by Sylvia Frost
“Rose,” I whispered.
“Good,” he nodded, and his approval made my insides feel like sparklers.
“And what day is it?” he asked.
“Uhh,” I stalled. How late had I left the office? Was it tomorrow yet? “March third, I think, but I’m not su-” I coughed and cut myself off.
He flipped on the faucet of the nearby sink and handed me a paper mini-cup full of lukewarm water. Before I had a chance to say thanks he said, “Drink.”
I drank. The water tasted metallic, but was still a blessed relief against my burning throat. After I downed the first mini-cup, he was already handing me another. I took it and emptied that one, too. All the while he didn’t stop staring at me.
“What do you mean the color of my eyes is right?” I asked finally. “Do you have something against brown eyes?” I gave him a goofy smile, hoping that would make him look away.
He didn’t get the memo and kept gazing at me. His golden eyes were molten and captured me completely, but he was probably just looking for symptoms.
“Your brown eyes had gray in them when you were admitted. That led me to believe that you had abnormal levels of silver in your blood.” He took the cups and tossed them in the trash-can with almost too perfect accuracy. “Sometimes silver can impair cognitive function. In your case it kept you from waking up.”
“Until you used chelation therapy on me?” I asked.
His brow furrowed in impressed confusion and his eyes narrowed. “How did you know?”
My belly shivered in delight at the intensity of his attention, but I couldn’t keep up the lie that I was some kind of medical genius. Just because I thought he looked at me like I was special didn’t mean I was. I wouldn’t get lost in daydreams again.
“I overheard the nurses,” I confessed, looking over the two IVs near me. “They said you’d cured me using this stuff.”
One of them looked like a standard IV bag on a metal stand, and the other was a giant blue box with another pouch of fluid that was dripping at a much slower rate. It was almost empty.
“It looks like I don’t have that much left to go?” I asked. “Will I be released soon?”
“No. I’m keeping you tonight,” he said, a dark promise underscoring his words.
“What?” My heart bellyflopped into my stomach. “W-why?
“I want to make sure that all the heavy metals are out of your system before I release you. And I also wanted to ask you about these.” He pulled out a familiar orange bottle from his pocket and set it on the nightstand.
“My hormone pills? Why do you…” I trailed off mid-sentence, my face going slack at the realization. “The silver was from the pills, wasn’t it?”
“You knew?” His smile dissolved into an expression bland as the wallpaper.
“Not until just now,” I said hurriedly. “Erostoxifam is an older medication, and I remember from history class that pharmacists used to cut older drugs with silver to help ward off werebeasts and fight infections.”
“I’m impressed.” Dr. Ward smiled, hinting at the point of his just-a-little-bit crooked canine.
At his smile, my heart stayed face-down in my stomach, pulsing, and my cheeks burned like the bottom of my lap-top after I’d spent too much time with it in bed, browsing some of the dirtier Mates of Darkness fanfiction
“Oh. I’m really not that special.” I tried to wave a hand, but my IV tubes didn’t let me go far, so I settled for just moving it up and down dismissively. “I’m just a werebeaset-phile. I mean, that sounds really weird. I don’t like werebeasts in a creepy way or anything. I mean, I like books. I read a lot. Of books. Fiction. History. You name it, I’ve read it. Well not all of it, some of it’s not very good.”
I nuzzled my head into my shoulder to keep from meeting his eyes. “God. I talk too much. I’m sorry.”
“Rose.”
Air currents shifted as he moved toward me, and I caught a whiff of cloves, dry grass and that dusty scent that always makes me think of rain. And thunder. Then his thumb and forefinger were cradling my jaw, nudging it upwards until my gaze was locked in.
I couldn’t hear my heart-beat or feel my stomach or taste my own mouth—everything that I was was tied up in his touch. My lips felt so swollen, I thought my heart was mid failure.
He’s not flirting, he just lacks personal space awareness, I told myself. Don’t let yourself get caught up in some sexual fantasy.
