by J. R. Ward
And there was something else.
Someone else.
There was Trez.
All at once, the vision of the female in front of her, the one of herself in a white robe from that other place, was broken through, a huge figure scattering the apparition with his own, solid, very real body.
Except it couldn’t be. Why would he know she was trapped in here?
“Therese!” he yelled as he saw her sprawled on the hallway floor.
As the tremendous male before her crouched down, she decided that this was her last thought, the final cognitive spasm of her consciousness: On the edge of her death, she had conjured not her mahmen or her father, not her brother or any of her cousins or her friends, but… him.
Somehow, she was not surprised.
“Oh, God, Therese!”
Except then things got weird. Well, okay, weirder. The hands that reached out to touch her did not seem like something she was imagining. They seemed very real, and she screamed at the contact with her burned skin.
“I know this hurts,” he said roughly, “but I’ve got to get you out.”
As the Trez vision spoke over the din of the fire, she was very impressed by the hallucination. It was so accurate, the way his voice cracked, the coughing, the fact that her body’s nerves went haywire with pain as he dragged her up off the carpet and held her against his chest and turned away from the center of the inferno.
Running now. He was running, and it was terrible, the jangling of her limp arms and legs causing her to retch from the agony as her raw skin rubbed against his shirt, his muscles, his bones. And there was even less oxygen to be had up off the floor. As she gasped and gagged, she had no idea how he was breathing through the exertion. Or how he knew where he was going. The smoke was blinding, not that she could have tracked anything, because pain was making her go in and out of consciousness, her eyes checker-boarding and then clearing… only to phase out again.
And then there was pause. And an explosion.
No, wait, he was kicking down a door.
But it wasn’t to the stairwell. It was to an apartment, and she was rushed into the space.
Trez—or what seemed to be him—slammed the door shut behind them and went farther into the apartment, all the way to the back, to a bathroom. The air was clearer now, and he yanked down the shower curtain with one hand, and laid it out on the tile.
“I’m going to put you down now,” he said.
He was careful as he did so, but she moaned in pain as her body was shifted, and as soon as she was on the hard flooring, a coughing fit curling her onto her side—and she was pretty sure she vomited. She didn’t know. She was just trying to breathe, but all she could seem to draw in was smoke, even though her eyes, unreliable as they were, were telling her that there was none in the cramped room.
Trez turned away. Opened the window. Got out a phone.
Then he was back down beside her, leaning over her as he spoke to someone.
All she could do was study his face.
He was totally familiar to her, she realized in her delirium. But not just because she had met him at the restaurant. Or because she had had sex with him. Or because she had been thinking of him all day and night since their breakup.
It was because she knew him… from before.
And this conviction made her study him all the more closely—although what she saw terrified her. Soot streaked the dark skin of his beautiful face, and part of his short hair was gone, singed off from the heat. The collar of his thin silk shirt was black, but not because the fabric had come in that color. The smoke had seeped into the fibers that had been white, and she had a thought that their lungs were the same, now clogged with particles.
What if he died here, too—
He was talking to her. Urgently.
When he took her hand, she moaned in pain, and he immediately stopped. In the strange, surreal silence between them, he looked as terrified as she felt, and she knew he feared he was too late when it came to having saved her. Just as she was scared she had endangered his life.
She wanted to tell him she loved him. Because she did. In a way she could not understand, the clogging, blinding smoke had brought in its thick, impenetrable folds a clarity that revealed everything: She had been his at an earlier time, and he had been hers, and they had been separated by death. After which she had been placed on the doorstep of her parents’ house and destined to find him here, in Caldwell, some decades down the line, in this specific moment right here.
This was the reunion that he had recognized first and then doubted.
And that she now saw for what it was.
A Christmas miracle.
Desperately, she wanted to tell him all this, but her strength was draining fast, as if, now that they were in relative safety, the adrenaline load that had kept her barely alive was leaving and taking the functioning of her vital organs with it. She was out of time.
Therese thought of her mahmen. Her brother. Her father.
And then she focused on Trez’s face.
With the last vestiges of her energy, she lifted her hand. As it entered her line of sight, she had a momentary horror at the bald anatomy that was showing. But then not even that mattered.
Touching Trez’s cheek, she knew she had come home to him.
“My love…” she whispered roughly. “How I have missed you.”
* * *
Trez couldn’t hear what Therese was saying as he leaned over her. But he wanted her to keep talking. Needed her to. She had been terribly injured, whole sheets of her skin… gone. Parts of her clothes melted onto her. Soot covering her to the point where the whites of her eyes glowed as if backlit in contrast to her smoke-stained skin. He had no idea how she had survived at all.
Reflexively, he went to take her hand again and had to stop himself. It had hurt her too much the first time.
“Stay with me,” he begged. “Help is coming—”
Her eyes locked on his, and the light behind them made the back of his neck tingle. Then she smiled. Even through her pain, she smiled at him and was beautiful.
“My love…,” she whispered. “How I have missed you.”
