by J. R. Ward
“Vishous. Do you—”
“Yeah.” He looked down at his cursed hand and flexed the goddamn piece of shit. “I get it.”
Deep inside his skin, at his very core, his inner string started to vibrate. It was the kind of thing he’d been intimately familiar with for most of his life—and also an utter shock. He hadn’t had this sensation since Jane and Butch had come along, and its return was . . . another slice of Fuck Me.
In the past, it had taken him seriously off the rails into the land of hard-core sex and dangerous, on-the-edge shit.
At the speed of sound.
Payne’s voice was thready. “And what say you.”
Damn it, he’d just met her.
“Yes.” He flexed his deadly hand. “I’ll take care of you. If it comes to that.”
As Payne stared up out of the cage of her dead-lead body, her twin’s bleak profile was all she could see, and she despised herself for the position she’d put him in. She had spent the time since she’d arrived on this side trying to tease out another path, another option, another . . . anything.
But what she needed was hardly something one could ask of a stranger.
Then again, he was a stranger.
“Thank you,” she said. “Brother mine.”
Vishous just nodded once and resumed staring straight ahead. In person, he was so much more than the sum of his facial features and the massive size of his body. Back before she had been imprisoned by their mahmen, she had long watched him in the seeing bowls of the sacred Chosen and had known the instant he had appeared in the shallow water who he was to her—all she’d had to do was look at him and she saw herself.
Such a life he had led. Starting with the war camp and their father’s brutality . . . and now this.
And beneath his cold composure, he raged. She could feel it in her very bones, some link between them giving her insight beyond that which her eyes informed her of: On the surface, he was collected as a brick wall, his composite components all in order and mortared in place. Inside his skin, however, he seethed . . . and the external clue was his gloved right hand. From underneath its base, a bright light shone . . . and got e’er brighter. Especially after she’d asked him what she had.
This could be their only time together, she realized, her eyes slicking over anew.
“You are mated to the healer female?” she murmured.
“Yeah.”
When there was only silence, she wished she could engage him, but it was clear he answered her only out of courtesy. And yet she believed him when he said he was glad she’d arrived herein. He didn’t strike her as the type to lie—not because he cared about morality or politeness as such, but rather because he viewed such effort as a waste of time and inclination.
Payne eased her eyes back to the ring of bright fire that hung o’erhead. She wished he would hold her hand or touch her in some way, but she had asked more than plenty of him already.
Lying upon the rolling slab, her body felt all wrong, both heavy and weightless in the same moment, and her only hope was the spasms that tore down her legs and tickled into her feet, causing them to jerk. Surely all was not lost if that was occurring, she told herself.
Except even as she took shelter under that thought, a very small, quiet part of her mind told her that the cognitive roof she was trying to construct would not withstand the rain that hung o’er what was left of her life: When she moved her hands, though she could not see them, she could feel the cool, soft sheeting and the slick chill of the table she was upon. But when she told her feet to do the same . . . it was as though she were in the serene, tepid waters of the bathing pools on the Other Side, cocooned in an invisible embrace, sensing nothing against her.
Where was this healer?
Time . . . was passing.
As the wait went from intolerable to downright agonizing, it was difficult to know whether the choking sensation in her throat was from her condition or the quiet of the room. Verily, she and her twin were alike steeped in stillness—just for very different reasons: She was going nowhere with alacrity. He was on the verge of an explosion.
Desperate for some stimulation, something . . . anything, she murmured, “Tell me about the healer who is coming.”
The cool draft that hit her face and the scent of dark spices that tunneled into her nose told her it was a male. Had to be.
“He’s the best,” Vishous muttered. “Jane’s always talked about him like he’s a god.”
The tone was rather less than complimentary, but, indeed, vampire males did not appreciate others of their persuasion around their females.
Who could it be within the race? she wondered. The only healer that Payne had seen in the bowls was Havers. And surely there would have been no reason to search for him?
Perhaps there was another she had not been witness to. After all, she had not spent a vast amount of time catching up with the world, and according to her twin, there had been many, many, many years transpiring between her imprisonment and her freedom, such as it was . . .
In an abrupt wave, exhaustion cut off her thought process, seeping into her very marrow, dragging her down even harder atop the metal table.
Yet when she closed her eyes, she could withstand the dimness only a moment before panic popped her lids open. Whilst their mother had held her in suspended animation, she had been all too aware of her blank, limitless surroundings and the grindingly slow passage of moments and minutes. This paralysis now was too much alike what she had suffered for hundreds of years.
And that was the why of her terrible request to Vishous. She could not come here to this side only to replicate what she had been so desperate to escape from.
Tears trickled over her vision, causing the bright light source to waver.
How she wished her brother would hold her hand.
“Please don’t cry,” Vishous said. “Don’t . . . cry.”
In truth, she was surprised he noticed. “Verily, you are correct. Crying cures naught.”
