by Jenna Ryan
The cops, blank faced and gruff, said their orders were to leave her there, alone. They deposited her at the rusty gate, told her to go inside and rolled off to park at the end of the street.
Shoving her hands in her coat pockets, Kate battled a series of deep shivers. Delayed shock, she supposed. She spied Nolan leaning against an ancient oak tree and felt her knees go weak. Then she saw his bland expression, and annoyance slithered in.
“It gets better and better, doesn’t it?” He stared off into the fog as he spoke. “Apparently being shot at in a waterfront bar and damn near blown up in Chinatown wasn’t enough. Now we get to experience a cloak-and-dagger meeting with a Fed who’s so cryptic he doesn’t officially exist.”
She marched right up to him. “We’re in a graveyard, Nolan. A creepy Halloween-style cemetery. It’s October, it’s foggy, horrible things have happened, and that’s your reaction? To stand there calmly and tell me I’m about to have a close encounter with a man who doesn’t exist?”
He glanced at her. “Are you hysterical?”
“No. I’m afraid if I get hysterical, I’ll die. Or worse, if anything can be worse.” Her gaze slid from headstone to headstone. “What kind of person would do this? Force the cops to make two people who’ve been shot at and then almost vaporized stand in an open cemetery and wait for him? Does he want us to be killed? Please, don’t say yes.”
“If someone who doesn’t exist wants us here, Kate, he must believe it’s safe.”
“Do you believe it’s safe?”
“Not particularly.”
She needed to move, Kate realized, and paced a short distance away from him. “After everything I’ve been through tonight, I did not hear that. I’m terrified and getting more pissed off by the minute. Which is probably good, but not the point.”
“There’s a point?”
The dangerous sound she made elicited a half smile.
“We’ll call that a yes. Go on, then, make it. I’ll listen as long as it doesn’t involve ball bashing or ass kicking.”
“Spoilsport.” But his remark got her thinking and it occurred to her that a change of strategy might be in order. Nolan was far from repulsive, and who knew, maybe all of this was nothing more than a dream. Might as well take it to its surreal limit.
Removing her hands from her pockets, Kate strolled closer and ran a deliberately provocative finger over the front of his jacket. “As a rule, and speaking literally, I prefer not to bash balls or kick ass, Doctor. For the most part, I come from pacifist stock. I’ll admit the idea of punching you has crossed my mind once or twice tonight, but being a woman, I feel certain there are other less painful ways to achieve my goal.”
“Uh-huh.” He regarded her narrow-eyed. “And what exactly is your goal?”
“Where you’re concerned?” She raised her head so her mouth was less than an inch from his. “I haven’t decided. Something to do with deep male pools and secrets and the fact that I love a good mystery.”
“In my experience, Kate, even a pacifist female will bring her knee up between a man’s legs given the right provocation. I was ten when I learned that little life lesson.”
“But you’re a man, aren’t you, and men tend to think in more violent terms than females.” She regarded him with humor. “No offense if that sounds cynical.”
“None taken, and you’re talking to the king of cynical.”
“I’ll admit the knee thing’s a temptation, but I repeat—pacifist stock.”
Catching her fingers, he drew them away from his chest. “What are you after, Kate?”
Her heart gave several unexpected thumps, but she stood her ground and challenged him with her eyes. “Honesty,” she said. “Truth.” Easing her hand from his, she stepped back. “I think you know a whole lot more about our situation than you’re letting on.” She leaned forward just far enough to stage whisper, “It’s time to start letting, Doc.”
He held her stare for a long moment. It seemed to her that something inside him shut down as he directed his gaze into the fog behind her. “The only thing I’m sure of is that I should’ve gone to the Crow. Toy boy wouldn’t have shot up a bar full of cops.”
So much for seduction. Pushing her tingling hand back into her pocket, Kate sighed. “Nolan, while I firmly believe that Frankie Perradine would still be dead, the simple truth is, if you’d stuck to the hospital duty roster, his mother might have been better able to accept what happened.”
