by J. R. Ward
Doc Jane checked her phone again, and when she saw that there was still just a lot of nothing on the screen, she mentally ran through her patient-status list. Assail was...exactly where he had been. Luchas was in the pool doing PT with Ehlena. No other beds were in use and she wasn't due for Rhamp and Lyric's regular checkup for another two hours.
She thought about texting Vishous and asking where he was, but an awkward, unpleasant sensation stopped her--and it took her a minute to figure out what it was.
Intrusion.
She felt as though it would be an intrusion to reach out to him, and the more she considered the tightness in her chest, the clearer things became. When had this started, she wondered. When had she begun to believe she was bothering her mate if she shot him a text?
That was wrong, she thought. All wrong.
Turning around, she headed for the office, opening the way in and going past the desk and the filing cabinets. The supply closet was off to the side, and she entered the shallow space, shuffling by all the stacks of legal pads, the boxes of pens, and the reams of printer paper. At the hidden access door in the back, she entered a code, stepped through into the tunnel--
And immediately chided herself for a lack of efficiency. Letting herself fade to ghost would have obviated all the opening and closing, but the longer she got used to being in her skin, so to speak, the more she fell into the habits and necessaries of regular mortals.
Even though they no longer applied.
Also...she kind of wanted to walk to clear her head.
The subterranean tunnel that linked the training center to the mansion, where the Brotherhood household stayed, and the Pit, which was Vishous and Butch's crash pad, was a straight shot of underground, the fluorescent lights on the ceiling like a landing strip that had gotten confused about gravity. As she walked along, she took her stethoscope from around her neck and put it into one of the square pockets of her white coat. Her scrubs were clean and blue, her Crocs red, her socks thick and from L.L. Bean.
What season was it, she wondered. Winter, now. It was...yes, January.
When was the last time she had gone outside?
Okay, that was not that long ago. In the last couple of weeks, she and Manny, her medical partner in all things whether it was surgery, general medicine, or administration, had responded to a number of emergencies out in the field downtown. But in situations like that you couldn't really enjoy the season--or even note whether it was hot or cold. Those trips were the same as going out of town for business: You might have been in New York City, but it wasn't to see a show or visit a museum or grab a gourmet meal.
No, during those times, she had been desperately trying to save someone's life: Peyton's, Rhage's...so many others. The wounds that the Brothers, the fighters, and the trainees got while engaging with the Lessening Society could easily be life-threatening, and these vampires were not arm's-length patients to her. They were her family.
If she failed any one of them, she would never forgive herself.
The tunnel's exit up to the mansion was marked by a short set of steps, and she kept going, passing them by.
God, the farther she went, the more a curdling sense of dread took root in her stomach--although that didn't make any sense.
She was going home. To see the male she loved.
Why would that bother her?
Maybe it was the Assail situation. Maybe the ringing warning at the base of her neck was just generalized anxiety squirting out during a moment alone, an emotion coloring outside of the line. Yes, that had to be it. Her Hippocratic oath was running up against euthanasia and she couldn't reconcile the two.
A good hundred, hundred and fifty yards later, she came up to the reinforced door to the Pit. Punching in the code, she went up the shallow half-flight of stairs and then through a second entry--
The sound of a vacuum cleaner had her leaning around the door. Fritz, butler extraordinaire, was working a Dyson back and forth on the runner in the short hall. In his black-and-white uniform, he looked like something out of an ad for a housekeeping service that employed only English dukes.
"Mistress!" As he extinguished the whrrrrring noise, his old, wrinkled face smiled, reminding her of drapes pulled back to let in sunlight. "You have come back to change then! I thought you had already vacated the premises or I would not have begun thus, forgive me."
She smiled back at him so he wouldn't worry he'd done a badness.
But she was totally confused here. "I'm sorry, what?"
"Your interlude downtown with the sire." Fritz glowed like a heart-shaped nightlight. "He asked me to get him candles and libations for the two of you."
