by J. R. Ward
She thought about the patient’s teeth. Yeah, maybe make that Doberman pinscher to the retriever.
The patient stared back at her, somehow managing to loom even though he was on his back, intubated, and only two hours out of trauma surgery.
How the hell was this guy conscious?
“Can you hear me?” she asked. “Nod your head if you can.”
His hand, the one with the tattoos, clawed at his throat, then grabbed onto the tube going into his mouth.
“No, that has to stay in.” As she leaned over to take his hand off of it, he whipped the thing back from her, moving it as far away as his arm would allow. “That’s right. Please don’t make me restrain you.”
His eyes went utterly wide in terror, just peeled right open as his big body started to shake on the bed. His lips worked against the tube down his throat as if he were crying out, and his fear touched her: There was such an animalistic edge to his desperation, like the way a wolf might look at you if his leg was caught in a trap: Help me and maybe I won’t kill you when you set me free.
She put her hand on his shoulder. “It’s all right. We don’t have to go that route. But we need that tube—”
The door to the room opened, and Jane froze.
The two men who came in were dressed in black leather and looked like the type who’d carry concealed weapons. One was probably the biggest, most gorgeous blond she’d ever eyeballed. The other scared her. He had a Red Sox hat pulled down low and a horrible air of malevolence about him. She couldn’t see a lot of his face, but going by his gray pallor, he seemed ill.
Looking at the pair, Jane’s first thought was that they had come for her patient, and not just to bring him flowers and yak it up.
Her second thought was that she was going to need security, stat.
“Get out,” she said. “Right now.”
The guy with the Sox cap completely ignored her and went over to the bedside. As he and the patient made eye contact, Red Sox reached out and the two linked hands.
In a hoarse voice, Red Sox said, “Thought I’d lost you, you son of a bitch.”
The patient’s eyes strained as if he were trying to communicate. Then he just shook his head from side to side on the pillow.
“We’re going to get you home, okay?”
As the patient nodded, Jane didn’t bother with any more Chatty-Cathy, you-need-to-leave shit. She lunged for the nursing station call button, the one that signaled a cardiac emergency and would bring half the floor to her.
She didn’t make it.
Red Sox’s buddy, the beautiful blond, moved so fast she couldn’t track him. One moment he was just inside the door; the next he’d grabbed her from behind and popped her feet off the floor. As she started to holler, he clamped his hand over her mouth and subdued her as easily as if she were a child throwing a tantrum.
Meanwhile, Red Sox systematically stripped the patient of everything: the intubation, the IV, the catheter, the cardiac wires, the oxygen monitor.
Jane went ballistic. As the machines’ alarms started going off, she hauled back and kicked her captor in the shin with her heel. The blond behemoth grunted then squeezed her rib cage until she got so busy trying to breathe she couldn’t soccer-ball him anymore.
At least the alarms would—
The shrill beeping fell silent even though no one touched the machines. And she had the horrible sense that nobody was coming from down the hall.
Jane fought harder, until she strained so hard her eyes watered.
“Easy,” the blond said in her ear. “We’ll be out of your hair in a minute. Just relax.”
Yeah, the hell she would. They were going to kill her patient—
The patient took a deep breath on his own. And another. And another. Then those eerie diamond eyes shifted over to her, and she stilled as if he’d willed her to do so.
There was a moment of silence. And then in a rough voice, the man whose life she saved spoke four words that changed everything…changed her life, changed her destiny:
“She. Comes. With. Me.”
Standing inside the nursing station, Phury did a quick hack job on the hospital’s IT system. He wasn’t as smooth or flashy with the keyboard as V was, but he was good enough. He located the records under the name Michael Klosnick and contaminated the findings and notes pertaining to Vishous’s treatment with random scripting: All the test results, the scans, the X-rays, the digital photographs, the scheduling, the postop notes, it all became unreadable. Then he entered a brief notation that Klosnick was indigent and had checked out AMA.
God he loved consolidated, computerized medical records. What a snap.
He’d also cleaned up the memories of most if not all of the OR staff. On the way up here he’d swung by the operating suite and had a little tête-à-tête with the nurses on duty. He’d lucked out. The shift hadn’t changed, so the folks who had been in with V were all present and he’d scrubbed them. None of those nurses would have distinct recollections of what they’d seen when the brother had been operated on.
It wasn’t a perfect erase job, of course. There were people he hadn’t gotten to and maybe some ancillary records that had been printed out. But that wasn’t his problem. Whatever confusion occurred in the wake of V’s disappearance would be absorbed into the frantic workings of a tremendously busy urban hospital. Sure, there might be a review or two of patient care, but they wouldn’t be able to find V by then, and that was all that mattered.
When Phury was finished with the computer, he jogged down the SICU floor. As he went, he fritzed out the security cameras that were embedded at regular intervals in the ceiling so all they’d show was fuzz.
Just as he came up to the room six, the door opened. Vishous was death warmed over in Butch’s arms, the brother pale and shaky and in pain, his head tucked into the cop’s neck. But he was breathing and his eyes were open.
“Let me take him,” Phury said, thinking Butch looked almost as bad.
