by J. R. Ward
“I’ve tested it for everything.”
All at once, Sarah’s researcher brain came fully online. Sure as a football stadium would turn its lights on at night, section by section, her mind blazed with questions, thoughts, observations, ideas.
Dimly, she realized she had been on autopilot at work for quite a while, going through the motions at the lab, being competent, although not extraordinary.
It was only now as her enthusiasm got her buzzing that she recognized the slump she’d been in.
She straightened and addressed the doctor. “I want to see everything you’ve got.”
The blond woman looked at the solider. “John, would you consent to—”
When he nodded vigorously, the doctor smiled a little. “Come on, Sarah, let’s go to my computer. We can start there.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
Xhex strode through the subterranean tunnel that connected the Brotherhood mansion to the training center at a fast walk. She wanted to run, but she didn’t have the energy for that, even though her nerves were live wires under her skin, her body was a tuning fork for anxiety, and her head was a cocktail blender full of Holy Fuck Frojitos. She had only gone back to her and John’s room to shower and change, but even that felt like too much time away from him.
When she came up to the entrance to the training center, she put in a code, the lock sprang, and she stepped into a supply closet that had OfficeMax written all over it. On the far side of all the shelves of printer paper, Scotch tape and Bic pens, she exited through the facility’s office and hit the corridor.
Only to stop short.
Murhder was halfway down to the parking area. Leaning against the wall. Arms crossed, one foot over the other. Head lowered.
Resuming her stride, she approached the former Brother, and he looked over, his red-and-black hair fanning across his shoulder.
“How we doing with the young?” she asked.
“Nate’s good. Well, good as can be expecting. Expected, I mean.” He rubbed his eyes like his head hurt. “Jane and Sarah are in with your male. Two doors up.”
Xhex still wasn’t sure how she felt about some random human messing around with the single most important person in her life. But it wasn’t like anyone on the vampire side had a bright idea about what could be done. And everything would be vetted first. Or rather, it better be.
As Murhder went back to staring at the concrete floor, she was struck by how familiar that pose of his was to her. This was what he’d always looked like when he was working through shit in his head.
Even though she wanted to get to John, she eased back against the cold concrete wall, crossing her arms just as Murhder had.
“Are you going to ask if the woman can stay?” Xhex rubbed her nose as it itched from the underground. “Does she want to?”
“Well, if she can find a way to help John . . . maybe she won’t have to leave?” He shrugged. “I mean, there are humans all around here now. The rules have clearly changed from my time.”
Yes and no, Xhex thought.
“So, are you planning on hanging around, then,” she prompted.
As he opened his mouth, but closed it quickly, she had the impression he hadn’t thought any of this through: not his obvious attraction to the human woman, not his presence here in the Brotherhood’s orbit, not the longer term of anything.
“I don’t have a role here anymore,” he said after a moment.
“You were really effective on that lab infiltration.”
“Old habits.” He glanced over. “I’m going to go back to South Carolina. After . . . I mean, as soon as . . .”
“You’ll take her with you, then?”
“Ah . . . I haven’t gotten that far.”
As Xhex measured the cut of his jaw, she could feel the tension in his body, sure as if it were her own.
“You deserve to be happy,” she murmured.
He shook his head. “Don’t waste time pitying me. I’m fine.”
“It’s not pity.” She thought of her relationship with her mate—and wanted him to find that with someone. “It’s only fair.”
He frowned and lowered his eyes again. “I have a question.”
“Talk to me.”
When a silence stretched between them, she thought about where they had started out, two people in a club in the ’90s, drawn to each other because they had been the only vampires there. A one-night stand had turned into a habit—which had somehow gotten back to her symphath kin. And then chaos and torture and dark, dark places for them both.
No way she would have put them here, in the Brotherhood’s training center, her mated, him interested in a human.
“That stuff that was done to me.” He motioned around his head. “Up in the colony. The things that they . . . uncovered and leveraged against me.”
Xhex closed her eyes and cursed her bloodline. “Yeah.”
“Is it permanent. The damage, I mean. Did they break me or just wound me?”
Fucking symphaths. Their weapons left no outward scars, no tears in the skin that bled, no bones that were broken, no disfigurements that didn’t heal. But the destructiveness of what they wrought was almost worse than all that.
The mind was a delicate, dispositive instrument in any person’s life, capable of defining their entire mortal experience.
You fucked with that shit? Most people ended up a wasteland.
Murhder’s voice dropped to a whisper. “They took me to places . . . even as my body wasn’t moved.”
She could only imagine.
“Of course they didn’t break you,” she heard herself say.
When she reopened her eyes, she found him staring at her, and she was struck by how strong he had to have been to get over the torture as much as he had.
“You never lied to me before,” he said grimly. “Given what’s at stake, I’ll ask you to pay me the respect of not starting now.”
Xhex took a deep breath and felt like the floor was opening beneath her feet so some version of Dhunhd could swallow her down. She was responsible for everything that had been done to him.
