Dark Embers

by Tessa Adams

  He ignored her.

  “Gabe, listen to me.” Dylan started at the tone in her voice; he’d never heard her sound like such a hard-ass, not even back in the lab when she’d been sparring with him. “You need to drink this.”

  Still no response.

  “Look, you have two choices. You can drink this cup of coffee or I can have Quinn wheel you into another room and we can treat you for shock. You won’t be allowed near your daughter for at least two hours.”

  Gabe’s head came up, his eyes glittering like diamonds. He looked angry enough to eat Phoebe alive, and Dylan moved to place himself between his best friend and his lover.

  She shoved him out of the way. “If you think I’m scared of the badass routine, you’ve got another think coming,” she shot at Gabe. “I’ve been getting it from Dylan for two days now, so I’m pretty much inoculated. Just drink the damn coffee and I’ll leave you alone.”

  Long seconds ticked by, but Gabe eventually brought the cup to his lips and drained it, all without taking his eyes from Phoebe’s for a second. She didn’t react to the blatant fuck-you, except to take the cup from him when he was finished and murmur a slight, “Thank you.”

  Completely unruffled, she turned back to Lana and started to document the girl’s symptoms in the notebook that was rarely out of her sight.

  The next twenty-hours slipped by unnoticed, only the setting, rising and subsequent setting of the sun marking time for Phoebe as she labored over Dylan’s niece’s hospital bed.

  It was a hopeless endeavor, one that was guaranteed to end in loss, and more than once she was thrown back to the final days when she’d taken care of her mother and her sister. Watching Gabe stoically endure the death of his daughter so soon after losing his wife broke her heart.

  He looked lost. Confused. Hopeless. All were feelings she remembered well. It had been three years between her mother’s death and her sister’s death, not a few days, but she had been crushed all the same. She remembered standing over her sister’s grave, watching the coffin being lowered into the ground, and knowing, with absolute certainty, that she was completely alone in the world.

  Gabe wore a look very similar to the one she had wandered around with for years. A look that said he was feeling all that she had felt and more.

  Exhausted—physically and emotionally drained—Phoebe leaned against the wall and watched as Quinn changed Lana’s IV for what was probably going to be the last time. The girl was dying, her ordeal almost finished, after a night and day straight out of a horror novel.

  The bleed-outs, which had begun with the nosebleed soon after Phoebe had arrived, had continued, getting worse with each hour that passed, until she was bleeding from every orifice. The paralysis had continued, until Lana had lost the ability to move not just her arms and legs, but even her diaphragm. She was now hooked up to a ventilator.

  Phoebe had documented it all in her notebook, had written down every new symptom and the time it occurred. Had taken numerous blood samples with the intention of studying the progression of the disease. In doing so, Phoebe hoped she’d see something Quinn and his team had missed—hoped she’d be able to find a reason, and subsequent cure, for the terrible disease.

  It hadn’t made her feel any less a monster, however, as everyone in the room watched her do her disconnected doctor routine. Hadn’t made her feel any more human as tears rolled silently down Lana’s cheeks.

  God, this whole thing seriously sucked. Give her a laboratory any time. This whole patient-interaction thing was for the damn birds.

  She looked out the window, noted the rapidly darkening sky and prayed for Lana to pass. No one should have to endure this kind of death. While it was relatively rapid in the grand scheme of things—sixty hours was nothing for a disease to be contracted and work its course—it had been agonizingly slow for Lana and her family.

  As the paralysis progressed, the pain had obviously diminished, but until she’d lost feeling in her limbs, Lana had been in excruciating pain. Even now, as she continued to bleed—a sign that her organs were liquefying inside of her—the pain had to be terrible. Her mouth was a mass of sores; her nose was raw from bleeding out. Quinn had told Phoebe that terrible head pain accompanied the last stages.

  The whole thing was a fucking nightmare, one she was desperate to wake up from.

