Dark Embers

by Tessa Adams

  “Same here.” His smile was relaxed, easygoing, his handshake firm but not overpowering. She found herself responding to him, liking his friendliness after spending the last few hours around Dylan’s dark brooding.

  Dylan must have sensed her response, however, because he moved in behind her, his hand circling her waist in an obvious gesture of possession. Logan’s eyes widened slightly at the move, but that was his only response. Still, it was amusing to watch as he eased back a little, putting enough space between them to appease a rampaging rhino.

  “So, not to be a whiner or anything, but where do we go from here?” She glanced at the empty desert around them. “No offense, but I’m not exactly wearing my desert hiking shoes.” She held up one foot, showing off her favorite pair of wedge sandals.

  “They’ll be here in a few minutes,” Dylan answered, his palm still stroking her lower back in soothing circles.

  “And you know this how?”

  He nodded toward a dust cloud in the distance, one that was moving fast as dusk descended. “That’s them.”

  She did a double take. “That dust cloud?”

  “It’s actually a couple of SUVs.”

  Sure enough, if she narrowed her eyes and strained like hell, she could just make out two black SUVs barreling toward them hell-for-leather.

  By the time Logan had unloaded her luggage—three trunks filled with research supplies and materials she hadn’t felt comfortable being without, and one suitcase that contained her clothes and personal items—the SUVs had pulled to a stop a few feet from the plane.

  Phoebe watched in shock as four men, each one nearly as gorgeous and tall as Dylan, piled out of the front seats. Blinking, she fought the urge to rub her eyes. Yesterday she had woken up in her apartment in Cambridge, eaten her usual breakfast of Froot Loops and a banana and headed into work. Now, less than forty-eight hours later, she was standing in the middle of the desert, surrounded by six of the sexiest men she had ever seen. It didn’t seem real.

  But it was real, and judging from the unhappy looks in their eyes, something was very wrong. Dylan obviously noticed, as well, because he didn’t bother with social niceties. Instead, he strode up to the largest of the group—who, unbelievably, stood a couple inches taller than he did—and demanded, “What?”

  “Lana’s sick.”

  If she hadn’t been watching closely, Phoebe would have assumed the news meant nothing to him. Dylan’s face didn’t change, his fists didn’t clench, nor did he make any of the abrupt, uncoordinated moves people often do when they receive bad news. But despite his cool, his entire body seemed to stiffen, one slow muscle at a time, until the man standing before her was a stranger. Dark, dangerous and so predatory she suddenly realized—too late—just how easy he’d been taking it on her.

  “Gabe?”

  “He’s fucked up, man. His wife and now his daughter. If Lana dies, he’s going to lose it completely.”

  “Take me there.” Phoebe reached over and grabbed the suitcase from the pile of luggage.

  Dylan turned haunted eyes on her. “Are you sure? You’ve barely started your research and—” He stopped, swallowed. “It’s bad, Phoebe. It’s always really bad.”

  “I’m a doctor, Dylan.” She snapped out the words as she headed toward the cars. “This is what I do. Now, which one of these behemoths do I need to get into?”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Logan said grimly. “They’re both going to the same place.” He lifted the cargo door on the first one, threw in her suitcase, then stepped back so the other men could pile her trunks in.

  “I’m going to take care of the plane,” he continued, heading back to the small aircraft. “And then I’ll meet you there.”

  His words gave Phoebe pause, but no one else seemed to find it odd that the pilot planned to catch up with them. Dylan’s clan must be even closer-knit than she expected.

  The ride through the desert was tense and silent. Phoebe spent it locked in her head, going over everything she’d read about the disease since Dylan had stormed into her lab. Every once in a while, one of the men in the car spoke, but she was too stressed to pay much attention.

  It was one thing to sit in a lab and research all day. Sure, she worked with test subjects, and, of course, she hoped that one day her research would make a huge difference in the lives of those suffering from lupus. But that was very different from what she was going to walk in on now. A young woman suffering from paralysis, who might or might not be bleeding out.

