heard about it from somebody called Julian or Julius.”
The policeman demanded, “And you are?”
“Emma Webb. U.S. Homeland Security.”
The woman officer said, “We definitely need to move this lot to the Yard.”
“You go anywhere you like,” Emma snapped. “I am taking this woman inside.”
“We’ll move when and where I say and not—”
“You are so far out of your pay scale we’re not even breathing the same atmosphere. Now back off.”
The policewoman said, “I’m calling for assistance.”
“You will do no such thing!” Leather heels marched smartly across the tarmac, and a tall shadow inserted himself into Storm’s fractured gaze. “My dear young lady. What an utterly dreadful turn of events. And on the front stairs of my club.”
The policeman demanded, “And which part of this circus act do you play?”
“How dare you take such a tone with me. I’ll have you know I’m a member of the Queen’s Privy Council!”
“The lady is soaking wet,” Emma said. “And she’s covered in the man’s blood and trembling so hard I’m worried she might be going into shock.”
“You don’t mean to tell me they’ve kept you out here in the—”
“Sir, we have every reason to believe this woman is involved in crimes against the state,” piped the blond officer.
“Oh, piffle. She defines the very concept of victim,” said Sir Julius. “And at the hands of our own constabulary. Which is why I intend to make your careers vanish in a puff of smoke. Now out of my way!”
SIR JULIUS TOOK CHARGE. EMMA played the silent f
riend, a comforting strength who filled the seat beside Storm and held her hand. Eventually the ward sister brought towels and a set of surgical blues. The nurse dismissed the police’s objections with a sniff and led Storm back to a private shower.
When Storm returned, the policewoman was talking on her phone and the male officer looked cowed. Sir Julius turned from the doctor speaking with him and said, “This doctor refuses to tell me anything whatsoever of value.”
The doctor explained, “We won’t know anything for another few hours.”
Sir Julius flicked the doctor away, much as he had dismissed Storm earlier. “Look here, Ms. Syrrell. I am late for a function where I am the guest of honor. Do be so good as to let me know of any development. No matter what the hour.” Sir Julius turned to the hovering police. “I assume we understand one another now. Yes? Splendid.”
As the tall man strode down the hospital corridor, Muriel Lang hurried toward them. She carried a suitcase and a practical air, despite her red eyes and broken voice. “How is Raphael?”
“Still in surgery.”
“I apologize for not being here sooner. But Raphael left explicit instructions on what steps to take in just such an emergency. I was not about to let him down.” She handed over the valise to Storm. “I stopped by the hotel for your things.”
“Thanks.”
“When I leave here I’ll move you out of Claridge’s and into the guest room of Raphael’s Chelsea loft.”
“Fine.” Storm saw Emma frown over the news. Storm did not care. She wasn’t going anywhere.
Three hours later, the doctors moved Raphael into a room in the hospital’s newer wing. The hallway formed a horseshoe around the central nurses’ station. The patients’ rooms all had walls of glass facing the station. The beds were stationed so that the patients faced the nurses. Gauze curtains could be swept across to offer incomplete privacy. Only one visitor at a time was permitted inside. There was no sign saying this wing housed the hospital’s new crisis center. None was required.
Raphael was wired and tubed. He breathed because a machine beside Storm’s chair pumped up his lungs and beeped in time with his heart. His chest was bruised in a multitude of places that did not make sense. His skin had a waxy translucence. His eyelashes looked impossibly long. The man was handsome even when unconscious.
The doctor who had saved Raphael’s life during the ambulance ride was named Jeremy Brenneman and was the former president of the Royal College of Surgeons. “Your gentleman friend is with us because I had declined the offer of a vintage armagnac and was standing in the foyer when the shots rang out.” He watched the way she stroked the hair on Raphael’s forearm and changed course. “Your fellow was struck by two bullets. His ribs deflected the first. The other unfortunately punctured a lung. Either because of blood loss or trauma or our need to restart his heart, he has slipped into a coma. This is the sort of blanket term we doctors like to use when we have no earthly idea what precisely is going on.”
Muriel drifted over from the nurses’ station. To avoid breaking the one-visitor rule, she hovered just outside the sliding glass door.
“My guess is, he might breathe on his own if we let him. But I am keeping him on the ventilator in order to offer a bit of assistance. Keep him regular, as it were.”
“Will he . . .”
“I have no earthly idea. Nor does anyone else. In my forty years of practice I have seen patients suffer the most horrendous of shocks and fall into such comas as part of the recuperative process. Why this happens, nobody knows. His bodily signs are strong. But he is not fully with us. There may be something we missed in the repair business, but I doubt it.” To give his hands something to do, he fitted the stethoscope to his ears and gave Raphael’s chest a careful listen. He stowed the instrument back in his pocket and declared, “Heart is strong as an ox.”
Storm knew he was talking for her benefit and struggled to shape the words, “Thank you, doctor.”
“Observe this, if you would.” Brenneman probed a deep cavity by Raphael’s right shoulder. “If I were to hazard a guess, I’d say this was caused either by shrapnel or a ruddy great spear.”
“Raphael fought in Africa.”
“Did he now. I suppose that’s where he picked up the burn marks across his thigh?”