  Near the bed, Gabe’s sister, Daniella, straightened with a small moan from where she’d been crouching. She stroked Lana’s hair away from her forehead and dropped a soft kiss on it. And then started to sob in earnest. Her husband, Greg, gathered her in his arms and propelled her out into the hall.

  All day people had been dropping by to see Lana, coming by in ones and twos and fives to say good-bye. It had been an amazing thing to watch—not just the parade of bouquet after bouquet of flowers and the tender ministrations—but the deferential way with which they treated Gabe and, interestingly, Dylan.

  When he had convinced her to come there, Dylan had referred to this group of people as his clan. His people. His tribe. At the time, she’d thought he was referring to himself as one of them, but the longer she was here and the more she watched how people treated him, the more convinced she was that it was something more than that. Dylan held a position of leadership here and, judging from the way men such as Quinn and Logan and even Gabe treated him, it was obviously a damn high one.

  She couldn’t help wishing he’d warned her. The idea that she had slept with the tribal leader or president or king or whatever he was didn’t sit well. She’d spent her life bucking authority and wasn’t really keen on changing that any time soon.

  Still, when she looked over at Dylan, she couldn’t help feeling for him. The poor guy looked shattered, like the weight of the whole world rested on his shoulders and he didn’t have a damn clue what to do with it.

  He was sitting with his elbows on his knees, his hands clasped between the deep V made by his thighs. He looked nothing like the man who had cornered her in her lab yesterday—self-assured, arrogant, completely in control even in an environment that was obviously hers.

  No, he didn’t look like he was in control now. He looked . . . defeated. Devastated. Her heart trembled in her chest, and for a moment all she could think about was comforting him. She wanted to crouch down next to him, to pull him into her arms and soothe the sharpest, most painful edges away.

  But one afternoon of hot sex didn’t give her that right. Hell, it didn’t give her any rights. She was here to research this damned disease, not make eyes at Dylan, and the sooner she realized that, the better off she would be.

  Despite the words and warnings thundering through her head, Phoebe crossed to Dylan. She laid a gentle hand on his shoulder—the same she would do for anyone. It wasn’t much, but maybe it was enough to make him feel less alone.

  Dylan reached up and snatched her hand off his shoulder so quickly that she gasped. Embarrassed heat started to bloom in her cheeks. What had she been thinking? That he would want her to touch him in front of all these people?

  She started to pull her hand away, but he held fast, his fingers tightening on hers almost to the point of pain. And then he was tugging her forward, around the chair and his stretched out legs, until she was standing between his thighs.

  Her mind flashed back to when they’d been in her lab and the sexual tension between them had been so thick, she could have cut it with a knife. It was different here. Sure, her body still responded to his, despite the fact that she was sad and disturbed and half dead with exhaustion. But arousal wasn’t the primary emotion rushing through her this time. Instead, tenderness was welling up inside her, along with a need to take away Dylan’s pain.

  The thought made her shy back, wanting desperately to pull her cold, clinical persona around her like a shield. Dylan was hiding something from her—if not out-and-out lying—and getting emotionally involved with him was a very bad idea. She’d watched her mother go through two marriages with men who lied and had always sworn she would never give a di
shonest man the time of day.

  She stiffened against him, but when Dylan gave another tug, she tumbled willingly down into his lap. His arms came around her, hot and hard and heavy, and everything but the need to comfort this man simply floated away.

  “God, Phoebe.” His voice was a rough whisper against her ear. “When is it going to end?”

  “Soon,” she murmured, stroking a hand down his glorious cheek. “She’s almost gone.”

  “It hurt her so badly.” His voice cracked a little, and empathetic tears sprang to her eyes.

  “I know, baby. I know.”

  He didn’t say anything else, and neither did she. But after a few minutes, when she made a move to get up, his arms tightened around her, holding her in place.

  She didn’t know how long she sat there, Dylan wrapped around her as she listened to the clock on the wall tick away the minutes. Outside the clinic, dusk had turned to darkness, the only light coming from the moon and stars and a faraway streetlight.

