by KH LeMoyne
Living for more than two centuries and only knowing Jason for several weeks, it should feel foreign to experience such doubt and need. Yet, what she desperately wanted was him here, holding her in his arms, telling her everything was going to be all right.
Instead, she sat alone, puzzling out a problem that refused explanation.
She shifted on the stool and reached for her purse and ridiculous phone, the impulse strong to call him. The need to talk through their problems was overwhelming; in spite of the way they’d parted an hour ago.
Head bent, she stared at her purse in her lap and again considered that maybe she’d been a little hasty leaving him.
The speed and level of attack had pinpointed her naivety. She’d spent each of the last few nights in workouts with Tsu. Fooling herself into believing she’d honed her inner warrior with the same dedication and skill she’d given her medical practice. Yet, when the window on the SUV rolled down, she’d frozen, totally unprepared to react. The concept of death, someone trying to kill her, hadn’t hit quickly enough for her to protect herself.
Fortunately, Jason had reacted, otherwise they would both be dead.
The sense of another presence in the lab slammed into her just as the fingers closed on her arm. He held on tight. Briet spun as she angled her free elbow low to force her attacker to release his hold.
The strike connected with her assailant’s groin, but he squeezed tighter, refusing to release her and latched onto her upper arms as he ducked and cursed in pain.
She needed to fold, but that would take him with her. If, by fluke, she managed to pick one of the few spots in the Sanctum with anyone on guard, she’d have help. Otherwise, she would be isolated, alone with this man, a damn rhinoceros, double her size in fists and arms alone.
Her head twisted. She tried to pull away, the dank smell of sweat and beer cloying at her sinuses as they struggled. A brief glimmer of movement shadowed from the corner of her eye before the closed fist of a second assailant contacted with her cheekbone.
Pain exploded across her face. Her body lurched back with the momentum of the strike. Before she had time to think, the second man grabbed her around the neck, dragging her further from the counter and the first attacker, toward the rear of the room.
She blinked, desperate to restore her vision, her feet grappling to gain a foothold and maintain balance.
Focus.
A sharp prick nipped her skin, breaching through her pain. She tugged at the arm around her neck for breath.
Flexing her fingers, palm open, her mind frantically worked to conjure staff, sword, whatever would respond. Nothing. She lunged backward to pull her assailant off balance. Her body froze. Her mind urged her fingers to curl, to claw his face—her muscles remained lax and numb, refusing to respond. A twitch from her fingers, a spasm from her foot, all her major limbs rejected the commands from her brain.
Fold. Risk it.
Nothing. A garbled sound of frustration worked from her throat.
Her first attacker had roused enough to kick her feet from under her in anger. The arm at her neck relaxed and her body dropped to the floor, landing her with a hard jolt on her side and shoulder. Body unresponsive, but free of constraining hands, she tried to fold again.
Nothing.
“Piece of cake.” The voice, raspy and thick preceded the stench of the man’s foul breath.
“Except she went for your balls. Little shit thing like that and you let her get the drop on you.”
Fold.
Her brain refused the simple command with the same rebellion as her arms and legs. The order, a useless idea given she couldn’t even frame the location for the fold in her mind or muster the sensation required for the process. A process she'd known so long it should be like breathing, now disappeared in the sludge of her brain waves.
Breathing was becoming a problem, too. Slow, shallow gasps were all she could muster.
“You’re both too cocky. Quit pawing the bitch.”
Briet moved her eyes, trying to look for a person to go with the third voice. Her assailant’s hand released from her thigh at the voice’s order.
He came into view, standing over her with a needle, assessment delivered with a sneer. Recognition rose with bile as she stared back at the dark eyes and confident, cruel smile—her abductor from the reception. How had these men gotten past security in the building?
Fingers and feet still moving, she pushed for control, but her jerky efforts produced futile spasms on the floor. A solid object connected with her foot. Her purse? Instinct forced her to nudge it under the cabinet.
“What does it matter if I give her a little payback?”
The man with the needle flicked a harsh glance to his partners. “We have two minutes before the security cameras are back up on the bridge span to the hospital. Quit wasting time and move back. You don’t want this stuff on you.”
“Whatever.”
Her assailants moved from her field of vision and away from her body.
“Check for her cell phone.”
“What about the guy?”
“He’s gone. The transponder registered at his apartment. We only need her and anyone with her. Witnesses only.”
Briet struggled, a strangled cry garbled from her lips as he knelt beside her, his hands gloved, needle gleaming in the lab’s fluorescent lights. “No.” Her whisper unintelligible to her own ears.
“Non-negotiable. Contract’s closed on you. You’ve already been more trouble than you’re worth.”
She tried to angle her head away from the needle. No help. He rolled her forward onto her face, jabbing the needle in the back of her arm, high near the shoulder. Not that she could have moved to extract it. The syringe remained embedded as he let her body flop back to the floor.
The action shifted her body closer to the counter, granting her an advantage to wiggle her foot and nudge her purse further out of sight. Jason was now the first number on her call list. If these men called him, Jason would come and they would kill him, witness or not.
She winced as the burn of fire beneath her skin increased around the injection site. The pain and the jelly-like response of her muscles swamped her senses and wiped away rational thought.