  Med school had never seemed so far away.

  “What are the first symptoms of the disease?” she snapped out into the quiet car.

  “Numbness in the legs.” Dylan was the one who answered her, though his jaw was so tight, she was afraid he might crack a molar or three. “Blurred vision, headaches, fever.” The list continued while the SUV ate up the rocky terrain. Her stomach clenched and pitched with each new bump.

  She swallowed, did her best to ignore the car sickness that had plagued her since childhood. “And the patient—”

  “Lana,” the driver interrupted with a growl.

  “Yes, Lana.” God, please let them get there soon. If not, she was going to begin her time with Dylan’s clan by booting all over the backseat of his friend’s car. Somehow, she didn’t think that would endear her to them. “How old is she?”

  It should have been an easy question, but nobody answered her. When she glanced around the car, doing her best to catch the eyes of the three men who weren’t driving, each studiously avoided the question.

  “Dylan?” she asked again. “How old is Lana? If you don’t know her exact age, give me your best guess. Twelve? Twenty-five? Somewhere in between?”

  Once again, eerie silence met her inquiry. Not for the first time, she wondered just what it was that Dylan was hiding.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Oh, shit. Dylan fought the urge to bang his head against the car window as he struggled for an answer to Phoebe’s question. He wasn’t ready for this, hadn’t prepared himself—or her—for this. Because as unready as he was to have the conversation, he knew she was at least three times as unprepared to hear what he had to say.

  But how the hell could he have prepared her for the fact that Lana was forty-seven years old but didn’t look a day over seventeen, if that. It wasn’t like Phoebe would understand—or believe him. And he really didn’t want to start her time out here with an argument.

  Any more than he wanted to start it out with lies.

  Still, he needed to say something. Phoebe was looking at him expectantly, waiting for an answer to a question she considered exceedingly basic. One that she had every right to expect him—or one of his men—to be able to answer.

  But fuck, he was still reeling from the news that his niece was sick. How? Why? The disease had never been contagious before, had never spread from one family member to the next.

  Was it changing? He frantically willed the car to go faster. Mutating? They’d thrown everything they had at the disease in the past few years, and hadn’t even slowed it down. But at least they’d gathered information on it, had looked into its properties and symptoms and time from first symptom until death. If it had changed, all of that work might very well be useless.

  Besides, what would they do—what would he do—if the damn disease suddenly became airborne? It could wipe out his entire clan in the space of a few weeks.

  “Sixteen.” The answer came, not from him, but from Shawn in the front seat. “I think Lana is sixteen.”

  Phoebe nodded, swallowed sickly. “How long has she been ill?”

  “The symptoms started yesterday afternoon.” This from Liam, who was driving.

  “So a little more than twenty-four hours. Where is she in the disease progression?”

  “Not quite halfway.” Shawn again, though his voice was shakier than Dylan had ever heard it. “She still has limited range of motion in her legs and arms, but her breathing is getting shallower. The fever’s spiking, and she’s sta
rted to bleed a little.”

  Dylan’s own breathing grew ragged as he fought for control. It felt like a 747 had crash-landed on his chest, and each breath he took was an agony.

  Lana, his brain screamed at him. Dear, sweet Mother Earth, how could it possibly be Lana? His beloved niece. One of the last children born to his clan, she still had her entire life ahead of her. She was just now getting ready to go off to college. She wanted to study architecture, to see how to integrate modern principals of design into the caves they had lived in for centuries.

  Not Lana. Please, not Lana. He’d been there when she was born, had been the first person besides her parents and the healer to hold her. Like he’d done with her mother, he’d helped her shift for the first time. Had taken her on her first solo flight.

  He was the one she’d come to when she needed help with her French homework. When she had wanted to learn how to drive a car. When she’d wanted advice on boys and was too embarrassed to talk to her own father. He couldn’t love her any more if she had been his own daughter, and now she was dying, slipping away from him as painfully and quickly as her mother had.

