by J. R. Ward
“I am going wherever he goes.” Sarah got up. “I am not leaving his side. And will someone please explain to me why we’re not on the way to law enforcement and a medical center right now?”
The doctor gave the commando a look like he was accountable for something. Then the woman said, “I’d like to check John before I go.”
“He’s upstairs.” The commando also stood. “And I’ll take care of things down here.”
“Take care of what things?” Sarah asked sharply as the doctor went to the bottom of the stairs and called up.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered.
“Sorry about what?”
Loud footsteps came down the stairs, and Sarah glanced through the hall to the see the male half of the couple shirtless and clearly worried . . . as he presented a nasty shoulder wound for the doctor’s inspection.
“Sarah? Will you look at me?”
Reflexively, she glanced at the commando—only to recoil at the intense expression on his face. At which point, from out of nowhere, a strange, piercing pain hit her temples, as if she’d eaten ice cream too fast—
“This is getting worse,” she heard the doctor say off in the distance.
Breaking eye contact with the commando—something that was strangely difficult to do, as if their stares had formed a tangible tie—Sarah leaned to the side and looked down the hall again. The doctor was palpating that shoulder—and before Sarah could help herself, she burst up and walked down to the two of them.
The doctor seemed surprised at the intrusion—and Sarah didn’t bother with reading anyone else’s expression. She was fascinated by the wound. It was unlike anything she had ever seen before—and jeez, talk about ugly. There was a blackened erosion of the first and second layers of skin along the edges of an infected area that extended from the top of the shoulder down onto the pectoral.
“Have you tried antibiotics?” Sarah asked. “What have you done so far to treat this?”
When they all stared at her and the commando came in from the kitchen, she glanced around at the group—which now included the girlfriend/wife who had come down the stairs.
“I’m sorry.” She took a step back and looked up at the patient. “I don’t mean to be pushy, but I’m a molecular geneticist. I specialize in the immune system and I’m just curious about what’s going on here for you. Your body’s clearly fighting off something, and the researcher in me wants to know what it is and what you’re doing to help yourself?”
She was surprised when the man lifted his hands and signed, I was hurt fighting. We haven’t treated it with antibiotics because it’s not that kind of infection.
The girlfriend/wife cleared her throat. “He really doesn’t want to talk about this—”
Sarah signed back, What kind of infection is it?
Smart was sexy.
It was also incredibly inconvenient when you were trying to get into someone’s brain, take over their thoughts, erase their short-term memory . . . and send them back to the human world where they belonged.
Murhder had a lot of experience wiping memories and replacing them with different versions of events, but he’d never started the process and had his target break away from the mind control and latch onto something else so completely that their consciousness locked him out.
Hello, Sarah.
And P.S., he loved her name.
As she and John signed back and forth, Murhder was very aware he needed to get into her skull again, and not just finish the scrub job, but start the damn thing all over. Instead, he just stood there like a planker, enjoying the sight of her as she communicated with John, her hands flipping smoothly through positions.
Lot of nodding between the pair of them.
Then Sarah looked at the doctor known as Jane. “I don’t have to know the details of how it happened. I can respect his privacy. But I don’t understand what the infection is—any more than you all do, evidently. I have a feeling you are not going to take him to a medical center, and no, I am not going to make trouble for you guys.” She glanced around. “But I can help if you want someone who knows a helluva lot about immune response to take a stab at it.”
Xhex spoke up from the stairwell’s bottom step. “What kind of help?”
“I’m not going to lie,” Sarah replied. “I don’t have any treatments immediately in mind. But I don’t like to see patients in pain or scared about their future. I deal with cancer patients, and trust me, after having lost both my parents to that disease, I know too well how hard it is to be terrified about your health. I’m motivated by all that, but also the researcher in me is fascinated. I want to know what the tissue looks like under the microscope. I want to see what his white blood cells are doing. I want to go down to that cellular level and find out what’s happening. There’s no easy solution, of course. Immunotherapy is still new science and it’s not like there’s a magic pill or shot that I can recommend that will make him better. I would love to help, though, and it is my area of expertise.”
Murhder waited for the Brotherhood’s doctor to pump the brakes on the idea. Then he glanced at Xhex and figured she’d be shaking her head. Finally, he checked out John and expected him to no-thank-you the offer.
When none of that happened, he tried not to get excited. Failed.
And had to remind himself that ultimately it was not going to work. Sarah couldn’t stay in their world, and the longer she was involved with vampires, the more memories she gathered, and the more difficult and painful it was going to be to clean her out.
Short-term stuff was one thing. Long-term was a different story.
Sarah shrugged. “Besides, after tonight, I’m out of a job anyway. Likely out of a career when I come forward with what I know.”
The Brotherhood’s doctor spoke up. “What was your name? I’m sorry, I didn’t catch it.”
“Dr. Sarah Watkins.” She put her palm out. “As I said, I specialize in immunotherapy for cancer patients and I am about to have a lot of time on my hands.”
“I’m Jane.” The two shook hands. “Dr. Jane Whitcomb.”