“I’ve got him. You deal with our management issue and ride herd on the security cameras.”
“What management issue?”
“Wait for it,” Butch muttered as he headed for a fire door at the far end of the hall.
A split second later, Phury got a load of the problem: Rhage walked out into the hall with a rip-shit human female in a choke hold. She was fighting him tooth and nail, the muffled yelling suggesting she had a vocabulary like a trucker.
“You gotta knock her cold, my brother,” Rhage said, then grunted. “I don’t want to hurt her, and V said she had to come with us.”
“This was not supposed to be a kidnap operation.”
“Too fucking late. Now knock her out, would ya?” Rhage grunted again and switched his grip, his hand leaving her mouth to catch one of her flailing arms.
Her voice came through loud and clear. “So help me, God, I’m going to—”
Phury took her chin in his hand and forced her head up. “Relax,” he said softly. “Just ease up.”
He locked his stare on hers and began to will her into calmness…will her into calmness…will her into—
“Fuck you!” she spat. “I’m not letting you kill my patient!”
Okay, this wasn’t working. Behind those rimless glasses and dark green eyes, she had a formidable mind, so with a curse he brought out the big guns, mentally shutting her down completely. She sagged like a mop.
Removing her glasses, he folded them up and put them in the breast pocket of his coat. “Let’s bust out of here before she comes around again.”
Rhage flipped the woman over, draping her like a shawl off his heavy shoulder. “Get her bag from the room.”
Phury ducked in, picked up a leather tote and the folder marked with the name KLOSNICK, then beat feet from the room. When he came back into the hall, Butch was having a run-in with a nurse who’d come out of a patient room.
“What are you doing!” the woman said.
Phury got on her like a tent, jumping in front o
f her, staring her into a stupor, planting the urgent need in her frontal lobe to get to a staff meeting. By the time he caught up with the evac again, the woman in Rhage’s arms was already throwing off the mind control, shaking her head back and forth as it bobbed to the beat of Hollywood’s get-up-’n-go.
As they came up to the stairwell’s fire door, Phury barked, “Hold up, Rhage.”
The brother stopped on a dime and Phury clamped his hand on the side of the woman’s neck, putting her out cold with a pressure lock.
“She’s gone. S’all good.”
They hit the back stairs and hauled ass. Vishous’s rasping breath was testimony to how much the express-train action was killing him, but he was hard-core as always, hanging in, in spite of the fact that he’d turned the color of pea soup.
Each time they came to a landing, Phury pulled a little scramble with a security camera, running an electrical surge through the things so they blinked out. His big hope was that they’d make it to the Escalade without tangling with a bunch of security guards. Humans were never targets for the Brotherhood. That being said, if there was a risk of the vampire race being exposed, there was nothing that wouldn’t be done. And as hypnotizing large groups of agitated and aggressive humans had a low success rate, that left fighting. And death for them.
Some eight flights down the stairwell bottomed out, and Butch stopped in front of a metal door. Sweat poured down his face and he was weaving, but his eyes were soldier-strong: He was going to get his buddy out, and nothing was going to stand in his way, even his own physical weakness.
“I’ll do the door,” Phury said, jumping to the head of the pack. After taking care of the alarm, he held the slab of steel open for the others. On the far side, a maze of utility halls branched out.
“Oh, shit,” he muttered. “Where the hell are we?”
“Basement.” The cop marched ahead. “Know it well. Morgue’s on this level. Spent a lot of time here in my old job.”
Some hundred yards farther, Butch hooked them up with a shallow corridor that was more a shaft full of HVAC piping than any kind of hallway.
And then there it was: salvation in the form of an emergency access door.
“Escalade’s out here,” the cop said to V. “Sitting pretty.”
“Thank…God.” V’s lips pressed flat again, like he was trying not to throw up.
Phury did another jump ahead, then cursed. This alarm setup was different from the others, operating on a more complex circuitry. Which he should have expected. Exterior doors were frequently wired more heavily than interior ones. Trouble was, his little mental tricks weren’t going to work here, and it wasn’t like he could call a time-out to disarm the thing. V was looking roadkill bad.
“Brace yourself for a screamer,” Phury said before punching the bar handle.
The alarm went off like a banshee.
As they rushed out into the night, Phury wheeled around and looked up at the ass end of the hospital. He located the security camera over the door, got it to misread, and stayed locked with its blinking red eye as V and the human female were dumped inside the Escalade and Rhage got behind the wheel.
Butch took shotgun and Phury hopped into the back with the cargo. He checked his watch. Total elapsed time from when they’d first parked back here to Hollywood’s foot slamming down on the gas pedal was twenty-nine minutes. The op had been relatively clean. All that was left to do now was get everyone to the compound in one piece and scrap the plates on the SUV.
There was just one complication.
Phury shifted his eyes to the human woman.
One big, huge complication.
Chapter Ten
John was antsy as he waited in the mansion’s brilliantly colored foyer. He and Zsadist always went out for an hour before dawn, and there had been no change of plans as far as he was aware. But the Brother was nearly half an hour late.