His fingers fell away from my face, but I stayed put, caught in his orbit. His golden eyes were as molten as the surface of the sun. They owned me.
When he spoke his voice was commandingly low, “You’re a smart woman, Rose. You have nothing to be embarrassed about around me.”
“Thank you.” I hated how husky my voice sounded. I hated how warm my core was at the thought that he’d clear the distance between us and press his lips against mine.
He didn’t. Of course.
“Good.” He nodded sharply, stood upright and slipped into professional mode. “Now what other symptoms did you experience after you started taking the pills?”
“Well.” I traced the edge of my mini-magnesium sword’s sheath with my thumb and tried not to care at the coldness I saw in his face. I didn’t care about the pit in my stomach. I was fine. Totally fine. “I started having trouble focusing. But my doctor said I just had ADD. I also had some trouble sleeping.”
“You didn’t consider switching medications?”
“I figured those issues were normal. Just something I had to deal with. The price of being me.” I shrugged.
“I see.” His words were so clipped
“She said that at the dosage I’d be on, it’d be fine. The drug rep — ”
“Is a salesman. He shouldn’t be a factor.” Dr. Ward’s nostrils flared. Even his nose was handsome. The bridge was wide, powerful. There was something distinctly swarthy about his face despite his pale complexion.
“And you should’ve never been given these.” He shook the pill bottle so violently, I was surprised the bulbous white capsules inside didn’t explode.
“I’m sorry.” My thumb pressed harder into the edge of my mini-sword necklace sheath. Naomi wouldn’t have apologized for something like that. But just as my mini-sword was made out of magnesium and not magical meteorite like Naomi’s was, so was I very clearly not a demon-slaying badass. My evil villain had been a pretty average taxicab.
Dr. Ward set down the pill bottle. “No, I’m sorry. None of this is your fault at all. Rose, there are some things I have to—” he began, but halfway through I started to yawn.
I covered my mouth, eyes wide with embarrassment, but he smiled. “Get some rest, Rose. I’ll see you again when you wake up.”
“Okay,” I said, my voice small as I leaned back onto the bed. I wanted to ask him to promise me that’d I’d see him one last time, before I melted back into the anonymous masses of New York. But instead I just asked, “Can you turn off the light?”
“Of course,” he said. He flicked it off.
It was only some time later that the door shut and in the darkness I swore I heard him whisper, “Sweet dreams.”
But I knew the truth. Dr. Ward was a professional, I must’ve misheard him. No, I must’ve already been asleep.
Chapter 4
DANIEL
I paced from one side of my office to the other, although there wasn’t much difference between the two. One side had a boring IKEA desk and my medical textbooks, the other my framed diploma and a photograph of a mountain. All of it felt empty. The opposite of Rose.
Her gentle brown eyes, her pink adorable lips, the way she turned up her face begging me to kiss her when I told her not to be embarrassed. All of it was so much more than I ever thought I’d have. Then I’d ever feared I lost.
But the frantic joy propelling my feet forward was edged with worry. Someone had been trying to poison her. Before I could give myself the luxury of truly bonding with my mate, I had to make sure that she was safe. If I wen
t into this without all the facts and the drug company had hurt Rose intentionally, getting close to Rose would put her at risk.
Three knuckle-bruising raps pounded at the door.
I inhaled to get a read on the intruder’s scent. Male. Sanitized mint veiled the chemical musk of over-engineered deodorant, and underneath that… The scars on my upper biceps ached with a phantom pain. No, I’d killed them all the night I’d escaped.
“Who is it?” I called. There were no goosebumps on my neck now.
“Lonan Brown from GR Scientific. You left a message for us so I thought I’d pay you a visit.”
“Come in.”
The man who entered had sharply trimmed raven hair, a hawkish nose, and calm, beady green eyes. When he saw me, a smile slicked over his lips like oil over water. He held out his hand. “It’s a pleasure to meet you, Dr. Ward.”
I stared at his hand.
“Put your hands on your head, sir, or we will shoot.”
No. This was not the same man.
“Likewise.” I took his hand and shook it. It was softer than a soldier’s would’ve been.
