by S A Gardner
I groped for my cell phone, speed-dialed his number. He picked up before the first ring was over. Had it been on auto-answer?
“Calista.” There was no surprise in his tone. No curiosity. This wasn’t a probing greeting. It was an acknowledgment laced with a fathoms-deep welcome. Relief even. I hadn’t returned his calls in over a month.
I wondered why he took it from me. Would have figured he’d consign me to the hell where über-alpha men believed capricious women belonged, and gotten on with his life. He hadn’t.
“Damian, I need you.”
“I’m listening.”
He’d caught on that I wasn’t inviting him to all-out sex, as he’d been suggesting I do. In a heartbeat, his voice was no longer washing over me with that encompassing passion that messed with logic and priorities, his ultimate black-ops operative component back in the driving seat.
I panted out the situation, the seconds taking Matt farther away from hope of retrieval feeling like quicksand, sucking what was left of my sanity.
It was only then that I realized what the background noise I was hearing was. Damian was driving, fast. In some other pursuit? Then he put me on hold. By the time he came back, I was screaming for him to talk to me.
“I was conferring with my team. Consider him caught.”
“Don’t hurt him….”
A beat, stern and bleak. Then he exhaled. “You’re calling me because you know I’m the only one who won’t.”
Yes, I knew. It was insulting that I should even hint he would.
I began to say this and he cut me off. “You stay put.”
I clamped up on a ball of resentment. Why did he have to go and spoil the incomparable favor he was doing me?
I bristled. “I’ll be there to help the minute I’m not needed here. I’m only calling you because, with a brain surgery and a pursuit-and-retrieval situation on the menu, I figured you can only handle the latter.”
“Tend your patient, Calista. I’ll bring Matt in.”
“Damian, if the police get him in their sights first—”
“They won’t. My team will contain the situation. And don’t worry, they won’t engage him, just keep him occupied until I arrive. I should make it to his location in three minutes.”
“Three minutes? Where are you?”
Matt couldn’t have run far. That makes Damian a few streets away from here. If even that. What was he doing in this neighborhood?”
I heard a car door slam, then his breath, slow, regular. He had to be running if it was audible.
He finally spoke as if he wasn’t. “I was coming to see you. Great timing, huh? I’ll call when it’s done.”
The line went dead.
Something inside me almost followed.
Great timing, he’d said. A minute ago, frantic to have him respond quickly, I’d wished he hadn’t kept his promise, that he did still have me under surveillance. Had I gotten my wish?
No. Of course, not. Damian would never break a promise.
Four
I moved the suction probe to and fro over the subdural hematoma clot. A tremor broke through my control. My hand shook. Once. Couldn’t afford a second time.
I snapped a look at the second operating station. I needed help. Needed out of here. Needed to go after Matt. Please, Al, Savvy!
Nope. No help. They had their hands deep in Mercedes’s chest, fixing the additional injuries our fight with Matt had inflicted. I was on my own. Trapped here while Matt…oh, Matt!
I felt Ayesha’s eyes on me, prompting, bolstering, sponging off agitation. I wasn’t on my own. And we’d come a long way. Juan was still alive. Keep at it. Don’t think. Don’t feel.
“More irrigation here, Ayesha. Just a bit,” I murmured.
Ayesha complied, gently irrigating in conjunction with my suction to develop a plane between the clot and the brain’s innermost coverings, lifting the clot away from its surface.
This was my third craniotomy. She’d assisted in dozens. I’d needed her all through scalp division and retraction, to bone perforation and cutting, to epidural hematoma evacuation. We’d reached the most delicate part, the subdural hematoma evacuation, before delving deeper to remove more clots.
“Craniotomy has to be the worst surgery in existence,” Ayesha muttered.
I agreed. I hated them. For the past five years I’d had tons of experience, opened chests and abdomens and backs, amputated limbs and put amputated ones back in place. Somehow opening the skull and exposing the brain took the cake.
And the way he’d been injured. Fury and futility pierced me like the drill had Juan’s skull. All that rage couldn’t be contributing to my healing abilities.
