Hidden Embers

by Tessa Adams

  He rushed across the lab, threw open a cabinet at the back and ripped out a black doctor’s bag, very similar to the one currently stowed in her trunk.

  “Quinn?” Phoebe’s voice rang out above the alarm, sounding more frightened than Jasmine had ever heard it. “What’s wrong?”

  He never got the chance to answer, but then, he didn’t need to. At that precise moment, two huge men came crashing through the door at the back of the lab. They were covered in blood and cuts, looking like something straight out of a horror movie. They carried a third man, who made tortured sounds as they jostled him into the room. A woman trailed behind them, her face pale as she held the injured man’s hand.

  As they brought him closer, Jasmine blanched at the damage that had been done to him. His stomach had been ripped open, and her first impression was that if he was still alive, it was only because his brain hadn’t yet figured out that he was dead.

  Shock held her immobile for precious seconds, and then her medical training kicked in. Jasmine rushed across the room for the injured man, right behind Phoebe.

  “Put him down here,” Quinn barked from the left side of the lab. He was standing next to a bed covered in white sheets. Jasmine blinked—how had he moved so quickly? Mere seconds before he’d been all the way across the lab, at the cabinets on the opposite end.

  Phoebe gasped. “Dylan?” For one horrible second Jasmine thought the man who was so close to death was her friend’s fiancé.

  “He’s fine,” ground out the tall blond one who had helped carry the injured man in. “He wasn’t with us.”

  That seemed to be all Phoebe needed to hear, as finally she sprang into action. “We’re going to need blood.” She eyed the man stretched out on the bed. “Lots of blood. There are a number of packs in the fridge, two labs over. Get one of the assistants to show you.”

  The second man, who was as tall and dark as Quinn, nodded and left without another word. He, too, moved so fast that Jasmine wasn’t sure his feet even touched the ground.

  Not that she had time to worry about that now, with an eviscerated man dying in front of her. Shoving past the blond man, she told Quinn, “We’ve got to stop the bleeding. Do you have a clamp in your bag until we can get him to the hospital for surgery?”

  “Stay out of my way.” It was a growl so menacing that it had her rearing back on her heels. But she’d never backed down in her life, and she sure as hell wasn’t going to do so now.

  “Don’t be stupid,” she snapped. “You need all the help you can get.” Turning to the other man, she said, “Can you pull this bed out? I need to be on the other side of him.”

  He looked at Quinn for permission and her temper sparked. “Do you want your friend to live or not? Because I don’t care how good a doctor you think he is, he can’t do this alone.”

  Quinn didn’t answer—he was too focused on trying to find the bleeder to pay attention to their exchange. But the guy must have taken her seriously because he leaned down and lifted the bottom half of the bed up and out.

  “What the hell are you doing, Logan?” Quinn barked without looking up.

  “You look like you could use all the help you could get. And Tyler doesn’t have much time.”

  That is an understatement. Phoebe crowded in next to her, and the three of them tried to stop the blood gushing from the open wound. They’d worked together in grim silence for a little over a minute when Jasmine’s fingers finally closed around the ripped vein. “I’ve got it,” she gritted out from between clenched teeth. “Get the clamp.”

  Phoebe was already handing it to her. “Are there more?”

  “I won’t know until I’ve got this one cut off.” She clamped the vein, trying to ignore the way her patient’s body arced up off the table in silent misery as she did so.

  “Do you have something here to put him out?” Jasmine demanded of Quinn.

  “I need him lucid.”

  “That’s ridiculous. He’s going to go into shock, if he hasn’t already—”

  “Don’t argue with me.”

  Jasmine opened her mouth to blast him, but Phoebe moved her gently aside. “Let him do his thing, Jazz. He knows what he’s doing.”

  This was probably the most insane thing Jasmine had ever heard. Quinn might be a doctor, but he’d obviously spent far too much time in the lab. He was ignoring the most basic procedures for acute trauma.

  “There’s another one,” Quinn said, interrupting her thoughts and pulling her back to the present crisis. “The bleeding has slowed down, but something’s still leaking in there.”