Lonan kept smiling. His teeth had a dead pearly look I knew were veneers. “Nice office.” He rose his eyebrows at the photograph of the mountain. “Have you climbed it or just like the look of it?”
I stared the picture for the first time in a long time. A single peak piercing the clouds, it was too generic to have a name. I didn’t know if it was a real mountain or just something Photoshopped into being. “I just needed something to fill the walls.”
Lonan nodded in uncomprehending agreement, sat down and placed a folder on my empty desk. On the corner of the folder was a generic looking check-mark logo. My breath stalled in my throat. I’d never known who it was who had taken me. Was it them? I had to be careful.
Placing both hands on the desk, I lowered myself into my chair, not breaking eye contact with him. “I had a patient who was in a car accident earlier today.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.” Lonan crossed his legs, one balancing over the other, taking up too much of my space.
“After being struck by the vehicle, she slipped into a brief coma. I believe that she was unable to awaken from this coma due to acute silver poisoning.” My words were so measured you could’ve timed out CPR to them. I gave nothing away.
“Well, that’s weird,” he said. “Now, I don’t have an M.D, but I’ve never heard of any connection between brain activity and silver.” He laughed and it felt stale. “Unless you want to talk about werebeasts or weremates, but we both know that’s as relevant to this discussion as the bubonic plague.”
He mocked looking around my office, one hand shading his beady eyes. “You’re not hiding the plague here are you, Doc?”
There was a special place in the hellscape between worlds for men that called me “Doc.” It was very tempting to slit this man’s throat and send him there.
“Aurora Thorne,” I hissed.
His hand fell sharply from his forehead and his smile shriveled. “Who?”
“My search didn’t turn up much about your drug or GR Scientific, Mr. Brown. But in the public court records I did find a lawsuit brought by a woman named Aurora Thorne.”
“I’m afraid you’ve got me, Doc. Never heard of her.” Liar. Liar. So tempting to set him on fire. I went on, “Like my patient, Ms. Thorne slipped into a coma. She was also taking Erostoxifam at the time, and when her doctor noticed heightened levels of silver in her blood, he also performed chelation therapy.”
“This sounds like you’ve got some legal questions, Dr. Brown. I can’t answer those, but I can—”
“If you can’t answer them, why did they send you?”
He held up his hands and gave me that dead smile again. It sat on his face like road-kill. “Don’t ask me. I’m just the jack-of-all-sales guy. Solve the basic problems. Someone else could—”
“I think you should know—” I ground out. “What kind of organization you’re a part of. I’d want to know, if I was employed by people who were hurting women.”
“Of course you would, I understand how you feel, but —”
“By the time Ms. Thorne had finished the therapy it was too late, she had suffered irreparable brain damage and severe short-term memory loss. She and her family sued your company.”
“I am really sorry to hear about all of this.” Lonan’s palms glided forward as if he could offer me condolences from the tips of his too long fingers. “But are you or your patient planning on suing, Dr. Ward? If so, you’ll want to talk to our lawyers.”
“What I want to know, is why you continue to cut your drugs with a substance you and the federal government know is pois—”
“Sorry, going to have to stop you.” Lonan drummed his knuckles on my desk, loud as a gunshot. His green eyes gleamed with cold annoyance. “Silver isn’t poisonous in the amount that your patient consumed. Just isn’t. FDA says so, our tests say so, everyone says so. In fact, silver helps fight infections.”
“And Ms. Thorne?”
“Ms. Thorne’s family tried and failed to argue our drugs harmed her, but the only way that theory would make any sense was if Ms. Thorne or your patient were the mate of werebeasts. And…well that’s just not possible.” He spread his arms wide and as he did his shirt strained against his bony chest. In a physical fight, I could demolish him.
Then he tilted his head and smiled at me, as if he were genuinely curious, except the angle was too dramatic. “Unless you know something that I don’t.”