“Pleased to meet you.” There was a long pause. “Do you mind if I make some phone calls first?”
Murhder stepped up. “Sarah? Look at me, please. Just for a moment.”
This time, without her incredible intellect distracted by the thing that interested it most, he found getting into her consciousness and staying there much easier.
Images rose from out of the depths of her memories, sunken boats floating to the surface of her own private sea. He saw a lot of a human man and guessed it was her fiancé—no surprise, he had an instant dislike of the guy. He also saw a lot of the inside of a laboratory not unlike the one they had infiltrated at the site. He further saw a simple house, with simple furnishings, and a bed that was messy only on one side.
He also caught the recollections of an FBI agent showing up on the doorstep of that simple house . . . and how she had made the man a coffee and sat down with him to answer questions about her dead fiancé.
Sarah had been unnerved by the whole thing.
Murhder slipped a patch over those memories associated with the FBI agent, effectively disappearing any mental trace of that visitor and his line of inquiry. Gone. As if she’d never met the man.
As he withdrew from her consciousness, she winced and rubbed her temples. “Does anyone have a Motrin? I’ve got a heck of a headache.”
“I’ll get you some,” Xhex said as she turned and went back up the stairs.
Murhder took a deep breath. “Sarah, exactly how open-minded are you?”
It wasn’t exactly a question.
More like a prayer of his.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
As Doc Jane went off somewhere with her phone up to her ear and her voice at whisper level, and Murhder and the human researcher went back to the kitchen, John turned to the sofa and looked at the pretrans who was sitting under a quilt and watching everything with wide, exhausted eyes.
Jo
hn lifted his palm at the kid.
“Hi,” the boy said back. “You don’t talk?”
John shook his head and went over to a rocking chair. When he sat down, the thing creaked like it might lose its structural integrity under his weight, but somehow the antique managed to hold him.
“What happened to your voice?” the young asked. “Were you hurt?”
John shook his head and then shrugged.
“You were born like that and you don’t know why.” When John nodded, the kid seemed sad. “I’m sorry.”
John shrugged again and put up his palms, all what-can-you-do. Then he pointed into the other room, to Doc Jane, and gave the boy a thumbs-up.
“You trust her?” John put his hand over his heart, closed his eyes, and nodded. “You trust her with your life.”
John gave the a-okay sign. Then pointed to the kid and made the a-okay sign.
“You think I’m going to be all right?”
John nodded, made the cross in front of his chest, and then pointed his finger like a gun, put it to his temple and pulled the trigger.
The young smiled. “Cross your heart, hope to die.”
John jammed a thumb toward his eyeball.
“Stick a finger in your eye.”
John made the a-okay sign again.
The boy got serious. “I knew my mahmen was dead. Last night, I was asleep in the cage, and all of a sudden, I felt someone shake me awake. As I sat up . . . I felt like she was sitting next to me, the way it used to be, the two of us together. It made me miss her so much. And then the feeling went away. It was like she visited me on her way unto the Fade.”
John nodded and put his hand over his heart, rubbing.
“Thanks. I appreciate that.” When John nodded again, the young took a deep breath. “I told the doctor what the last month has been like. The humans at the lab, they were getting excited because my readings are all messed up. My mahmen, she told me if I lived this long that I had to watch for signs that my change was coming. She also told me that I had to get out of that lab before the transition hit. The humans weren’t going to know what to do to get me through it.”
John shook his head. Then he exposed his watch, tapped it, and pointed at the young.
“How old am I? I’m twenty. Or at least I think I am that old. Sometimes I’m not sure whether I count the years correctly. It’s kind of messed up in my head. My mahmen, she told me I’d go through the change at about twenty-five, but that stress could add or subtract from that.”
John let the kid talk it all out and decided that one good thing about being mute was that he was able to give people a lot of space to share what was going on for them. And the more the kid chatted to him, the more he returned to his own past, to when he’d been scrawny and living in that rat hole, calling the Suicide Prevention Hotline, praying for Mary’s voice on the other line.
This young was just as lost as he had been.
And like John, he’d been found in a nick of time.
Jesus, it made him sick to his stomach to think of what would have happened to the pretrans if he hadn’t been rescued tonight—because the kid was right. Those humans couldn’t have gotten him to a female of the species—hell, they probably didn’t even know they had to. And if he’d hit the transition without the proper vein to take, he was going to die outright.
Unfortunately, sometimes the young died anyway. Even if they had help.
A powerful worry took up root in John’s chest as he stared across the safe house’s sitting room. For some reason, he didn’t want anything to happen to this young.
Funny, how what you had in common with a stranger could turn them into family so quickly.
“Were you scared when you went through the change?” the young asked.
John nodded. And then he pointed to himself and flashed the thumbs-up.
“But you made it. And you’re big and okay.”
As John nodded again, the kid took a deep breath. “Do you think they’ll let the human woman stay with me? And the big male?”