As she spoke the words, a cold shock went through him—and a vision of his shellan’s face overlaid Therese’s, or maybe it was more that his Chosen’s was revealed through Therese’s. Revealed to be… the same.
“Selena?” he choked out.
“Yes,” she whispered. “I don’t know how… but yes.”
Without warning, her eyes fluttered closed and a sound that was more animal than anything remotely civilized ripped from his throat. He lunged forward, as if he could go into her failing body and drag her soul out of the burned shell.
“No!”
Planting his palms on either side of her, he was yelling, babbling, crying. He had done this once—he had already done this! He was not losing her again—
Someone touched his shoulder, and he bared his fangs and snapped at the hand, nearly biting it off at the wrist.
Doc Jane, instead of falling back, grabbed the front of his throat with a hard grip. “It’s me! Trez! I’m here!”
He blinked, aggression and agony warring for control as his faulty brain tried to pull some kind of rational anything out of the no-sense-anywhere that just happened. That was happening.
Oh, God… was it possible they were the same people after all? But how?
Or was he just getting back on the train he’d gotten off of, the one that had hurt a female he… loved?
“Back off,” Doc Jane commanded. “If you want her to have a shot at surviving, you need to back off right now.”
When he didn’t move—because he couldn’t—the Brotherhood’s physician put her hand out behind her, and snapped, “And you stay there. I do not need any help. I got this.”
Trez shifted his eyes up and over. Vishous, Jane’s mate, was standing off to the side, his diamond eyes flashing a bonded male’s urge to kill, his enormous body poised t
o attack, his fangs likewise bared. Which was what you got when you tried to bite someone’s shellan.
“I’ll fucking kill you and not even care,” the Brother ground out.
“Vishous! Lay off—”
Trez reared away from Therese, holding his palms up like someone was pointing a loaded gun at him. “I’m sorry—just help her! Please! I can’t lose her again—”
His voice broke, and then he was collapsing, his body refusing to hold his weight, what was left of him pitching to the side and slamming into the hard floor. Even as he went down, his eyes did not leave his female and he had to swipe his face with his hand to try to clear his vision.
“Just save her,” he kept saying, over and over again.
And he wasn’t only talking about Selena. It was about who Therese was, as well. It was both of them, a single life that had been lived in two parts, in two different eras, but with one true love.
This was the solution to the equation. Provided she lived.
Thank fuck Doc Jane was on it. She had come with a backpack strapped to her shoulders and an oxygen tank mounted on her chest, and she moved fast, putting a mask on his shellan and checking for a pulse at the neck. Then she was injecting things into an arm—no, an IV. She was setting an IV and then injecting things.
“Come here,” someone said to him. V. It was V.
Trez felt his position get moved, his torso lifted from the floor and laid in someone’s lap. And then something was passed over his face. He tried to bat it away, but his hands were unceremoniously slapped aside.
“It’s oxygen,” V said in a dry voice. “You’re wheezing.”
Was he?
“I need you to breathe slow and steady for me.”
Trez did what he was told because it was easier than arguing. All he really cared about was trying to keep track of what Doc Jane was doing—and the fact that she was still moving so fast was the good news and the bad news. It meant that his shellan was still alive, but it also meant that the injuries were serious. Like he didn’t already know that, though? Dear God, his female’s skin had been ravaged by the fire.
As he started coughing, he nearly vomited.
Doc Jane put a cell phone up to her ear. “Where are you. Right. ETA? Got it. Yeah, we’re going to have to move her.”
Trez’s body inflated with strength. Shoving himself up off of V’s lap, he pushed the oxygen mask onto his forehead. “I’m going to carry her. No one else.”
Doc Jane ended her call and opened her mouth, no doubt to hell-no him.
“That’s the way it’s going to be,” he said grimly.
“Not if you want her to live.” Doc Jane rezipped her backpack and got to her feet, the thin, clear tubing running between the oxygen tank and Therese’s mask terrifying because it seemed so fragile for its critical purpose. “You hold the oxygen mask in place and the IV bag. That’s just as important as her body. V, you’re going to have to pick her up. I haven’t given her any morphine, but I can’t run the risk of depressing her respiration any further.”
When he opened his mouth to argue, Doc Jane shook her head sharply. “Let’s make this fast, gentlemen, so I can stabilize her properly in the mobile unit.”
Trez was of a mind to disregard it all, but something in those forest green eyes got through his possessiveness. Doc Jane wasn’t giving him a choice, and not because she was playing games or didn’t understand how bonded males were. It was because she understood everything that mattered medically.
V’s face barged into Trez’s line of sight again. “I’ll get her down safe. You can trust me.”
Trez nodded numbly. “Okay. Let’s do this.”
He was given her oxygen tank and a flappy plastic IV bag full of God only knew what.
“Put that mask back on yourself,” V said. “The tank’s in my pack, so we need to stay close.”
“I love her,” Trez explained. “Even though it doesn’t make sense.”