Stiffening her resolve, she forced herself to be strong, but it was a battle. Although her knowledge of the arts of medicine was limited, simple logic spelled out what she was up against: As she was of an extraordinarily strong bloodline, her body had begun repairing itself the moment she had been injured whilst sparring with the Blind King. The problem was, however, the very regenerative process that would ordinarily save her life was making her condition ever more dire—and likely to be permanent.
Spines that were broken and fixing themselves were not likely to achieve a well-ordered result, and the paralysis of her lower legs was testament to that fact.
“Why do you keep regarding your hand?” she asked, still staring at the light.
There was a silent moment. Atop all the others. “Why do you think I am?”
Payne sighed. “Because I know you, brother mine. I know all about you.”
When he said not another thing, the quiet was about as companionable as the Old Country inquests had been.
Oh, what things had she set in motion?
And where would they all be when this came to an end?
THREE
Sometimes the only way to know how far you’d come was to return to where you once had been.
As Jane Whitcomb, M.D., walked into the St. Francis Hospital complex, she was sucked back into her former life. In one sense, it was a short trip—merely a year ago, she’d been the chief of trauma service here, living in a condo full of her parents’ things, spending twenty hours a day running between the ER and the ORs.
Not anymore.
A sure clue that change had come a-knock-knock-knockin’ was the way she entered the surgical building. No reason to bother with the rotating doors. Or the ones that pushed into the lobby.
She walked right through the glass walls and passed the security guards at the check-in without their seeing her.
Ghosts were good like that.
Ever since she’d been transformed, she could go places and get into things without anyon
e having a clue she was around. But she could also become as corporeal as the next person, summoning herself into a solid at her will. In one form, she was utter ether; in the other, she was as human as she’d once been, capable of eating and loving and living.
It was a powerful advantage in her job as the Brotherhood’s private surgeon.
Like right now, for example. How the hell else would she be able to infiltrate the human world again with a minimum of fuss?
Hurrying along the buffed stone floor of the lobby, she went past the marble wall that was inscribed with the names of benefactors, and wended her way through the crowds of people. In and among the congestion, so many faces were familiar, from admin staff to doctors to nurses she’d worked with for years. Even the stressed-out patients and their families were anonymous and yet intimates of hers—on some level, the masks of grief and worry were the same no matter whose facial features they were on.
As she headed for the back stairs, she was on the hunt for her former boss. And, Christ, she almost wanted to laugh. Through all their years of working together, she had come at Manny Manello with a variety of OMGs, but this was going to top any multicar pileup, airplane crash, or building collapse.
Put together.
Wafting through a metal emergency exit, she mounted the rear stairway, her feet not touching the steps but floating above them while she ascended as a draft did, going up without effort.
This had to work. She had to get Manny to come in and take care of that spinal injury. Period. There were no other options, no contingencies, no lefts or rights off this road. This was the Hail Mary pass . . . and she was just praying that the receiver in the end zone caught the fucking football.
Good thing she performed well under pressure. And that the man she was after was one she knew as well as the back of her hand.
Manny would take the challenge. Even though this was going to make no sense to him on so many levels, and he was likely to be livid that she was still “alive,” he was not going to be able to walk away from a patient in need. It simply wasn’t in his hardwiring.
On the tenth floor, she ethered through another fire door and entered the administrative offices of the surgery department. The place was kitted out like a law firm, all dark and somber and rich-looking. Made sense. Surgery was a huge revenue center for any teaching hospital, and big money was always spent to recruit, hold, and house the brilliant, arrogant hothouse flowers who cut people open for a living.
Among the scalpel set at St. Francis, Manny Manello was at the top of the heap, the head of not just a subspecialty, as she had been, but the whole kit and caboodle. This meant he was a movie star, a drill sergeant, and the president of the United States all rolled up into a six-foot-tall, stacked son of a bitch. He had a terrible temper, a stunning intellect, and a fuse that was about a millimeter long.
On a good day.
And he was an absolute gem.
The guy’s bread and butter had always been high-profile professional athletes, and he tackled a lot of knees and hips and shoulders that would otherwise have been career enders for football, baseball and hockey players. But he had a lot of experience with the spine, and although a neurosurgeon on backup would also be nice, given what Payne’s scans were showing, this was an orthopedic issue: If the spinal cord was severed, no amount of neuro anything was going to help her. Medical science just hadn’t progressed that far yet.
As she rounded the corner of the receptionist’s desk, she had to stop. Over to the left was her old office, the place where she had spent countless hours pushing papers and doing consults with Manny and the rest of the team. The nameplate on the door now read, THOMAS GOLDBERG, M.D. CHIEF, TRAUMA SURGERY.
Goldberg was an excellent choice.
Still hurt to see the new sign for some reason.
But come on. Like she’d expected Manny to preserve her desk and office as a monument to her?
Life went on. Hers. His. This hospital’s.
Kicking her own ass, she strode down the carpeted corridor, fiddling with her white coat and the pen in her pocket and the cell phone that she hadn’t had reason to use yet. There was no time to explain her back-from-the-dead routine or cajole Manny or help him through the mind fuck she was about to deliver. And no choice but to somehow get him to come with her.