  “Let me back in,” Jasmine demanded. “My hands are smaller than yours. I’ll find it.”

  “It’s too late for that,” Quinn said. He leaned over the table. “Tyler, man, look at me.”

  The patient’s pain-filled gray eyes opened slowly and focused on Quinn.

  “I need you to focus on what I’m telling you. Can you do that?”

  “Yeah,” he said, gasping.

  “You’re in bad shape, man. If you’re going to make it, I’m going to need to do it the old-fashioned way. But for me to do that, I need your help. You need to lower your guards, let me in.” He paused for a second, studied Tyler’s face. “Do you understand what I’m telling you?”

  The other man nodded, but his eyes were closing and Jasmine couldn’t be sure if the other man understood Quinn’s request. Not that she could blame him—she hadn’t understood one word Quinn had said. But Phoebe looked totally calm, as if she knew what he was talking about and was all right with the whole thing, so Jasmine reined in the protests welling in the back of her throat.

  She prayed that she wasn’t condemning this Tyler person to certain death as she did so.

  Quinn lowered his head and closed his eyes, his hands hovering just above the wound. Frustration snaked through Jasmine. How the hell did he think he could help a patient by just standing there? Ignoring Phoebe’s protests, Jasmine shoved her aside. Maybe Phoebe had lost her mind out here in the middle of this damned desert, but Jasmine hadn’t.

  She didn’t care what anyone said, didn’t care that for a moment Quinn had seemed to know exactly what he was doing. Every ounce of medical training she had told her that Tyler was going to slip away if they didn’t do something—now. The clamp she’d put on was a stopgap measure, but much more needed to happen if he was to survive.

  “Let me go back in,” she demanded, shoving her blood-coated hands back into the wound. “I’ll find the second—”

  An invisible force reached out and shoved her against the wall, held her pinned there. It hadn’t pushed hard, hadn’t hurt her, but it was inexorable and unrelenting. Shocked, horrified, she struggled to free herself. But there was nothing, no one to fight. The thought scared the hell out of her.

  “Phoebe!”

  “It’s okay.” Her friend reached out and grabbed her gloved hand, tugged a little. “Stop it, Quinn.”

  “Then keep her the hell away from me.” The force holding her in place fell away, but Quinn never opened his eyes.

  Then again, he didn’t have to. All of the fight drained out of Jasmine as she looked around in shock. Had she entered some alternate universe when she’d driven into town, one where people could actually bend the laws of physics?

  The whole thing was absurd, and yet she wasn’t crazy. Something, someone, had held her against that wall, and judging by Phoebe’s reaction, that someone was Quinn. As her panic receded and she could think again, she realized the touch had seemed familiar—and more than a little intimate.

  If that was the case, it had to have been Quinn. God knew, there wasn’t much he hadn’t done to her in that motel room the night before.

  Then, as her attention returned to her patient, she saw that Quinn was obviously doing something, despite the fact that he wasn’t touching Tyler. The bleeding had completely stopped, and beneath her fascinated gaze, the veins and organs under his hand seemed to be mending themselves. They were actually putting themselves
back together on their own.

  It was impossible. She had a pretty open mind, had traveled enough of the world to know that there was more to healing than what she’d learned in medical school. But this—what she was seeing—was impossible. It couldn’t be happening. It absolutely, positively could not be happening.

  Yet it was.

  She couldn’t tear her eyes away from the patient, couldn’t so much as blink for fear she would miss some part of the strange, miraculous healing going on in front of her. He was fixing Tyler, mending his wounds without benefit of a scalpel or any other instruments. Without so much as a painkiller for the patient. And Tyler didn’t say a word, didn’t even squirm as Quinn repaired the damage and moved his organs back to where they belonged.

  She thought again of that force, that invisible hand, that had pinned her against the wall. Was this the same principle at work? Was Quinn somehow holding Tyler immobile while he…?