Pivoting, she regarded the grimy weed-covered headstones. “I’m not Buffy, okay? Action on the edge isn’t my thing. I played with Barbie dolls as a kid. Dr. Barbie doll, in my case. Like me, her attitude was that blood and guts are manageable realities, but only when they’re confined to the O.R. I don’t know about you, but I just underwent a question-and-answer session in a room that makes the hospital morgue look like party central.”
“You must have missed last year’s Halloween bash.”
She swung back, but this time kept two feet of air between them. “I’m serious, Nolan. Is it possible there’s a statute of limitations on Alistair Perradine’s gratitude? Because if there is, we’re right back where we started. With me being toast for performing an unsuccessful surgery on his nephew and you being in the same position because you didn’t.”
He studied her through eyes too close to silver to be real. “Are you always this long-winded?”
“Only when I’m fighting off a panic attack.”
“You have panic attacks?”
“No, but it’s possible I’m on the verge. These past few hours have given me my first real glimpse into hell. Unless you count the runaway train.” She moved a shoulder. “I was on one once. Did I ever tell you that?”
“You’ve never told me anything, Kate.”
“Exactly. Do you know why?”
“No, and I’m pretty sure I don’t want to.”
She whirled away. Then back. “You picked up your phone tonight, Nolan, instead of coming to the hospital. Your reason? Gotta get drunk. Don’t give a rat’s ass if it screws things up for a dozen-plus people. Do you know what that makes you?”
“Human?”
“No. You’re an unfeeling, angst-ridden, antisocial sexpot.” Sweeping her gaze over his long body, Kate made an irritable gesture. “I mean face it, doctors, and especially brilliant surgeons, don’t look like you. And all the angst does is add to the really annoying bad-boy appeal.”
“So if I looked like a surgical version of Clark Kent, you’d have talked to me?”
The image of that surprised a laugh out of her. “God, no, not a chance. Dr. Chambers looks like Clark Kent, and I spend the better part of our conjoined shifts avoiding him. Guy’s a lech in Kent’s clothing.”
“So’s Liz Barlowe in Medical Imaging.” Nolan shrugged. “Trust me, a female lech is no better than a male one.” In a move Kate didn’t see coming, he snagged her wrist and pulled her toward him. “Talk more about the sexpot thing.”
She’d started this, Kate realized. This touchy-feely sexual awareness moment they appeared to be sharing. The plan had been to goad him into telling her what she wanted to know. It absolutely had not been to react to him or worse, to have him see that she was reacting.
“Sexpot was Lola’s word, not mine.” When attempting to free herself didn’t work, she placed her other hand on the front of his jacket. “Cut me some slack, will you, Nolan? I’ve only had four boyfriends in my life, and out of those four, two solid relationships.”
“Good or bad relationships?”
“Pretty sure I used the word ‘solid.’”
“Solid translates to dull.”
“Only in your mind. They were—interesting,” she said. “Nice.”
“Yeah? How did they end?”
Kate recognized the trap, and it provoked her enough that she jerked free. “I like solid relationships with nice men. It keeps life—”
“Safe,” he finished for her. “Come on, Kate. We’re standing in a graveyard. It’s three in
the morning, and we both know that somewhere along the line we took a hard left into the Twilight Zone. Be honest.”
She matched his level stare. “I do what works for me, okay? I’m as big a fan of safe as I am—or was—of pacifism.”
“In that case, set your sights on Dr. Brown.”
She opened her mouth and closed it again. “Not a fan of that safe. Brown wears combat boots everywhere he goes.”
“He does the same thing with surgical gloves. Safer than that is hard to find. And I know for a fact he likes you.”
Kate’s lips quirked into a humorless smile. “He doesn’t like me anywhere near as much as I dislike you.”
“And there it is.”
“There what is?”
“You’d grind Brown’s bones to make your bread, Marshall.” With his gaze locked on hers, he trapped her chin between his thumb and fingers, tipped her head back, and damn him, made the breath in her lungs seize. “Nice and/or safe can suck worse than any lawsuit, Kate. You’re a beautiful woman. A guy like Brown won’t tell you that, but I’m not like him so I will. Now before I do something we’ll both regret, I’m going to reach into one of my deep male pools and tell you part of what it is I know that I’m not letting on. Listen closely. It doesn’t matter.”