“The truth is . . .” Xhex wished she had a better answer for him. “I don’t know. Everyone’s different. Some people rebound, eventually. Some . . .”
“Stay insane, right?” When she didn’t reply, he muttered, “Jesus Christ, Xhex, I need to know where I stand. I got a brief return to what seemed like normal when I was getting us out of that lab, but now . . . I don’t know whether that was a hiccup or a trajectory out of this hell I’ve been in.”
“I can’t answer that. No one can.”
“I’ve been twenty years off the planet, unable to connect. I guess I was just hoping that the way I felt on that evac means I’m . . . okay.”
The sadness in his voice was backed up by fear, and Xhex found herself wanting to punch the concrete wall. “This is all my fault—”
“No,” he snapped. “You don’t own any of this. I decided to come after you, and your relations did what they did to me. Did what they did to you, too.”
“But you had no idea what you were walking into. And that is on me. And then you protected me after I burned that first lab down by letting the Brotherhood think it was you.”
Murhder went back to focusing on the floor, and as things got quiet, she knew he was replaying all kinds of bad scenes in his head.
“When do we ever know what we’re walking into,” he said in a low voice. “Destiny is not a straightaway. It’s cluttered with corners and all of them are dark. We make the turns we do . . . and find ourselves where we are.”
As he stopped talking, she became very aware that she owed him.
The question was, how did she repay the debt he refused to acknowledge or entertain.
The next time Sarah looked at the clock—the one on the lower right-hand corner of a computer screen—the lineup of numbers read five eighteen. Sitting back in the office chair, she cracked her spine and wondered whether that was five in the afternoon o
r five in the morning. It had to be afternoon, she decided, as in late in the afternoon, almost twenty-four hours after she had driven to BioMed with her backpack and those credentials from the safety deposit box.
As well as some vague idea of rescuing someone she wasn’t sure actually existed.
What a day. After hours and hours of studying John’s case, her mind was spinning with everything she had learned. After studying slides and test results, and talking with the staff, and processing it all through the filter of her own training and experience she was . . .
Jazzed.
It was the only way to describe the feeling. She was alive. Excited. Focused.
She did not like the fact that John had something wrong with him. Or that his loved ones were worried. But the idea of solving the problem, getting him cured, returning him to full health? In this new landscape of anatomy and immune system? Given that no one was really sure what the pathogen was?
It was the chance of a lifetime in a totally new horizon.
And of course, in the back of her mind, she was wondering how all of this could help humans with cancer. Vampires were apparently like sharks. They didn’t get the disease. So why not? Especially as so much about them was the same.
Although so much was different, too.
“You hungry?”
The sound of the deep male voice behind her made her nape tingle—and not because she was frightened.
Spinning her chair around, she looked up at her commando. He’d taken a shower and changed clothes, although now everything was black, just like the other men—males. His long red-and-black hair was damp on the ends and he smelled . . . heavenly.
“Is Nate still okay?” she said.
“He’s doing very well. He ate something and now he’s resting.”
“What did he have?” Like he was her kid or something. “That ginger and rice—”
“Roast beef.”
“Oh, that’s great! A serving or two of that can help his iron counts.”
“It wasn’t just a serving. He had a whole roast beef. As in . . . a bone-in, standing prime rib roast. I believe they said it weighed sixteen pounds.”
Sarah blinked. “Jeez, what was dessert—an entire pie?”
“Vanilla ice cream.”
“Oh, that’s more reasonable. It’s not like he ate a whole half gallon.”
“And the pie.”
“What?”
“He ate a half gallon of vanilla ice cream with an apple pie. He’s in a food coma now.”
Sarah threw her head back and laughed. Part of it was relief. Part of it was lack of sleep. Part of it was . . . the smile on the commando’s face: Because he felt the same way she did, that connected them.
And she liked being connected to him.
“What is your name,” she said as she caught her breath. When he hesitated, she shrugged. “Come on, I already know everything. Well, a lot of things, at any rate. Your name is a simple thing, right?”
The commando cleared his throat. “I come from a warrior tradition.”
She looked up and down his magnificent body. “Really? And here I thought you were a baker.”
The fact that he laughed again made her feel good.
“No,” he said. “I don’t make bread or rolls.”
“Have you ever tried?”
“Ah, no.”
“Okay, well, don’t feel bad. Neither have I. You were saying? You’re a badass?”
That smile got bigger. But then faded into a wince. “So our names . . . the names we are given are meant to inspire fear. They are identifiers of our nature as defenders of the race—”
Sarah put her palm up. “Just tell me. How bad can it be?”
“Murhder. My name is Murhder.”
She laughed. And then her mouth fell open before she could catch herself. “Wait, you’re serious.” When he nodded, she tried to compose herself. “Oh. Wow. Is—um, is that first or last?”
“Last. My first name is Cold-Blooded.” As she did a double take, he smiled shyly. “I’m joking. It’s just Murhder.”
Sarah broke out in a laugh. “Did you make a funny?”