  She knew she should get up, should add to the copious notes she’d been taking to document Lana’s deteriorating condition since she’d walked into this hospital room. But except for her blood pressure dropping and her heart rate slowing, the girl’s condition hadn’t changed much. She could document the changes later—she had a photographic memory, one of many things that had helped her get through med school and become a top medical researcher. Surely she could remember the last few numbers of a dying girl’s life. Right now, Dylan needed her.

  Aware of the looks she was getting from everyone in the room— except for Gabe, who wouldn’t have noticed if a bomb had gone off—Phoebe did her best to ignore the attention. And when Dylan’s hand slipped under her shirt, his fingers lightly trailing up and down her spine, she did her best to ignore that, too.

  She had just leaned into him, brushing a kiss against his temple, when a loud, uninterrupted beep sounded in the room. Shoving off Dylan hard, she scrambled to the bed. Quinn beat her there, was doing a physical check of Lana’s vitals before Phoebe could even get her stethoscope off her neck.

  Hands trembling with the need to reach for the paddles—it went against everything she knew to stand silently by as a sixteen-year-old girl slipped away—she kept her clenched fists by her side. Lana had suffered enough. It was past time to let her go.

  Dylan’s dragon screamed in agony as he watched Lana die. Quinn flipped off the ventilator, then, seconds later, turned off the heart monitor, as well. The hair-raising beep stopped as abruptly as it had started.

  Gabe came to his feet with a powerful roar. He was holding himself so tightly that every single muscle he had stood out in stark relief, agonized growls and snarls erupting from within him with each breath he took.

  Dylan shoved his own horror down and crossed the room to his friend in one long leap. Quinn and Logan were only a heartbeat behind him. “Gabe—”

  Gabe shoved him away, the adrenaline coursing through him making him stronger than he might have been otherwise. Dylan skidded back a few steps, bumped hard into Quinn and Logan. As soon as he hit them, he was heading back toward his friend.

  “Don’t.” Gabe held a hand out to stop him, talons already breaking through the fingertips. His voice was pure dragon, low and almost unintelligible. As they watched, his feet burst through his boots, shredding the leather like it was no more substantial than wet newsprint.

  Logan threw a glance behind them at Phoebe, then moved closer to Quinn and Dylan in an effort to close the gaps between them. Gaps she could see through. Gaps Gabe could use to lunge at her if he spiraled any more out of control.

  But Phoebe wasn’t watching them. She was concentrating on Lana instead, unhooking the dead girl from all the tubes and equipment that had been used to make her last hours if not comfortable, at least bearable. She was giving Gabe his privacy—not even responding to the obviously animalistic sounds he was uttering.

  “Let’s get out of here.” Dylan started ushering Gabe toward the door.

  Gabe roared again—the sound filled with so much pain and anger that it hurt to hear it. Then he lashed out with one clawed hand, his nails raking across Logan’s stomach, up Dylan’s arm.

  Pain exploded down his injured bicep, but Dylan didn’t flinch. It wasn’t the first time he’d gotten clawed and wouldn’t be the last. He tried to grab on to Gabe, just to get him out of the confining clinic and into the open air, but his friend eluded him. He took a step back, then another and another, until he was in the hallway. Then he simply dissolved in front of them.

  Dylan tracked him—he was the only one who could. As king, he had a connection to each of his people that they did not have to each other. Following Gabe’s nearly undetectable footprint—the dragon was more than a hundred years older than Dylan, and, as such, very accomplished in magic—he was torn. Part of him wanted nothing more than to follow Gabe, to ensure himself that his friend and brother and sentry was all right.

  But another, larger part wanted simply to wing into the night to be alone with his own grief. He had watched both his sister and her daughter die because of his own inadequacies as a ruler. It was a harsh pill to swallow, one made harsher by the sadness beating inside him like a drum.

  Add in the fact that a third, heretofore unknown, part of him wanted to head back into his niece’s hospital room and wrap himself around Phoebe, and he was a disaster with wings.

  In the end, he did what he’d always known he was going to do—what his people expected of him. Running through the long hallways, he blurred his molecules until he, too, was invisible. Then the second he hit the street, he launched himself straight into the sky, shifting as he did so.