To kill some more time, John took another trip across the mosaic floor. As always he felt as if he didn’t belong in all the grandeur, but he loved and appreciated it. The foyer was so outrageously fancy it was like standing in a jewelry box: Columns in red marble and some kind of green-and-black stone supported walls festooned with gold-leafed curlicue thingies and light fixtures with crystals. The staircase up was a majestic expanse of red carpet, the kind of thing a movie star would pause dramatically at the top of, then swoop down to a black-tie party. And the pattern beneath your feet was of an apple tree in bloom, the bright palate of spring resplendent and glimmering thanks to millions of sparkling pieces of colored glass.
His favorite thing, though, was the ceiling. Three stories up there was an astonishing stretch of painted scenes, with warriors and stallions leaping to life as they went into battle with black daggers. They were so real it was as if you could reach up and touch them.
So real it was as if you could be them.
He thought back to when he’d first seen it all. Tohr had been taking him to meet Wrath.
John swallowed. He’d had Tohrment for such a short time. Mere months. After a lifetime of feeling ungrounded, after having floated along for two decades without any family-gravity to anchor him, he’d been given a glimpse of what he’d always wanted. And then with one bullet both his adoptive father and mother were gone.
He’d like to be big enough to say he was grateful he’d known Tohr and Wellsie for the time he had, but that was a lie. He wished he’d never met them. The loss of them was so much harder to bear than the amorphous ache he’d had when he’d been by himself.
Not really a male of worth, was he?
Without warning, Z strode out of the hidden door under the grand staircase, and John stiffened. He couldn’t help it. No matter how many times he saw the Brother, Zsadist’s appearance always made him think twice. It wasn’t just the facial scar or the skull trim. It was the deadly air that hadn’t been lost, even though he was now mated and going to be a father.
Plus tonight, Z’s face was cast-iron tight, his body even tighter. “You good to go?”
John narrowed his eyes and signed, What’s going on?
“Nothing you need to worry about. Are you ready.” Not a question, a command.
When John nodded and zipped up his parka, the two of them went out through the front vestibule.
The night was the color of a dove, the stars faded by a thin saturation of clouds that was backlit by a full moon. According to the calendar spring was coming, but it was just in theory, if you went by the landscape: The fountain in front of the mansion remained out of commission for the winter, empty and waiting to be refilled. The trees were like black skeletons reaching to the sky, pleading with their bony arms for the sun to get stronger. Snow lingered on the lawns, stubbornly hanging in over ground that was still frozen solid.
The wind held a cheek-slapping chill as he and Zsadist walked over to the right, the pebbles of the courtyard shifting under their boots. The compound’s security wall was off in the distance, a twenty-foot-tall, three-foot-thick bulwark that encircled the Brotherhood’s property. The thing was strung with security cameras and motion detectors, a good soldier packing a shitload of ammo. But all that was just small potatoes, really. The true keep-out was the 120 volts of electrical charge that ran across the top in curls of barbed wire.
Safety first. Always.
John followed Z down the snow-patched lawn, passing battened-down flower beds and the drained swimming pool in the back. After a gentle decline they reached the forest edge. At this point the monster wall hung a sharp louie and shot down the mountainside. They didn’t follow it, but penetrated the tree line.
Beneath thick pines and densely branched maples there was a pad of old needles and leaves and not much undergrowth. Here, the air smelled like earth and cold air, a combination that made the inside of his nose tingle.
As usual, Zsadist led. The paths they took each night were different and felt random, but they always ended at the same place, a short-stack waterfall: The brook that came down the mountai
nside threw itself off a little cliff, then formed a shallow pool some nine feet across.
John went over and put his hand into the gurgling rush. As his palm pierced the tumble, his fingers numbed out from the cold.
In silence Zsadist crossed the stream, leaping from rock to rock to rock. The Brother’s grace was that of the water, flowing and strong, his footing so sure it was clear he knew precisely how his body would react to each shift of muscle.
On the far side he walked up to the waterfall so he was across from John.
Their eyes met. Oh, man, Z had something to say tonight, didn’t he.
The walks had started up after John had attacked another classmate and laid the kid out cold in the locker room shower. Wrath had made them a condition upon John staying in the training program, and he’d dreaded them at first, figuring Z was going to try to crawl all around his head. Up until now, however, they had always been about silence.
That wasn’t going to be the case tonight.
John retracted his arm, walked downstream a little, and crossed over without Zsadist’s confidence or dexterity.
As he came up to the Brother, Z said, “Lash is coming back.”
John crossed his arms over his chest. Oh, great, the asshole John had put on a gurney. Granted, Lash had been beyond asking for it, coming after John, heckling and pushing him, turning on Blay. But still.
“And he’s gone through the change.”
Terrific. Even frickin’ better. Now the bastard would be gunning for him with muscle.
When? John signed.
“Tomorrow. I’ve made it clear if he pulls any shit, he’s out for good. You have problems with him, you come to me, we clear?”
Shit. John wanted to take care of himself. He didn’t want to be watched over like a kid.
“John? You come to me. Nod your damn head.”
John did so slowly.
“You will not aggress on the fucker. I don’t care what he says or what he does. Just because he gets up in your face doesn’t mean you have to react.”
John nodded, because he had a feeling Z was going to ask him to again if he didn’t.