V was known for empathy to the same degree one would expect it from a loaded shotgun. Nonetheless, the sadness and regret that transformed his harsh face was not so much a testament to a character transformation, but the life-or-death situation they were all in.
“I gotchu, true?” Vishous said softly. “And you and I are going to get her out together.”
Trez nodded and got to his feet. Or… tried to. The fact that he lurched and had to throw out a hand to the wall was a good indication Doc Jane had made the right role assignments. To help himself, he snapped his oxygen feed back into place, and took as much as he could of the plastic-scented, force-fed air.
As V bent down and gathered Therese’s arms and legs, she stirred. But when he lifted her from the floor, she cried out in pain under the mask, her eyes flaring open, her hands clawing, her legs kicking.
“We gotta be quick,” V said urgently. “Fuck.”
“I’m right here!” Trez repositioned the mask on her face, making sure the seal was tight around her lips and nose. “We’re getting you to help!”
“Down the stairwell. It’s to the left,” Doc Jane ordered as they moved as a group out of the bathroom.
“Stay with us,” Trez yelled through his own mask. “We’re almost there!”
Bullshit, they were almost there. They had countless landings, dead humans in the way, and God, Manny’s mobile surgery unit had better be where he said it’d be. Wherever the hell that was.
“Not long!” Trez said loudly.
As Doc Jane opened the outer door and they reentered the smoky, hot corridor, he stayed as close as he could to Therese and kept talking, for all the good it was doing. Her eyes had rolled back in her head, and he worried that the shock of the relocation was killing her.
“I’m behind you,” he said as V rushed out with his precious cargo, turning sideways through the jambs to fit Therese’s head and legs.
Left, Trez thought. They had to go left.
Faster, now, through the smoke, the level of which rose as they left the fire behind, now at their chests. Now above their shoulders. Better visibility and less heat—and then they were passing under the EXIT sign and entering the stairwell. Amid the screaming alarms and blinking lights, there were stragglers descending, some with bags in their arms, others with TVs they either had stolen or were protecting from theft or water damage. As Team Therese joined the rush, Trez struggled to keep his legs moving. He couldn’t feel anything in his body, his head dizzy even with the supplemental oxygen.
He was going to pass out. He was going to fucking pass out.
“Stay with me,” he repeated. “Stay with me…”
He didn’t know whether he was talking to Therese.
Or himself.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
Trez didn’t make it.
As he stumbled on a landing, and his knees failed to catch him, he twisted around and held out the IV bag and oxygen to Doc Jane.
“Stop,” she yelled to her hellren. V froze on the dime as she caught everything Trez threw at her.
Coughing, he tore off his oxygen mask and blinked in the flashing lights. “Go! Fuck me! Take her and go!”
“I’m sending help!” Doc Jane said as she turned her mate around and removed the tank that fed Trez’s mask. “I’m sending help!”
As she dropped the thing by him, Trez pushed himself back out of the way. “Go!”
It was a relief to see them continue the descent, Therese’s lax head bouncing off the crux of V’s elbow as the Brother jogged down the stairs.
Putting his mask back in place, Trez could not seem to get any oxygen into his lungs. As his vision faltered, two other humans—both men—came down, their arms laden with electronics. They didn’t spare him a glance, and he had a worry they would catch up to Therese. Although what they would do to her, he didn’t know. Like they were going after oxygen tanks?
He wanted to move. He wished he could move. He tried to move.
But his body had given out, to the point where even his heart was slowing down. Was i
t shock? He didn’t know—
Boom, boom, boom…
Thunderous footsteps. Ascending the stairwell. Coming at him.
And there he was.
Tohrment, son of Hharm. The sensible leader of the Brotherhood. The one who took care of all the others.
Who else could it have been? Trez wondered mutely.
The Brother was dressed for war, covered in leather with weapons hidden but never out of reach. And there were no wasted words, no salutations, as Tohr picked Trez up like he weighed nothing more than a toaster oven.
“Is she alive,” Trez said. Or tried to. He didn’t know what came out of his mouth.
“Hold on to that tank,” the Brother told him.
Trez did the best he could with that, but he couldn’t seem to make his arms work right. They mostly hung like ropes from his torso, useless, inanimate. And his breathing got worse as they hit the stairs. Like the words he had attempted to speak, nothing was working right in his throat, inflow and outflow jammed up.
On the bottom floor, Tohr kicked open a steel door, and the cold was a shock, not a relief, the icy air stinging Trez’s face. As a serious fucking coughing jag stole his breath and his eyesight, at least Tohr’s arms remained strong, and the Brother’s boots made fast work over the dirty snow. The mobile surgical unit came to them—or at least it seemed that way. Trez couldn’t tell. All he knew was that he was suddenly thrown into the back of the RV, and Manny Manello caught him. As he was stretched out flat on the metal floor, he had a brief impression of Therese on the treatment table, all blistered and burned skin with medical people around her, but then there were too many things on and in his face for him to see anything.