In front of his closed door, she braced herself and then marched right through—
He wasn’t behind his desk. Or at the conference table in the alcove.
Quick check of his private bath . . . not there either, and there was no moisture on the glass doors, or damp towels around the sink.
Back in the office proper, she took a deep breath . . . and the faded scent of his aftershave lingering in the air made her swallow hard.
God, she missed him.
Shaking her head, she went around to his desk and looked over the clutter. Patient files, stacks of interdepartmental memos, reports from the Patient Care Assessment and Quality Committee. As it was just after five in the afternoon on a Saturday, she’d expected to find him here: Electives were not done on weekends, so unless he was on call and dealing with a trauma case, he should have been parked behind this mess pushing papers.
Manny put the “twenty-four/seven” in workaholic.
Heading out of the office, she checked his admin assistant’s desk. No clues there, given that his schedule was kept in the computer.
Next stop was down to the ORs. St. Francis had several different levels of operating rooms, all arranged by subspecialty, and she went to the pod that he usually worked in. Peering in through the glass windows in the double doors, she saw a rotator cuff being worked on, and a nasty compound fracture. And although the surgeons had masks and caps on, she could tell none of them was Manny. His shoulders were big enough to stretch even the largest of the scrub sets, and besides, the music drifting out was wrong in both cases. Mozart? Not a chance. Pop? Over his dead body.
Manny listened to acid rock and heavy metal. To the point where, if it hadn’t been against protocol, the nurses would have been wearing earplugs for years.
Damn it . . . where the hell was he? There were no conferences at this time of year, and he had no life outside of the hospital. The only other options were him at the Commodore—either passed out from exhaustion on the couch at his condo or in the high-rise’s gym.
As she headed out, she fired up her cell phone and dialed into the hospital’s answering system.
“Yes, hello,” she said when the call was answered. “I’d like to page Dr. Manuel Manello. My name?” Shit. “Ah . . . Hannah. Hannah Whit. And here’s my callback.”
As she hung up, she had no idea what to say if he returned the ping, but she excelled at spur-of-the-moment thinking—and prayed that her core competency really hit it out of the park this time. The thing was, if the sun was below the horizon, one of the Brothers could have come out and done some mental work on Manny in order to ease this whole process of getting him to the compound.
Although not Vishous. Someone else. Anybody else.
Her instincts told her to keep the pair of them as far apart as she could. They already had one medical emergency cooking. Last thing she needed was her old boss getting put into traction because her husband got territorial and decided to do a little spine cracking himself: Just before her death, Manny had been interested in more than a professional association with her. So unless he’d up and married one of those Barbies he’d insisted on dating, he was probably still single . . . and under the absence-makes-the-heart-grow-fonder rule, his feelings might have persisted.
Then again, he was just as likely to tell her to go fuck herself for lying to him about the whole “dead and gone” thing.
Good job he wasn’t going to remember any of this.
On her end, though, she feared she was never going to forget the next twenty-four hours.
The Tricounty Equine Hospital was state-of-the-art all the way. Located about fifteen minutes away from the Aqueduct, it had everything from operating
rooms and full-service recovery suites to hydrotherapy pools and advanced imaging. And it was staffed with people who saw horses as more than profit-and-loss statements on four hooves.
In the OR, Manny read the X-rays of his girl’s front leg, and wanted to be the one to go in and take care of business: He could clearly see the fissures in the radius, but that was not what worried him. There was a handful of chips that had broken off, the sharp flakes orbiting the bulbous end of her long bone like moons around a planet.
Just because she was another species didn’t mean he couldn’t handle the operation. As long as the anesthesiologist kept her under safely, he could handle the rest. Bone was bone.
But he wasn’t going to be an asshole. “What do you think,” he said.
“In my professional opinion,” the head vet replied, “it’s pretty grim. That’s a multiple displaced fracture. The recovery time is going to be extensive, and there’s no guarantee of even breeding soundness.”
Which was the shitkicker: Horses were meant to stand upright with their weight evenly distributed on four points. When a leg was broken, it wasn’t so much the injury that was a bitch; it was the fact that they had to redistribute their poundage and disproportionally rely on the good side to stay on their feet. And that was how trouble came.
Based on what he was staring at, most owners would choose euthanasia. His girl was born to run, and this catastrophic injury was going to make that impossible, even on a recreational basis—if she survived. And as a doctor, he was quite familiar with the cruelty of medical “savior” jobs that ultimately left a patient in a condition worse than death—or did nothing but painfully prolong the inevitable.
“Dr. Manello? Did you hear what I said?”
“Yeah. I did.” But at least, this guy, unlike the pussy out at the track, looked as heartbroken as Manny felt.
Turning away, he went over to where they had laid her out and put his hand on the round drum of her cheek. Her black coat was shining under the bright lights, and in the midst of all the pale tile and stainless steel, she was like a shadow thrown out and left forgotten in the center of the room.