Healing? could I actually heal Juan? Right now, I had no idea what kind of life we were salvaging. I wondered what Juan would say, if he knew his odds. Would he choose to go now, and be spared a possible existence as a brain-damaged cripple?
Images bombarded me. Exuberant Juan wasting away, crumpled or spastic or incoherent. Another salvo discharged in my chest. My jaw hurt, my nerves tightened until they almost snapped.
“We could only do the best job we can,” I finally said. I always said that. Tried to mean it. To accept it. No other option was available. Not now, not ever.
It took all I had to turn off my aggression and pessimism, to turn all my energies back to my task.
After I was done evacuating all the blood and clots, there was nothing more to be done about the brain tissue lacerations. Time to close up.
Both teams, black and blue and exhausted, concluded our tasks, our patients still alive. Barely. Our nurses took them to Recovery, while the rest of the team shuffled to the soiled room. I picked up empathic transmissions from each one, felt shock crushing down on them, now that they could afford to give in to it. I saw them avoiding one another’s eyes. Each of them wanted to be alone, to surrender control, to let it all hit bottom.
I streaked out of the soiled room dressed, my wireless headset transmitting the interminable ringing of Damian’s phone. Pick up. Pick up, damn you.
I called again and again till the line disconnected. Just before my heart burst on the tenth try, he answered.
“I said I’d call you,” he hissed.
I hissed right back. “And you didn’t!”
“I thought you had an emergency surgery.”
“It’s done. Tell me where you are. I’m coming in.”
“I said stay put, Calista.”
“Tell me where you are!”
“Why don’t you calm the hell down and let me do my job?”
“Your job is liquidating terrorists. Matt has been poisoned.”
“Still insisting I’m some programmed machine set on Kill?”
“No, it’s just…”
“Trust me, then.”
Trust him. Ha.
But then—I did. With my life for starters. With Matt’s, for sure. Weird, this selective faith.
“I’ve cornered him where he can’t hurt himself or anyone else. I’ll bring him over. That’s the deal.”
“No deal. He’s my friend. My best friend.”
“And I’m taking care of him as if he were mine. And hell, yes, he is my friend, too.”
Tears erupted under pressure. My knees wobbled. I must have sobbed. He must have heard. His voice dipped, darkened, spread a soothing caress that showed me I was raw inside more than out.
“Spare yourself, Calista. Let me do this for you.”
“He may need medical attention. I have to be there.” Please went un-cried.
He must have heard it, too. He sighed. Clearly hating it, he told me where to find them. They were only ten minutes away by car.
Ten minutes. It felt like wading in a morass of slowed-down time as worst-case scenarios hammered at me. Then I arrived.
They’d herded him to an abandoned factory, got him cornered there. His rampage had been curbed, had gone unnoticed by authorities. All good news. Bad news was, he was on the roof, four levels up.
<
br /> On the ledge.
Five
A geyser of pain erupted in one knee, turning the graying night skies blotched crimson. I must have crashed down on it.
I felt air all around, couldn’t get any into my lungs. They were shriveled. And my heart was growing spikes, piercing out of my chest. Tremors robbed me of all volition.
So this was a panic attack.
The sight of Matt, teetering on the edge like that, made the final confrontation with Jake over a mile-deep abyss less nightmarish by comparison.
Jake had been the first man to arouse my mind and body. Then for eight years I’d resigned myself to his loss. Finding him again had been a miracle. But no matter how I ached for him or dreamed of saving him, the time apart had dulled my feelings into distant memories. Had made it easier, marginally, to stand knowing how beyond redemption he’d become. Had made shooting that poisoned dart into his carotid possible. Survivable.
But Matt. Matt! The man who’d supported me when no one had, who’d kept me together, held my hand and scalpel—my crutch and shield in this mad existence. My Calista-first, all-supportive rock. The big brother I never had. I couldn’t lose him. Not like this.
My grit-stuffed, streaming eyes registered Damian’s team. They had a huge safety net right below Matt. When did they get that? Must be nice to have bottomless resources.