Storm wiped her eyes and shook her head. “I don’t know.”
“What I mean to say is, this fellow has been through some very rough scrapes. And he’s survived. I see no reason why he shouldn’t do so again.”
“How long before we know?”
“I cannot say.” He walked around the bed and slipped between her and the patient. “Now I’ll tell you what I do know, if you’ll be so kind as to pay close attention. That’s better. What we have learned from talking with patients who return from such forays is this. They are still with us. How precisely, we have no idea. But many are able to repeat almost verbatim everything that was said while they were incapacitated. They say they were utterly aware, simply unable to reply.”
“You want me to talk with him.”
“I want you to do more than that, young lady. I want you to engage him. Because we have also learned that such discussions seem to draw them back from wherever they might currently reside.”
“I can do that.”
“I should hope so. But first you must maintain your strength. I’m going to ask the sister to bring you a tray. I want you to eat everything on it. Including the napkin and utensils. If you don’t, I will come back and be most cross with you. And if you ask any of the wretched students who have suffered my wrath, this is something to avoid at all costs.” Brenneman moved for the door. “I’m also going to prescribe something I want you to take. No, young lady, don’t even think of objecting. You’ve been through your own shock. You will take the tablet and you will have a good night’s rest. I’ll have them make up the divan there so you can remain at his side. But sleep you will, or you and I will have words.”
The ward nurse brought Storm a tray and insisted she leave Raphael’s room to eat. The main waiting room was a collage of cheery pastels. Sky-blue floor melted into butterscotch walls with creamy drapes covering nighttime windows. The children’s play area was done in lavender and rose. One door led off to a conference area, the other to a small chapel. All the rooms had interior windows so that the nurses could sit at their station and observe everything.
Eating proved to be a terrible trial. Storm tasted nothing. All she could smell was the hospital. Twice she almost lost it, the gorge rising as she struggled over another bite. Emma basically stalked her, standing so close her shadow loomed over the little table rolled in front of Storm’s chair.
Muriel was stationed in the doorway, from where she could look back and see the entrance to Raphael’s room. “The sister is going to give her a tablet to make her rest.”
Emma shot the woman a tight look. “Can you give us a minute?”
If Muriel was offended, she gave no sign. “Of course. I’ll just go have a few minutes with Raphael.”
Emma waited until she left the room, then asked, “You trust her?”
“Raphael did and so do I.”
Emma mouthed a silent okay. “What about Sir Beanstalk?”
Storm tried for another bite of the overboiled potatoes, then set down her fork in defeat. “He helped me with the police.”
“Which would make sense, if he didn’t want the cops looking too closely at something.”
“Do you distrust everybody?”
“Almost.” Emma waited while the nurse brought in a pill and stood over Storm while she took it. When they were alone once more, Emma went on. “You’re going back to the man’s apartment?”
“His name is Raphael, and I’m not going anywhere. They’re making me up a bed in his room. What about you?”
“Muriel’s booked me into a hotel around the corner. The lady is efficient, I’ll give her that.” Emma stared through the glass wall, past the nurses’ station, to the open glass door le
ading to Raphael’s room. “I need to report back, let Tip know what’s happened.”
“And Harry.”
Emma nodded, then lowered her voice. “I left Harry on a sour note.”
It felt good to have something else to worry about. “You two argued?”
“It would probably have been easier if we did. But no. Harry was a perfect gentleman. I was the one in a borderline panic.” Emma kneaded the soft leather of her shoulder bag. “I’m a United States federal agent. I’m highly skilled in unarmed combat. I hold an expert rating in small arms. A couple of days back I took out two armed men with my bare hands. Now I’ve been totally undone by the finest man I’ve ever known.”
Storm replied, “I’m going to sit here and pretend that makes sense.”
“You’re not helping. At all.”
“Harry loves you. You love him. I don’t see the problem.”
“You don’t know what baggage I’m carrying.”
“Oh, and Harry is mister perfect?” Storm was suddenly engulfed by a wave of fatigue. “Wow.”
“What’s the matter?”
“The pill she gave me feels like a velvet hammer.” Storm gripped the chair arms and forced herself to her feet. “I’m going to bed.”
She walked past the nurses’ station and arrived at the entrance to Raphael’s room. She found Muriel seated in a chair. One hand clutched the sheet, the other held Raphael’s limp fingers. Muriel’s face was buried in the bedcovers. She wept softly.
Storm returned to the waiting room, determined to make a little more noise on her next arrival. She found Emma still seated there, staring at nothing. Storm declared, “Muriel is on our side.”
THIRTY-SIX
THE PILL KEPT STORM DOWN for almost eight hours. Several times she relived the attack, great booming flashes that shredded a soft rain and softer kiss. Each time she almost surfaced, drawing close enough to wakefulness to hear the hospital sounds and smell the sharp odors. Then the drug’s languid claws dragged her back down again.
She finally rose from the narrow divan just after seven. The ward nurse smiled a professional good morning as she checked Raphael’s status. Storm tried to shape the words, but her brain was still clogged by the pill. The nurse understood her anyway and said, “Your young gentleman had a restful night. At this stage, you should take that as good news.”