  And Gabe—he didn’t even want to think about how his best friend was doing. Losing Marta two weeks ago had nearly killed him. He’d been walking around like a shadow of his old self since the moment his wife had taken her last breath. Dylan was deathly afraid that losing his daughter so soon after his wife, and in the same horrifying manner, would send Gabe right over the edge of sanity.

  “How much longer?” he growled, his voice dragon deep. He felt Phoebe tense on the seat next to him, but there was nothing he could do about it. The beast was frantic, furious, growing more so with each minute that passed.

  “Five or six minutes,” Liam answered tersely, as he took a sharp left onto the street leading to town. Phoebe gasped at the speed with which he took the turn, but Dylan had been riding with Liam for so many years, he barely noticed.

  “Who’s with her?” he demanded, certain that he already knew the answer.

  “Quinn.”

  “Good.” Quinn was the best healer they had. He might not be able to save Lana—the thought was another quick one-two to Dylan’s gut—but he’d do his damnedest to make sure she didn’t suffer any more than she absolutely had to.

  It was cold comfort, but the only thing he had to hold on to as they sped through the night.

  A couple minutes later, Liam pulled up in front of the clan’s clinic. Dylan found it a little strange that Gabe hadn’t moved Lana to his cave before she got really sick, but he didn’t say anything. Maybe the memories of her mother dying there a few short days before had been too much for the girl to bear.

  Not that it mattered, he decided as he took the stairs leading up to the front door two at a time. Here or at the cave, she was still getting the best medical expertise his clan could provide her.

  He slammed into the cottage that looked more like a ginger-bread house than it did a fully functional hospital, with Phoebe hot on his heels.

  “I have to—”

  “I know,” she said. “I’m right behind you.”

  And she was, her medical bag clutched in her hand as if a lifeline. Not Lana, he repeated in his head. Let them be wrong. Let this be a mistake. Let it be anything, anyone, but Lana suffering from this terrible disease.

  But the second he opened the door the on-duty nurse had directed him to, Dylan knew his prayers had been in vain. Lana was lying in the middle of the hospital bed, Gabe on one side and Quinn on the other. She was paler than he had ever seen her, her hair and nightgown soaked with sweat. There were smears of blood under her nose, indicating a recent nosebleed, and each breath she took seemed labored, harsh, despite the oxygen Quinn had hooked her up to.

  For a second, Dylan felt the world go black as the small hope he’d held that his men were wrong withered into nothingness. Lana was sick. She would die, and there was nothing he could do about it.

  Pictures of his brother, his parents, his sister, ran through his mind in a fucked-up montage. All people he’d loved; all people he’d failed to save. Was it any wonder his people doubted his judgment on this? It’d be stranger, much stranger, if they’d actually believed what he was saying.

  Lana coughed weakly, and he swore he heard a death rattle in her chest despite the peaceful way she held her father’s hand. He must have made some kind of sound of distress, because Phoebe’s hand was on the center of his back, cool, soothing, steady, despite the horror ripping through him. He let himself take in her comfort for a second, two; then he moved toward Lana.

  Quinn stood as Dylan approached the bed, offering him his seat without words. But Dylan ignored the offer, chose instead to sink onto his knees by his niece’s side. He reached for her hand, squeezed it, but got nothing in return. Her entire arm was limp, yielding, and he felt his heart stutter. The disease had progressed quickly; she was already paralyzed.

  Taking a deep breath to steady himself, he reached out a hand and stroked her hair away from her forehead. Lana’s eyes—emerald green like her mother’s—opened slowly, and she smiled at him. It wasn’t a real smile—more a tiny upward curve of her lips—but he would take it. He would take anything she had to give him.

  “Hi, Uncle Dylan.” Her voice was raspy, the words disjointed as she struggled for breath.

  “Hey, kiddo.” He knew he should say more, but he couldn’t force out any words. His throat had closed up so tightly that he felt like he was the one slowly suffocating.

  “Don’t look . . . so sad.” She smiled, but there were tears in her eyes.