John nodded, even though he wasn’t sure what was going to happen. But come on, surely the Brotherhood would give the young a break? And he was very close to the transition. John could scent it.
“I just don’t . . .” Those eyes gleamed with tears. “I’ve been alone for a really long time and I’m scared.”
John pointed to the kid. Then pointed to the center of his own chest. Then he curled his upper lip and tapped his fang with his finger. After that, he made a slashing motion in front of his own throat.
“You were alone, too? In the human world.”
John nodded grimly.
“Really? I thought I was the only one.” The boy took a deep breath. “It’s kind of a relief to know that isn’t the case.”
When John nodded once again, the kid half-smiled. “No offense, I’d rather we have winning the lottery in common.”
The two of them laughed, the young with sound, John without.
Not that the difference mattered.
In making the immunology pitch, Sarah had played the only card she had. Her instincts were telling her that her time with the group was ending. Somehow, they were either going to disappear on her, or disappear her—although not in a mortal sense: At no time had she felt threatened or fearful for her life. But this secretive enclave of . . . she didn’t know what . . . had resources, talent and intelligence, and clearly liked to stay under the radar.
She thought of the security guard at BioMed. Kraiten, himself. She couldn’t begin to explain how the commandos had seemed to take control of those men. And the fact that she didn’t understand so much of what had happened made her want to know more about them. Was it the researcher in her?
Or maybe something more primal?
Across the kitchen, leaning back against the counter, the commando with the red-and-black hair was looking at her with the kind of speculation usually reserved for women who were not like Sarah. And no, she didn’t mean that she wasn’t attractive. But those hooded eyes, the fixated stare, the erotic air around his big body, were more often directed at those who put their sexuality on display and encouraged the currency exchange of sex and attraction with men.
Meanwhile, she was looking like a hot mess over here in the damn hazmat suit.
Unless, of course, he had a fetish thing for weather balloons.
“You’ve never told me your name,” she blurted. When he hesitated to respond, she had to smile. “Top secret, huh.”
“Is it important?”
“It’s where most people start when they want to get to know each other.”
Abruptly, his voice dropped low, the tone deepening. “Do you want to know me?”
The words were simple. The question behind the curtain of those syllables was anything but.
Sarah glanced down at her hands. It had been so long, she thought.
“Sorry,” he muttered.
“Yes,” she said without looking up. “I do want to know you.”
That scent, that cologne he wore, returned to her nose, and she swore the smell of it gave her a contact high: All at once, she was floating in her own body.
“Sarah.”
Taking a deep breath, she shook her head. “I’m not good at this.”
“Good at what.”
She wanted to tell him that she hadn’t been with anyone since Gerry died, but she didn’t want to dwell on that. People were allowed to move on, weren’t they? And it had been two years since he’d been gone. Two years . . . which had been preceded by a lot of lonely nights.
And it was funny, in the midst of this drama, this storm of incomprehensible scope and unprecedented magnitude, she found herself wanting to break free of everything: Her humdrum life, her complicated grief, her sense that she had somehow missed her future because nothing had ended up as it was supposed to.
Gerry gone. Her alone. Now her job likely over—because she’d trespassed at her goddamn research facility, busted out a hostage patient, and
gone on the lam with a bunch of commandos who were so far off the grid, they had their own medical team.
“Lam”? Or was it “lamb”? She didn’t even know what the proper term/spelling was.
Because, hello, the closest she had ever come to committing a crime was parking too close to a frickin’ fire hydrant.
Sarah rubbed her aching head. Hell, maybe the tossing sea of emotion she was in was part of her attraction to this stranger. He represented an anonymous outlet for all the energy she couldn’t seem to hold inside her skin—
When a floorboard creaked, she looked up.
He was standing in front of her, this incredibly tall man with that hair, those peach-colored eyes . . . that body . . .
Okay, fine. The attraction was also probably his body, she decided. He would look amazing laying naked in messy sheets, all those muscles on display and his . . . sword of love . . . all erect and—
Sword of love? Had her brain really just spit that one out?
And please, God, let her have kept that to herself.
“Sarah . . .”
The way he said her name was a caress, something tactile as opposed to just sound through air. And as she allowed her eyes to travel down his chest to his hips, it became abundantly clear he could more than follow up on the sexual tension between them.
He was fully aroused. And not bothering to hide it in the slightest.
“Yes,” she said.
As she spoke, she was aware that she had answered the question that arousal of his was asking: She didn’t know where and she didn’t know when, but she and this stranger were going to be together.
The doctor came into the kitchen. “Okay. Let’s bring you in. Let’s do it.”
Yes, Sarah thought to herself as she got up from the table. We’re going to.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Throe, son of Throe, sat at a Louis XV bureau plat in a canary-yellow parlor in a mansion he had inherited from a distant relative because of a murder.
Or at least that was how he had come to frame his largesse. In reality, he had no official property rights to the home and he’d had no relation to the deceased other than sharing the social status and DNA common to all aristocrats. Still, he had possession of the structure, and that was not going to be challenged by rightful heirs because no one knew the previous owner was dead.