A sensation of numbing cold hit the top of her head and ran down her like water until she felt it fill her legs up as if they were boots.
"Mistress?"
"Yes, of course. I--ah, right. Of course." What was he asking? "But I'm just going to go as is."
"It will not matter to him. He will simply be glad to see you."
Jane said some more things. She didn't know what they were. And then she walked out to the front room. The black leather sofa, the foosball table, and the gym bags were exactly what she had seen in here for the last however many nights, weeks, months, years.
Vishous's bank of computers was likewise--except now, as she stared at the monitors, towers, and keyboards, she noted that everything was screen locked and she didn't have any of the passwords. Then again it never would have occurred to ask for them--or wonder what he was doing when he was sitting in his chair, brows tight, those tattoos on the side of his face pulled ever so slightly out of place.
She had always assumed he was working on his security systems, his programming, his LearnedLeague stuff.
What else had he been doing?
Or...who else--
Okay, Glenn Close, she thought. Why don't you back away from the pot and the bunny until you actually know what's going on here.
Maybe there was a perfectly reasonable explanation for what Fritz seemed to suggest was going on. Maybe Vishous was planning something for them as a mated couple and he just hadn't asked her yet.
She checked her phone. Looked around. Heard the vacuum turn back on.
Part of her didn't want to go to the Commodore because it seemed like spying. Like something a girl, not a woman, would do. It also felt...too real. As if her mate actually had lied by omission and was in fact meeting someone else--
Screw it, she thought. Waiting around for him to come home was just too passive.
Besides, it was, literally, the work of a moment for her to get downtown: One of the advantages to being nonexistent at will was that travel was more than a binary choice. Courtesy of V's mother, the Scribe Virgin, Jane now had ambulation, motorization, and mentalization to pick from, with the latter being similar to vampires' dematerializing: Her process of disappearing and reappearing required the same sort of concentration and will, and she could do it anywhere, anytime, with no apparent limit to the distance.
Closing her eyes, she imagined herself as a breeze, a disturbance of air molecules, a draft. Nothingness. Lightness. A pane of glass.
It had always worked in the past.
Yup. Really. It...had.
Yeah, well, not tonight, she thought as she lifted her lids.
Rubbing the center of her chest, she went to the Pit's door and let herself out in the event that Fritz finished with his Dyson and caught her standing there like an idiot. As she emerged into the night, the cold woof! of January's frigid breath made her gasp and have to collect herself.
The cottage she thought of as her home was the carriage house of the main mansion, located across the courtyard from the dour, stone mountain-on-top-of-a-mountain where the Brotherhood, the fighters, and their mates lived. She, V, Butch, and Marissa had been staying in the two-bedroom, two-bath setup since their relationships had taken root, and she had come to think of the four of them as a little family unit.
Tilting her head, sh
e stared up at the great gray vertical expanse of the mansion. There were gargoyles along the roofline, and three or four levels of diamond-pane windows, and shadows everywhere because of the various wings, levels, and dormers.
Where else would vampires live?
Shutting her lids again, she told herself she needed to get a grip--and her self-discipline came to the rescue. Becoming one with the air, she moved through the darkness in a swirl that, when she had first started doing this, had made her stomach queasy, but now was just the same as riding in a car.
Traveling through the night toward downtown, she was no substance, all existence, her thoughts and feelings, her soul, remaining intact even as her body was ether--which meant her pain and uncertainty, her anxiety, her stress, came with her.
Off the mountain, into the hills. Through the farm country. Over the suburbs. Past the old-fashioned apartment buildings, entering the urban core of skyscrapers, parking garages, and one-way streets.
The Commodore was a high-rise right on the Hudson River, a Nakatomi Plaza-worthy show of twenty or thirty floors of steel and glass--and she landed, like a superhero, on a terrace right at its top.
"Oh, thank God," she muttered as she saw the darkened windows of the penthouse.