Kate’s mind clouded. She couldn’t think. Why couldn’t she think? Or breathe? The fog was winding around her body not her brain. So what if Nolan had a seriously sexy mouth to go with those amazing silver eyes. She’d never been shortsighted enough to imagine that mouth on hers. She’d certainly never wondered how it might feel to have those clever hands touching her skin. And God knew she’d never pictured him naked, or aroused, or…
A hard shiver slid through her. It shattered the trance she’d allowed herself to fall into and zapped her straight back to the disused cemetery.
Smiling just a little, Nolan released her and returned to leaning on the oak tree. “None of it matters, Kate,” he repeated. “If you’re smart, and you are, you’ll make those words your mantra.”
Although the imprint of his fingers lingered, she resisted an urge to touch. “You’re being mysterious on purpose,” she accused. “None of what matters? What are we talking about? Safe relationships or Alistair Perradine’s questionable gratitude?”
“Sorry to say, kid, door number two. You losing a patient, Alistair’s potential reaction, me wanting to get drunk—they’re all moot points. The guy who exploded your car is the only thing that counts.”
Kate’s fingers fell away from the throbbing nerve in her neck. “Should I have any idea what you’re talking about?” she asked wearily. Then she spotted a movement in the fog and glanced past him. “Oh, God, not again.” Full nerve and muscle tension returned. “Who are you?” she demanded in a louder voice.
Nolan followed her gaze. “Who’s who?”
She scanned the misty headstones. “Damn it, no one now.” Releasing a frustrated breath, she shoved through the weeds until she reached a small gray headstone. “I saw a woman standing right here, on this spot. She was wearing a long, baggy coat and a veil. You can call me crazy, but I know what I saw. She was here when the fog shifted, and now she isn’t.”
The look Nolan slanted her spoke volumes.
A cheerless laugh escaped. “Yes, I know. The overworked, overstressed doctor’s cracking up. Except—” her coat whirled when she spun “—not.”
“What did the woman look like?” Nolan asked.
Should she tell him? Kate wondered. Might as well. The night really couldn’t get much more bizarre. “She’s quite small. She has a flower tattooed on the back of her left hand. I got the impression of old and…” She hunched her shoulders. “I saw her before. On that stretch of road where you can look at St. Mark’s up the rise with the black forest spreading out behind it.”
“Our very own Grimm Brothers’ workplace.”
Diverted, she laughed. “You know fairy tales?”
He made a noncommittal motion with his head. “My bad luck, two of the scrub nurses I work with on a regular basis love nothing better than to bring our haunted surroundings to the table during easy surgeries.”
“Oh, great.” Kate let her own head fall back. “You have easy surgeries?”
“Routine, then. The kind of surgery Frankie Perradine’s wasn’t. Talk to me about the woman. What was she doing?”
“I told you. She was standing on the side of the road. And please don’t look at me like I’m rubber-room ready, but I also thought she spoke to me. I do understand that was probably my imagination. Look, can we suspend this weird topic for a moment and go back to what you were saying about nothing mattering? We know for a fact that toy boy shot up Shanghai Lily’s bar, so how can you think Frankie Perradine’s death isn’t tied into this nightmare?”
“Because I can put a name to what’s coming, and you can’t. What did the woman on the road say to you?”
She lifted her hands in surrender. “All right, you win. She told me not to be deceived by what isn’t real, only to fear what is. No idea what she meant, and seeing as Anna Perradine’s big black car was bearing down on me at the time, I didn’t have a chance to ask. She said I should ‘move now,’ then poof, no more woman in a veil, only fog and high beams and a really close encounter between me and Anna’s Caddy.”
“Interesting.”
“Not the word that sprang to mind at the time, but I guess it applies. Come on, Nolan, toss me a bone here. If everything we went through up to the point where my car exploded is irrelevant, tell me what’s coming so I can prepare for it.”