  Jasmine didn’t complete the thought. She couldn’t. She had no idea how to describe whatever it was Quinn was doing. Worked on hardly seemed adequate and neither did operated on. Maybe healed, but the word had such strange connotations—especially in this context—that she shied away from using it.

  Then it was over, the bleeding stopped. The internal damage repaired. She glanced at Quinn, saw that he was nearly gray with exhaustion. He swayed where he stood. Prompted by some unexpected instinct, Jasmine stripped off her gloves as she moved closer to him and placed a bracing hand in the center of his back.

  “You did well, Quinn,” she said. “Tyler’s a lot better. Let someone else take over. I can close, or Phoebe can.”

  He shook his head. “I’ll finish.”

  She wanted to argue, but when he opened his eyes, the look in them was implacable. Tyler was his patient, and he wasn’t going to step aside now, not when things were almost done. She would have felt exactly the same way.

  So she moved back to give him room to work and started digging in his bag for the supplies he would need to sew up Tyler’s wounds. She found them, raised her head, and then wondered why she’d even bothered. Under Quinn’s steady hands, Tyler’s wounds were slowly, carefully mending themselves—the ripped edges of skin fusing themselves back together without the benefit of stitches, until only raw, red lines existed where there had once been gaping injury.

  It knocked her for a loop, even considering everything else she’d seen. Jasmine had absolutely no idea how to react.

  Just then, the man who had gone in search of blood came back, his hands full of blood pouches, all of which were marked O negative—the universal blood type that could be accepted by anyone in an emergency. Behind him came a lab assistant with an IV machine, which she plugged into the nearest power source.

  Figuring that she could at least do this, since Quinn had rendered all of her other efforts obsolete, Jasmine replaced the materials needed to perform stitches and pulled out an IV kit instead. Quickly and efficiently, she got it set up, and within a couple of minutes, blood was pumping from one of the pouches into Tyler’s right arm. It wasn’t as quick or as pretty as it would be at a hospital, but she’d spent her career working in makeshift clinics in developing nations. She’d learned long ago that things didn’t have to be quick or pretty, as long as they got the job done.

  She stepped back, but kept a close eye on Tyler. Already, he was looking better. Whatever Quinn had done to him had obviously worked, and with the steady influx of blood pumping through his veins, it was almost as if he’d come in with a minor injury, instead of one so life-threatening she had first placed his chances of survival at next to nothing.

  Quinn wasn’t so lucky. He looked like hell, and she figured it was only a matter of time before he fell down. Though she had a million questions—at least—Jasmine forced herself to wait for the answers for just a little while longer.

  Grabbing one of the lab stools, she scooted it up to Quinn and then pressed on his chest. “Sit down before you fall down,” she told him, in her most physician-like tone. She grabbed his wrist and surreptitiously took his pulse for the second time in less than twenty-four hours. Like before, in the hotel room, it was weak and thready and way too fast. For a moment she couldn’t help wondering if Quinn had saved Tyler at the cost of himself.

  “Phoebe, he needs something with sugar. Do you have a soda or something?”

  “Sure.” Phoebe was out of the room in a flash, and Jasmine gritted her teeth, doing her best not to notice that her friend also moved with preternatural speed.

  “How are you feeling?” she asked Quinn, whose entire body was trembling.

  “I’m fine.” His voice was little more than a whisper, and Jasmine had to strain to hear him, a sure-fire sign that he was not doing as well as he pretended. “I need to check on Ty—”

  “Ty’s fine.” She gestured to where Tyler was resting, his head in the lap of the woman who had trailed him into the lab. She was softly stroking his hair and murmuring to him.

  She glanced around the lab, cursing as she did so. The place had everything, but that didn’t help her much—not when she didn’t know where anything was.

  Her frustration must have showed because Logan came over to her. “What do you need?”

  “Do you know if there’s a blanket around here anywhere? He’s freezing.”

  He looked at her in surprise, then crouched so that he could get a better look at Quinn’s face. “Hey, man. You doing all right?”

  “Just peachy.” It came out as a growl, and Logan laughed and patted him on the back. “He’s okay. Just a little tired.”