Vishous was not here with someone else. He hadn't made a decision she was going to have to do something about. There was, as it turned out, no deception, just a misunderstanding on the part of the butler and a paranoia on her side that, if she were smart and wanted to keep her mating strong, she'd use as a warning shot across her bow. She probably had been too wrapped up in her work lately--which wouldn't have been any kind of excuse for infidelity on V's part, but certainly would explain this distance she now was recognizing between them.
And if she had been feeling connected to him, she wouldn't have been so scared about all this.
Taking out her phone, she got over herself and shot Vishous a text: Hey, off work for two hours. Let's hang!
Cheerful. Upbeat. Positive. Not hinting that she'd lost her damn mind for an instant and devolved into insecurity. Now, she just had to wait to see what he responded.
As time passed, and she got nothing back, her heart began to beat hard again--and she thought, holy crap, it was like she was sixteen and trying to get a boy in her algebra class to ask her out.
Cupping the phone in her palms, she kept waiting, not feeling the gusts of wind or the cold, not noticing the height that made the Hudson River seem like a stream, not dwelling on the near-miss.
Okay, fine, she was dwelling on that.
But hey, this was an opportunity for them. They needed to get away and be together. Maybe they could head up to Rehv's Great Camp? She didn't think of herself as a romantic person, but that old cedar-shingled Victorian with its stone hearths and view of the lake could be just the ticket. Snow everywhere, only the evergreens offering color. No pressures or responsibilities. They could cook their meals together and sleep side by side and re-forge that which had gotten eclipsed by nightly life.
Taking a deep breath, she felt a surge of...optimism? Happiness? She hadn't had whatever it was in so long that she didn't know how to readily define the warm buoyancy.
And yeah, that was probably another sign she needed to rebalance things.
When a response still didn't come, she turned to face the river. The other side of Caldwell was a much quieter landscape, with low buildings that glowed instead of skyscrapers that twinkled.
Assail lived down the Hudson a little ways. On a peninsula in a glass house.
Or at least had lived there.
What was she going to do about him...
Light bloomed from behind her, and she wheeled around, putting a smile on her face. V was here and this was an opportunity--
She frowned. Behind the glass doors, the interior of the penthouse was all wrong. Instead of black floors and all kinds of her mate's kinky stuff, there was a calming interior of grays, the furniture modern and thoughtfully scaled and placed.
Ruhn, Saxton's mate, walked in from a hallway, proceeding to a kitchen that was all black granite and brushed-steel appliances.
In her upset and distraction, she had gone to the opposite side of the building.
Before Ruhn saw her and she had to explain what the hell she was doing on his terrace, she disappeared.
This time, she knew immediately she was in the right place. Too bad it was clear she'd wrong-timed it.
One of the sliding glass doors to V's penthouse was wide open in spite of the cold, and black candles flickered all around the bald space's interior, illuminating not only his sexual equipment, but the male himself: Vishous was sitting on his sex rack, his lower legs hanging free, his head down as he stared at his phone. He was in his leathers, which was a stupid relief, but his powerful upper torso was bare and she wondered who had taken his customary muscle shirt off.
So he'd gotten her text.
Or another from someone he was more interested in hearing from.
Abruptly, Jane was aware of her palms becoming sweaty and her heart pounding and her stomach churning.
This is not us, she thought. We don't do things like this to each other.
V's head lifted and turned toward her, his brows frowning.
For an instant, all she could do was absorb the sight of him. He was not one to ever be defeated. Between his intelligence, his physical brawn, and his incredible reflexes, he was an attacker, an aggressor, a beat-the-system, win-the-game, vanquish-the-foes source of superiority in the world. Not tonight. His broad shoulders were tilted into his chest, and exhaustion was like a stain in the air around him.
His diamond eyes were dull with guilt as they focused on her.
Jane started backing up even before he shifted off the rack and came forward.