“What if someone finds her?”
“Building’s empty except for security. They won’t leave the desk for another couple of hours. She’ll be gone long before then.”
Lethargy crept in after the pain. Briet blinked, her head against the cold floor, listening to the men’s soft soles shush across the tiles and into the hallway. Several seconds later, a loud slam followed their escape into the stairwell.
Jason. Thank God, she’d left him at the hotel.
She had wanted to share her results tonight, her list of questions and theories. If she had, he would be here beside her, a victim as well. He would have come with her if she’d asked. Because she did know how much he cared about her. Better, she met this fate alone.
“Jason.” The whisper soft, all garbled and gibberish.
He wouldn’t hear her. She doubted he’d absorbed any of her blood when he’d healed her. Certainly not enough to qualify for a blood bond or allow for a blood call between them. Her cries would go nowhere, falling in silence.
That didn’t stop her. “Jason.”
She didn’t really want him to come, didn’t want him at risk, but saying his name gave her comfort.
Struggling, she tried to inch along the floor. The icy spikes radiating from the needle in her arm stopped her, the immobilization terrifying. The hot sizzle along her shoulders and arms, her neck and part of her ribs, wrenched another strangled sound from her lips.
Had to warn him. Jason.
No longer aware if she spoke the words aloud, her mind wrestled to process options. The chemical progressed through her bloodstream with vigor—couldn’t breathe.
All the computer equipment was connected to the alarm system. Her last attempt?
She took a painful, tight breath and wobbled enough to s
tart her body on a roll. With her final turn, she managed one weak knock with her wooden legs. The stand swayed, the monitor toppled with a crash of metal, spraying shards of glass along the floor.
No alarm followed. They’d cut the feeds on her floor.
She wanted to scream. Tears leaked from her eyes, the only thing functioning in her body and not from her command.
“Jason.” Her words were less than a murmur as the paralysis clamped down on her throat.
***
There were no cars in the parking garage, which meant absolutely nothing. Except, theoretically, there wasn’t anyone in the building. Jason glared at the buttons lighting the elevator panel.
Briet was here. However, a woman who could just blip in and out of places didn’t need a car. No wonder she always beat him to the hospital.
He pushed the elevator button again in frustration. The light made steady but excruciatingly slow progress from the second floor to the third.
The guard confirmed they locked the stairwells at night. People could leave a floor and exit down to the parking level, but garage level was secured against entry as well. Once in the stairwells the only option was down. The bridge span from the hospital was locked at night, monitored by security cameras. Again, in theory, the only access available was through the rear entrance and the night security desk.
However, security let in anyone with a badge, regardless of actual identity.
They’d let someone through with his badge within the last thirty minutes. For ten blasted minutes, they’d detained him. Even after, he’d explained the theft of his badge. Even after he’d produced photo identification and confirmation of his identity via fingerprint scan.
He gritted his teeth. Maybe he was blowing the situation out of proportion but he couldn’t shake the alarms screaming in his mind. It was if he could hear Briet calling for him and it scared the hell out of him. Jason crossed his arms to keep from punching the button again. Force wouldn’t make the damn thing go faster.
Finally, the fourth floor. Pushing through the doors, he was halfway down the hall before the elevator doors had completely opened with a bing.
A sharp, heavy crash from ahead sent him into a full sprint. He burst through the door of her lab and spun around. The room seemed empty. “Briet?”
The equipment on the printer table was gone. His eyes narrowed on the debris at the end of the aisle. Beneath the overturned computer cart was one silver high-heeled shoe.
“Briet.” He skidded to a halt on his knees beside her. Her eyelids, only half-open, flickered in acknowledgement. With a yank, he dislodged the needle sticking through her lab coat, shoving it across the floor toward her purse. The silver gleam, a match to her shoes, winked from beneath the lower lip of the lab counter.
A small grunt ushered from her mouth as he pushed her lab coat from her shoulder to check the point of entry. Her body jerked and her eyes closed before he got the chance. With a whistle through his teeth, he brushed his fingers around the injection site. He’d anticipated a lot of reactions. The thin black tendrils expanding beneath her skin and webbing their way up her arm sent a hot spike of fear through his system. And the marks were spreading.
Not releasing her, he grappled with one hand, shuffling through the lowest cabinet drawers for options. He settled on an old pair of safety glasses.
Snapping off the rubber holder, he looped it under her armpit, tying it at her shoulder to restrict the spread of the toxin. The webbing slowed but didn’t stop.
He rested his ear against her chest and pressed his fingers to the pulse in her neck. Faint pulse with labored breathing. No time for an ambulance.
The lab, while connected to the hospital was four blocks from the emergency room entrance. It would take paramedics longer to get here than for Jason to drive her himself. “Hang in there, Briet. Don’t you dare let go on me.”
He shoved the vile syringe in her purse, tucked the purse in her lab coat pocket, and hoisted her into his arms, leaving the arm with the toxic black stain to dangle as he ran back down the hallway. Circumventing the elevators, he barreled through the door to the stairwell and leapt down the stairs through all three flights to the garage level.