  Agony and ecstasy overwhelmed him, as they always did when he changed. First came the easy changes—the shifting from fingers and toes to talons with long, sharp claws. Then the wings, pushing out through the muscles of his back, growing, unfurling, spreading wide as he barreled straight up into the inky darkness of the sky.

  And finally, his body—changing, contorting. Bones breaking and reshaping, growing denser, stronger, until he was fully dragon.

  He streaked through the night, following Gabe’s path like a heat-seeking missile. He didn’t know what he would say when he caught up with his friend, didn’t know what there was to say to a man who had lost everything in the space of a few measly days. For a creature with a life span that measured in the millennia, two weeks was barely the blink of an eye.

  He was traveling so fast that he nearly flew right by Gabe. Stopping on a dime, tumbling through the air down, down, down, he closed in on his friend. As he approached, he waited for inspiration to strike, for the right words to come to him.

  Nothing did, so in the end, he chose to fall in behind Gabe as his friend attacked the night. Up, down, above houses, through trees, over the mountains and across the rivers, he followed Gabe.

  It was a wild flight—one meant to push them both to mental and physical exhaustion. Hours went by until even Dylan, whose strength was nearly indefatigable, was wearing out. And still Gabe flew. Running from his demons. Running from his pain. Running from the life he no longer had. Dylan could only guess what was going through his friend’s head. He knew none of it was good.

  When Gabe finally settled in the middle of the desert, near the caves where they both spent most of their sleeping hours, Dylan murmured a prayer of thanks, even as he landed next to him and began the shift back to human form.

  “What the fuck are you doing?” Gabe demanded, getting in his face with a shove that made him stumble back.

  “Maybe I should ask you that question,” Dylan said, his voice low.

  “I want to be alone. Can’t you see that?” His hands were tight fists at his side, his jaw clenched so that he was speaking through his teeth.

  “Yeah, well, I don’t think that’s such a good idea.”

  “Like I give a shit what you think.”

  “Gabe, come on. Let me take you home.”

  “Home?” His face con
torted. “I don’t have a home. Marta was my home. Lana was my home.”

  “I know. I’m so—”

  “Don’t you fucking tell me you’re sorry!” Fire shot from his fingertips, hit the desert inches from Dylan’s feet. “What the fuck do you know? What the fuck—” A sob ripped through him.

  “You’ve never loved a woman once in your whole, goddamned life. And you’re going to tell me that you know, that you’re sorry? You don’t have a fucking clue what you’re missing. You don’t even know what you’re sorry for.”

  The words cut more sharply than his talons had earlier, but that was exactly what Gabe had intended. They’d been friends too long for the other man not to know that he was hitting below the belt.

  Anger churned in Dylan’s belly—Gabe wasn’t the only one who had lost Marta and Lana—and for long seconds he wanted nothing more than to let it lose. The fire was already inside him, licking up from his stomach, flowing down his hands.

  But he locked his jaw, kept his mouth shut as the older man continued to rage. “Lana had her whole fucking life ahead of her. She could have been anything, done anything, and now she’s dead. Two days and she’s dead, and we still don’t have a fucking clue what killed her.

  “And Marta—” His voice broke. Sobs shook his massive shoulders, and more fire shot from him. It hit the ground, sizzled for a few moments and then died out in the sand. “Jesus, Dyl, I want Marta. I want my wife. I want my fucking mate!” He screamed the last and then sank to his knees, as if standing was suddenly too much for him to manage.

  “I—” Dylan stopped midsentence. Not so much because he was worried about how Gabe would react to another platitude, but because he was beginning to understand that he really didn’t know. Not the agony that came with losing a child. And certainly not the nightmare of losing a mate. He would have to find a mate before he could lose her.

  Just the thought made his stomach clench and his palms grow sweaty.

  “What can I do?” He dropped onto the sand next to Gabe, pulled the other man into his arms and held him while he cried. He didn’t know what else to do.