“Not what. Who.”
She stabbed an accusing finger and moved away. “You see? This is exactly why I like safe men. They don’t play games.”
“Sure they do, they just don’t let you know it. This isn’t a game, Kate. It’s—” He broke off, and even though he was looking out over an empty graveyard, she saw a faint smile tug on his lips. “Hey, Crucible. It’s been awhile.”
“Four years, eight months and a handful of days.”
The response, smooth as velvet, came from Kate’s left. She didn’t jump or even start. She merely pivoted on her boot heels and located the shadowy speaker.
The man called Crucible smiled at her. Like a piranha, she reflected and didn’t think that boded well for the night improving.
“Nolan and I met overseas,” he told her. “Or rather my ruptured appendix met his scalpel.”
“The man’s a workaholic.” She glanced at her silent counterpart. “Among other things.”
“I understand you’ve had some problems,” Crucible remarked. “Starting with a young man’s death and veering into an explosion on a quiet street in Chinatown.”
Veering into? Oh yeah, Kate decided, no improvement whatsoever on the horizon.
When the new arrival moved out of the shadows into the light of a distant street lamp, she checked a strong urge to bolt. He was tall, broad shouldered, dressed entirely in black and was, without a doubt, the most formidable man she’d ever seen. She’d have added terrifying if his expression hadn’t been one of utter calm. When he stared at her, she had the disturbing sensation that he was looking right into her head.
Wariness took over. “Who are you?” she asked softly.
She felt rather than heard Nolan come up behind her. “Crucible’s like a ghost, Kate. Part of his job is to chase phantoms. The other part is to keep the people he protects from becoming ghosts themselves. In this case, that would be people like you and me.”
CHAPTER FIVE
Crucible took them into a crypt in the middle of the cemetery. Anyone stretching the point might have called it an open-door meeting. Except here, cobwebs dangled from the ceiling, dried leaves crunched underfoot and there was a raised tomb in the middle of the floor.
Nolan sat on a stone bench. He stretched his legs out and propped his back against a dirty wall. Crucible stationed himself near the creaking iron doors and Kate paced, hands jammed in the pockets of her long, leather coat. She k
ept her brown eyes, still strongly mistrustful, glued to the man across from her, but to her credit didn’t ask him a single question.
With fog from the graveyard curling around his ankles, Crucible opened the conversation. “Let me start by telling you that I am in fact chasing a phantom. For some time now, I’ve been working in conjunction with a team of four government directors to bring a very specific serial killer to justice. I’ll delve further into that subject in a moment. First things first, however. Dr. Marshall, I hear you had an unpleasant run-in with Anna Perradine.”
“Extremely unpleasant,” Kate confirmed. “She’s not a woman who hides her emotions well.”
“She’s angry with you.”
“She’s furious with me. Nolan says she wasn’t responsible for the attack on us in Chinatown. Is that true?”
Crucible’s eyes only flickered a little. “We don’t know.”
“In that case,” Nolan remarked, “we’re slipping badly, old friend.”
Kate made an aggravated sound and set her hands on the top of the tomb. “Okay, here’s the deal. I’m a surgeon, not a—whatever Crucible is—and I’m weirded out enough already. Can we please keep this conversation a little less cryptic and a little more explicit? Why are we meeting in a cemetery?”
“Because we believe the person we’re after, the one we’re really after, has a highly superstitious nature.” Crucible spread gloved fingers. “Some of my colleagues, mainly the directors I mentioned earlier, have gone so far as to speculate that he fears any reference to the supernatural.”
She met his gaze. “Making him or her a very scary person.”
“I’ll expand on the occult theory some other time. For now, I prefer to deal with the concrete.” Reaching into his coat, he produced a plain white calling card. “Do either of you recognize this silhouette?”
Nolan peered at the impressionist sketch of a man’s profile. Something about it brought the word “shadowy” to mind, but beyond that… He shrugged. “Doesn’t say anything to me.”