"No," she said into the wind. "No..."
SIX
The knock on Sola's bedroom door was soft, but she came awake like a heavy fist was trying to splinter the thin wood. "Vovo!"
A shaft of illumination pierced the darkness, making her think of a lightsaber. "There is people here, Sola. Come, get up and get dressed."
Sola reached for the gun on her bedside table as she looked at the digital clock. Three a.m.? "Where? Who--do not open--"
"I am cooking now. Come."
Cooking? "Vovo, who is--"
The door closed firmly, and Sola was up-and-out less than a second later, the fact that she had finally crashed fully dressed a stroke of luck. Out in the cramped hall, she flipped the safety off of her nine and kept the weapon behind her back as she padded down the cheap carpeting.
The smell of sauteing onions was so out of context that she decided this was a dream. Yup, she was going to round this corner here and walk into her grandmother's kitchen and see a non sequitur at their table for two. Lady Gaga or Leonardo DiCaprio or, hell, Leonardo da Vinci--
Sola stopped dead. Across the linoleum, sitting on the pair of cane chairs, were two men she'd been convinced she would never see again.
Her first thought, as identical sets of eyes swung in her direction, was that the chairs were not going to hold all that weight for long--but Assail's cousins solved that problem by rising to their feet. As they bowed low in her direction, it was bizarre--but also what she was used to them doing whenever she walked into a room.
Dream, she told herself. This was a figment of her imagination.
"You," her grandmother ordered to the one on the right. "You go and get chair for my Sola. Go."
The six-five stretch of muscle and banked aggression trotted off into the living room like a retriever sent for a tennis ball, returning with an armchair instead of something lighter. Then again, if you'd asked him to pick up a quart of milk, he'd probably bring the whole Publix back to you.
" 'Scuse me," he said as he came up behind her.
As Sola moved out of his way, she wondered how her grandmother could so calmly be dicing red and yellow peppers.
"I need to wake up," Sola muttered. "
Right now."
"Sola, the coffee." Her grandmother nodded to the machine. "You start."
She gave things a minute to wakey-wakey, and when the scene wasn't replaced by her rolling over and cracking an eyelid, she decided she had to go with it for the time being.
"What are you doing here?" she asked the twins as they resettled in those structurally unreliable chairs.
It was nearly impossible to tell them apart, but the distinction was made as the one on the left spoke up.
"We have come for you."
That would be Ehric. Evale, the armchair-retriever, would never have volunteered to speak. He was as frugal as Scrooge with his words.
"Assail," she whispered.
"Coffee," her grandmother demanded.
She fell in line with the order, Sola's hands shook as she reengaged her gun's safety, tucked it away at the small of her back, and went to get the Maxwell House. After she had made quick work with the Krups, she took a seat on the armchair.
"Tell me," she said. "Where is he."
* * *
--
Ehric was a male first and foremost. So as the human woman sat down on the chair his brother had provided unto her, he could not help but catalog her beauty. She was not frilly nor silly. No, no, his cousin, Assail, would not have picked one of those. Sola's eyes were direct upon his own, her body tense as if she were ready to spring--not away from conflict, but toward it.
And there was a gun holstered at her waistband.
Ehric smiled a little, but that didn't last. It never did with him.
She was blond now, and he resolved that his cousin would not approve of the change. It was not an unpleasing shade, not brassy or frizzed, but it did not suit her dark eyes or the memories of her natural brown. The hair was shorter now, too, cut around her ears and shorn up close to her neck.
It was a wise choice if she were looking to disguise herself.
But no, Assail would prefer her as she had been a year ago, and at least her face was, as always, strong-featured yet smooth of skin and sensual of lip. And her simple clothes were the same, too, the leggings black and the hooded sweatshirt navy blue with no logo or image upon it.
Her lithe, long body beneath the soft folds was something he refused to let himself assess, out of respect not just for his cousin, but for her. Ehric liked her. He always had.