My inner lion’s fur went stiff, and the tiny human hairs went my arms were stiffer. What I knew that he didn’t could’ve filled the bookshelf behind me, and on the very first page would’ve been “Werebeasts are real.” I understood now. Lonan’s company had hurt my mate through stupidity, not malice. But if I questioned him further, he might get a clue.
“I’m afraid everything you say makes perfect sense to me, Mr. Brown,” I said, surprised by the calmness of my own voice. “I’m just having a hard time squaring away what makes sense and the facts. Maybe you can help me? Please.” Be polite. That’s how you hide. The only problem was I couldn’t shake the feeling that Lonan was hiding too.
“Well.” Lonan’s smile faded. “My advice is to forget about it. All of this stuff is just business, anyway.”
“It’s hard to forget things when someone’s life is in danger.” My claws itched at my toes, breaking through my skin and then my socks. With his manicured nails and over-sized watch, Lonan had never known what it was like to fear for someone’s life. To fear for his own. I could show him.
“Your patient’s life isn’t in danger anymore, though, is it?” he asked. “And if it was, I bet the car that hit her was a big part of the problem. I’d tell your patient to get the plate.” With no warning or sound my sensitive ears caught, he pressed a hand to his pocket abruptly. “Looks like I’m getting a call. Big boss, got to take this, unless you have any other questions I can answer?”
“No,” I said, pushing my lion down. My claws retracted back into my skin. The thick leather tips of my shoes were safe. There was nothing to gain from a fight. “I think we’re done here.”
“Good, good.” Lonan moved his phone to his left shoulder, cradled it, pushed the folder toward me and mouthed. “Free pen.”
The door thumped shut as he left, and then there was just the humming of the heater and silence. I watched the pen slowly roll out from between the covers of the folder. Its fat body clicked against my desk. My inner lion wanted to break it in two and run its claws across the cheap pine desk until wood shavings curled up and the whole world knew that this was my territory. Until the whole world knew that I would tolerate no one hurting what was mine.
But I had learned my lesson the last time. Don’t mark territory that doesn’t belong to you. In the human world nothing belonged to me. I was not king of this concrete jungle, I was hiding in it, and if I claimed Rose and shared my secret with her, I’d force her to have to hide wi
th me too. I’d put her in danger.
Could I do that? Could I force this life of empty walls and polite smiles on her? I’d saved her life, but now, if I claimed her, would I be dooming her to an empty existence? I didn’t think I could do that.
I fell into my chair. A wash of cold certainty slipped over my face. This silver medicine was a fluke. Just business. An accident. One after my stern lecture yesterday she wouldn’t be likely to repeat. Any further involvement on my part was only likely to put her further at risk. Oh gods. In order to keep my mate safe and healthy, I’d have to do what I should’ve done the first moment I smelled her: let her go.
Chapter 5
ROSE
The plastic spoon bent as I scooped up a mound of rice and brought it reluctantly to my lips. The rice was so mushy I couldn’t see the individual grains anymore. Worse, either because I was off the Erostoxifam or because my brush with death had heightened my senses, my taste buds were hypersensitive to the slimy texture and bland flavor.
It was afternoon now, although the white drop ceiling and tiled floors were reflective, made it feel like the light slanting through the window was coming from everywhere and nowhere. The bulky machines to my right showed all kinds of technical graphs I didn’t have the first clue about, and without Dr. Ward here to impress, I felt my lack of know-how keenly. For the past twenty-four hours the machines and the nurses had been my only company.
It didn’t matter how eagerly I turned when someone knocked at the door. It was never him. Dr. Ward. My doctor. God, no. He wasn’t mine. He was a real man, I couldn’t pretend like he was my book boyfriend. It wasn’t fair to him. Or me.
I pushed the spoon between my lips and swallowed down the hospital mystery mash. Just as I was gagging, someone knocked at the door. I swallowed, my heart jumping a little.
“Come in?”
It was one of the nurses, the Asian guy. John. And someone else I couldn’t make out looming behind him. He looked at me apologetically. “I’m sorry, Ms. Briar. I told her that visiting hours were almost over, but—”