He burst outside and made a beeline for his car, still in visitor’s parking. A bonus from his car’s accident—the rental actually had a back seat.
Tremors shook Briet’s body, as he fumbled with the doors. Her eyelids flashed open, the whites increasing as her pupils rolled back in her head.
A seizure?
Sliding her on to the seat, he pried her mouth open but she wasn’t clenching her jaw. Striations of black were creeping from her back to her neck and up to her beautiful face. He moved her body further along the seat and noted the black, inky marks moving, writhing underneath her skin, advancing past the rubber tie to mar the purity of her skin. Her wrist and arm below the injection point were almost totally black, pulsing in a sick rhythm that matched neither her heartbeat nor his.
He’d never get her to the hospital in time.
The ring of the phone from her pocket startled him. He ignored the jangling tune and bent her legs into the car.
No time.
The arm with the injection, he let dangle on the floor of the back seat. Hopefully gravity would slow the spread. Even so, the marks were invading around her mouth and along the top of her gown, the ink spreading toward her heart and lungs. He pressed his fingers to her jaw and neck in an insane response to stop the black. It receded at his touch. For a moment.
The ringing jangled again. Desperate, he pulled the phone from her purse. Ansgar.
He flicked the phone open. “I need help.”
“What are you doing with Briet’s phone?”
He ignored the hostility, awkwardly strapping Briet into the seatbelt as he cradled the phone between his shoulder and jaw.
“She was attacked. The drug is invading her whole system.” He moved quickly into the driver’s seat, fumbled with the keys, and started the car. “It’s moving fast. I’m getting her to the hospital now. Call them. Tell them I said to have a team ready for poison treatment.”
Snapping the phone shut, he tossed it to the seat next to him. With a quick grasp on the steering wheel, he twisted backward, one arm stretched out against the passenger seat as he looked behind him to swing out in reverse in a whining screech. He spun the wheel back, shifting into forward with barely time to stop. Ansgar and another tall, dark haired man appeared in the headlights, inches from the front bumper.
He smacked the steering wheel in frustration. They must all be able to do that. Not normal. So not normal.
Ansgar had the door to the backseat open before Jason put the car in park. The man lifted his sister into his arms.
Jason moved to stop him. “She needs a doctor.”
“She’ll get the best care with us.” Ansgar elbowed his way around Jason.
“Where are you taking her?”
The other man gave Jason a more compassionate look than Ansgar. “One of us will let you know when her condition improves.”
With that, they were gone, into thin air and darkness, taking Briet with them and every last bit of Jason’s sanity.
Shit. He slammed the back door shut and smashed his fists on the roof. Breathing hard, he stood there, hands on top of the running vehicle, his mind spinning through scenarios.
He had to be with her. She needed him. She’d told him only he could help her heal. He’d seen the blackness pull back when he touched her. He could feel the urge to be with her as gnawing and painful as if his own flesh was being ripped from his bones.
What to do?
He turned, sliding his back down the side of the car into a crouch to think. If they couldn’t help her, if she needed him there to heal, as she had before, she wouldn’t recover. He clenched his hands and squeezed his eyes shut, his concentration focused on answers in the darkness.
He didn’t have Briet’s capabilities to travel. Or Ansgar’s. Or the tribe’s. But he ha
d to get to her to be of any help. He opened his eyes, not seeing the asphalt before him and brushed the back of his hand across his mouth. In spite of his surroundings, all he saw was her face. As clear as if she stood before him.
You have the capacity to do this for me. Only you.
Because she was his. What a fucking idiot he was. He’d thought she was waxing poetic, but she’d been telling him all along.
She’d pulled him to her ever since he first met her. He hadn’t been losing his mind or spacing out. She was like his personal homing beacon. Maybe he couldn’t just pop wherever, but he could get to her.
No room for doubts and no time to waver. Absolute success was mandatory, because there was no other option. If he wasn’t there to dig beneath her skin and hold off the black poison, it would kill her.
The drug injected into Briet couldn’t be a Welson formula. This stuff was horribly unique, the reaction like nothing he’d ever witnessed. Whatever the composite of this new toxic cocktail, the result was to kill Briet, a finite resolution to keep her from poking into Welson’s protocol.
Not acceptable.
His job was to fight back. No one got to choose the battles fate dropped in their lap. Frank had always told him that. He’d always thought Frank was full of crap for the pansy-assed saying. Until now.
He could either treat his relationship with Briet like a destructive bomb or suck it up and take it for the gift it was. Jason wasn’t used to accepting gifts, but he wasn’t giving her back. He damn well wasn’t letting anyone take her from him.
Now to find her.
He glanced around the visitor’s section of the garage. It was as empty and quiet as when he’d first arrived. Good, the fewer traces of him the better. No traces and no path back to him. He didn’t want them to see him coming. And he would be coming. Once Briet was okay, then he would come to extract every pound of flesh he could find. His father’s genes finally put to good use, for once.
Jason slid back into the car. With an unprecedented calm, he drove back to his condo and parked. The visitor’s lot at the lab didn’t have cameras. The one at his condo would only register his rental leaving and returning, the timeframe so brief he could have run an errand.