He blushed. “I did. I made a joke.”
He was so hesitant, so . . . endearingly unsure of the humor . . . that she wanted to hug him.
“That’s a good one.” She got up out of the chair. “And I am starved. Do you know where food is?”
“I do. Everyone’s gone up to the big house for First Meal, but there’s a break room down the way. And yes, Nate’s being monitored by machines with loads of alarms. If he needs anything, people are going to come running, including us.”
“Good. Let’s do this.”
Sarah followed the commando’s—Murhder’s—lead, heading down the concrete corridor and coming up to Nate’s hospital room. Opening the door, she leaned in and reassured herself that he was, indeed, sound asleep, a slight snore rising from his man’s throat.
“I still can’t believe what he went through,” she murmured.
Murhder’s voice was quiet. “It’s just the way it works for us.”
Making sure the door closed silently, they continued down the hall, walking side by side—and it felt normal. Natural. As if she had been striding next to him for years.
“So how’s your work with John?”
She exhaled. “Well, they refuse to tell me how he was injured. It’s the one piece I don’t have, but I’m working around that. At the end of the day, the ‘how’ is not as important as the ‘where.’ ”
“Like in the shoulder location?”
“No, as in the status of the wound. I mean, on a molecular level, where are we—is it getting worse? What can I do to make it better? This kind of thing.” She glanced around. “Speaking of which, where are we?” And then she held her palm up. “I know you probably can’t tell me, but I’m just . . . who paid for all this? Where does the money come from?”
“Here, let me get the door for you.”
As he jumped ahead and opened the way into a cafeteria-like space, she knew he wasn’t going to answer any of those questions—and it was a reminder that she was just a visitor here. Not a new resident.
Sarah stopped abruptly and stared at the dorm couches, the tables with chairs, the vending machines and the hot and cold buffet that was stocked with food that smelled delicious.
“I won’t remember anything,” she said in a rough voice.
When she looked over at Murhder, he met her eyes. “No. Nothing.”
In the silence that stretched out between them, she tried to memorize everything about him, from the fall of his incredible hair to his strong, handsome face, from his broad shoulders and heavy chest to his long, long legs. When her stare returned to his, the air between them changed, that electric current igniting, the sexual attraction not returning so much as resurfacing because it had never really left her: With all distractions pushed aside, and the fact that they were alone together, she became keenly aware of her own body . . . and his.
“Sarah,” he said in that way he did, in that low growl of his.
The first thing that went through her mind was that if she wouldn’t remember this anyway, why not pursue the attraction? She had never judged people for having casual sex, and God, who could blame her for wanting him? But more to the point, there were going to be no aftershocks, no regrets, because she was going to have no memory of being with him, however the sex went.
Yet the instant those thoughts went through her mind, she threw them out. She had more self-respect, for one thing—she was going to own her decisions, whether or not she had any memory of what the sex was like. And for another, that kind of thinking dehumanized him, reducing him to a kinky sex toy she used in a proverbial hotel room while away on a business trip—nothing more than a romp outside her normal bandwidth that she didn’t need to feel guilty about because it was out of context and didn’t count.
Wait, “dehumanized” wasn’t the right word, was it. More like . . . “devampired him.
” Or something.
Shit.
“I won’t hurt you,” he said.
In the back of her mind, she realized it was the second time he’d said that to her. And she believed him. Down to her core, she had this strange, abiding faith that, regardless of whatever else was being kept from her, when it came to keeping her safe, he was speaking the truth.
Sarah reached her hand up toward his face. And as if he knew what she wanted, he leaned in from his great height, giving her the warmth of his skin, the rasp of his five o’clock shadow, the cut of his jaw.
The instant the connection was made, she knew that she would do this anyway. She would choose him, this man—this male, she corrected—even if she would have memories that made her miss him for the rest of her life. And the strength of that conviction was such that she wished she would remember him. In fact, she wished for things even further along than that, things she was not going to get out of this . . . whatever it was.
Things like a future. A relationship. A partnership.
Which was nuts. She barely knew him—and had only just learned his kind even existed.
“Anywhere,” he groaned. “Touch me anywhere you want.”
When she glanced at the door and wondered if anyone was going to interrupt at an inopportune time, there was a subtle click, as if it locked itself. Before she decided whether that was alarming or not, he pointed to his chest.
“I did that—so we won’t be disturbed. But you’re free to go. The lock’s on this side and I will never stop you from leaving.”
“You always read my mind.”
He opened his mouth to reply—except as her fingertips brushed over his lower lip, the contact seemed to make him lose all thought.
“I’m not using you,” she told him. “I just want to be clear.”
“I wouldn’t care if you were.”
Sarah put her hands on the pads of his pecs and rode the big muscles up to his shoulders. Waves of that cologne he wore got into her nose anew, as if the sexual connection was turning up all her sensory receptors and amplifying everything.
God, he was big. And hard.
Everywhere.
“Kiss me,” she said as she tilted her head up.