  He tried to return her smile, though he knew it was a sick version of his normal grin. “Sorry. I was just thinking that pink really isn’t your color.” He gestured to the nightshirt she was wearing. “I think purple would look much better.”

  Lana made a sound that might have been a giggle, had she had enough oxygen. “I love you, Uncle Dylan.” Tears rolled slowly down her face, but she didn’t brush them away. It wasn’t until Gabe leaned over and wiped his daughter’s face that Dylan remembered she couldn’t wipe the tears away. In an odd reversal of how paralysis normally worked, with this disease, the loss of the ability to move one’s arms always came before loss of leg movement

  “Oh, sweetie, I love you, too.” He knelt by her bed for a few more minutes, stroking her hair and cheeks, until another nosebleed happened and Quinn shoved him out of the way.

  It was a bad one, blood pouring copiously out of Lana’s nasal passages despite Quinn’s every effort to stanch the flow. At some point, Phoebe got involved, pushing past him and reaching into her bag for something.

  He heard her ask Quinn a question, saw Quinn nod, and then she was filling a syringe with something and injecting it straight into Lana’s IV. Dylan glanced at Gabe then, certain the other man would try to stop a stranger, particularly a human stranger, from treating his daughter. But Gabe hadn’t moved, was simply watching the scene on the bed with a detached kind of horror—the same look on his face that a person might wear when rubbernecking at a particularly bloody car crash.

  “Hey, man, you okay?” Dylan stepped around the bed to stand next to his brother-in-law’s chair. He felt like an idiot asking the question; of course Gabe wasn’t okay. But he didn’t know what else to say. “You don’t look so good.”

  Gabe didn’t respond, just kept starting at Lana blankly. Whatever medicine Phoebe had pulled out of her bag of tricks had obviously worked, because the nosebleed had slowed down to a trickle. Still, she didn’t move away for a couple more minutes, until the bleeding had finally stopped.

  Then she turned to Dylan with a grim look and said, “Get him a cup of coffee.”

  For a moment, the words confused him, his distraught brain unable to make sense of what she was saying. When her meaning finally registered, he glanced down at Gabe. “I don’t think he’ll—”

  “He’s in shock. If we don’t get him out of it, he’s going to pass out. There won’t be enough blood flowing to his b
rain to keep him conscious.”

  CHAPTER TEN

  Phoebe crossed to the shelves on the other side of the room, pulled down a couple blankets. “He needs to drink something warm before it gets worse.”

  She covered Gabe with a blanket. He stirred a little bit, but didn’t say anything. Nor did he take his eyes from his daughter for a second.

  The last thing Dylan saw before he left the room was Phoebe placing a bracing hand on Gabe’s shoulder. The dragon screamed at the easiness with which she touched another male, but the man in him was pleased. Grateful. Humbled.

  She didn’t have to be here doing this. Didn’t have to get involved with his people. He’d brought Phoebe here to sit in a laboratory and analyze the disease. That didn’t mean she had to watch as his niece died from it.

  He got Gabe a cup of coffee—loaded with sugar—from the vending machine, then tore back down the hall.

  No, she definitely didn’t have to be here, helping, when she could be sleeping in the house he kept for guests of the clan. But she was, and he’d never been so grateful.

  When he got back into the room, she was standing over Gabe, her hand on his wrist as she took his pulse. Dylan approached slowly, wondering how long it would take—

  “How fast is your normal heart rate?”

  He was intensely aware of the fact that everyone in the room, with the exception of Gabe, was completely focused on their conversation. Even Lana’s eyes were on them.

  “It varies. Why?” he asked, even though he knew.

  “Because he’s at rest and his heart is beating nearly three hundred beats per minute. Do I need to be concerned about him having a heart attack?”

  “That’s a little slow, actually.” Quinn spoke up from his spot next to Lana’s bed. “The shock is working on him.”

  Phoebe didn’t say a word, but her eyebrows nearly touched her hairline. She took the coffee cup from him, then bent down so she was looking Gabe in the eye. “Drink this,” she said firmly, as she pressed it into his unresisting hand.