  Jasmine had to admit that Quinn did look somewhat better, but she had a strong feeling it had more to do with him not wanting to look weak in front of his friend than him actually feeling even close to okay.

  God save her from cavemen who pounded their chests. Nothing annoyed her more.

  Phoebe chose that moment to pop back in with a cold can of soda. Jasmine took it from her, then sent her off again in search of a blanket. As they waited, she opened the can and handed it to Quinn. “Drink the whole thing. Fast.”

  “I don’t want—”

  It was her turn to bend down until she was eye to eye with him. “Too bad you don’t get a vote. I don’t know what you just did there. I’m not even sure I want to know. But it took a hell of a lot out of you. You look like shit, your pulse is weak, your system is shocked, and at the moment I’m a hell of a lot more concerned about your health than I am about his.” She gestured behind her to the bed, where Tyler was resting peacefully.

  Quinn looked like he wanted to argue but seemed to change his mind. With a shrug, he took a long gulp of the soda. Jasmine kept her hand on his shoulder as she watched him carefully, pleased to see a little color return to his cheeks.

  Phoebe came back with the blanket, and within a couple of minutes, Quinn’s shaking subsided to the occasional violent chill. His hands became a lot steadier, and even his pulse calmed down a little. It wasn’t normal, but at least Jasmine wasn’t worried about him dropping dead anymore. At the same time, though, he still didn’t look ready to run a marathon or anything. He was a little pale, and his eyes looked absolutely exhausted.

  She didn’t like it—and not just from a medical standpoint. He’d pushed himself far, too far, to help Tyler. While she couldn’t fault him for that, it bugged the hell out of her that she was the only one who seemed concerned about him. Everyone else seemed to take his condition in stride. Even Logan had bothered to check on him only at her urging.

  It didn’t seem to upset Quinn at all, though, and that bugged her even more. He didn’t deserve such blatant unconcern. A part of her wanted nothing more than to get him into a bed where he could rest, and where she could curl up next to him and watch over him. It was a strange feeling, one she wasn’t entirely comfortable with. But obviously he needed someone to take care of him, as he did a crappy job of watching out for himself.

  She started to pull away—she wanted to get a stethoscope and listen
to his heart—but his hand reached up and grabbed hers, holding it against his shoulder. “Don’t go.”

  “I was just going to—”

  “Please.” His fingers tightened and something moved deep inside of her. Again, she saw him as he’d been when she’d awoken the night before, curled up on the floor, utterly vulnerable and worn out, yet determined not to bother her. It seemed this man was willing to take responsibility for everyone and everything but himself.

  Which meant she was just going to have to do it for him—at least until he was back up to fighting form.

  “Hey, Phoebe, is this kind of thing normal?”

  Phoebe snorted. “Define normal. Nothing around here is exactly status quo.”

  Like she hadn’t figured that out for herself? “I mean, is Quinn always like this after he does his—” She broke off, still not sure what name to put to whatever it was he had done.

  “I don’t know. Quinn’s a really private person. I’ve never noticed him having a problem before.”

  “Is that true?” Jasmine asked, turning to Quinn. “Is this kind of reaction unusual for you?” She bent down so no one could hear what she said next. “And don’t even think about lying to me. You won’t like what happens if you do.”

  His lush lips pulled into a grim line and his eyes narrowed, but not before she saw something move in them—something that wasn’t quite human. And suddenly all of the little clues fell into place.

  “Oh, shit. You’re—”

  She didn’t get a chance to finish as the side door banged open a second time. And this time, when a man so large he made Quinn, Gabe and Logan look regular-sized entered the room, Jasmine didn’t even flinch.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  “Would someone like to tell me what the hell is going on here?” The question echoed through the lab, and Quinn looked up just in time to see Dylan stride into his lab like an avenging angel on the warpath—which was pretty much what he was, if you substituted dragon wings for angel’s wings. It was also exactly what Quinn didn’t need right then—even if his old friend was in human form.