Still—a fall from this height, with his mass—what if they couldn’t catch him? If he fell on one of them, or still hit the ground too hard even with the net—or—or—? Was Matt suicidal now? Or was he too out of it to know the danger he’d placed himself in, reacting instinctively to being pursued? How would the stalemate break? Did Damian have a plan? What? Was he up there? Would he try to catch him? Or just push him over, confident in his team’s abilities, knowing it would end the situation?
No! He couldn’t be thinking that, couldn’t risk it unnecessarily….
Get moving. Get up there. Find Damian. Get close to Matt.
I limped, my mind churning, barely noticing my surroundings as I entered the factory, and climbed the stairs. Then I was on the roof. Massive structures blocked my field of vision. Matt, Damian—where were they?
I pinpointed Matt’s location from a new litany of butchered howls. The alien sounds quaked through me, almost drove me to my knees again.
Fighting up a black well of nausea, I pushed forward, came around a chimney. Saw Matt, illuminated by incipient dawn, in stark relief against the still gloomy sky at his back.
But it was no longer him. I was looking at a deranged, emptied shell, the man I knew and loved gone. Forever?
God, please!
God upped the ante. A few more steps showed me Matt was not alone in danger of falling off to possible crippling or death. A dozen feet away, Damian crouched on the less-than-a-foot-wide ledge. And what was that shapeless mass in his arms?
“Don’t come any closer. And shut up.”
Damian’s terse words froze me. I cursed myself for making him speak them. Matt suddenly swung toward him, remnant awareness registering Damian, for the first time it seemed, and as a threat. He charged. His bellow uprooted my heart.
Damian. Jump out of his way. I can’t lose you both.
The scream suffocated in my bursting lungs. I couldn’t risk compromising the precise balance that could mean his life.
But I can’t do this. I couldn’t stand aside again, futility corroding me, my loved ones in terminal danger. Damian. Matt. Please.
Dancing back out of the charging Matt’s reach, Damian hurled out the mass in his arms.
No! You’ll fall!
Next second, panic was extinguished under a sledgehammer of relief. Damian was jumping onto the roof. And that mass, once it had left his arms, arced against the indigo dawn, and swooped down on Matt like a falling piece of sky.
A net. Made of some material that had a mind of its own, and the ability to change weight and velocity. It engulfed Matt on that first cast. Then Damian tugged, tightening the snare as he sprinted away, bringing Matt down.
The deafening wrath that erupted from Matt had me revising my disbelieving stance on demonic possession. What other thing than a trapped demon could sound so terrible?
But he was caught. Safe. Now I’d examine him, and if it was a demon riding his body, I’d exorcise it.
Damian fell to his knees beside Matt, the first to reach him. He freed Matt’s head from the net and Matt’s howls suddenly stopped. Was he coming out of it? Please, please…
I saw Damian’s head snap up in the bleak light, his face urgent, his call booming.
“Calista! He’s convulsing.”
I crashed to my knees, reached for Matt, my hands flailing on his convulsing body. A grand mal seizure. He’d bitten his tongue, and his body was bucking in violent, full-body heaves, as if trying to break his spine and sever the aberrant nervous transmissions frying his brain. Or to expel the demon necrotizing it alive.
Had to stop the convulsions. Had to. But I was blind. Lost. The world blurred…
Something warm, gentle pressed my lids, smoothed them and my cheeks, wiping the moist barrier I was lost behind. Damian, cupping my face, urging.
“Tell me what you need.”
“God, Damian, I can’t give him a powerful sedative—I have no idea what’s in his system—the drug interactions—his brain’s already been battered enough. What if he never wakes up?”
He gave me one hard shake. “The convulsions are only getting stronger, and it doesn’t look like they’ll stop on their own. If you don’t, he won’t have much of a brain to wake up with.”
If he woke up at all. Status epilepticus, the sustained convulsions that now possessed his body, lead either to death or to permanent brain damage if left untreated. I had a choice between two possibilities. Leave him to die or probably kill him myself.
Knowing Matt, he’d rather I did the latter.
Damian’s arm came around me, opened the emergency bag I’d lost the ability to handle.
“Tell me what you need.”
I pushed away, bit down on my tongue, the self-inflicted jolt beating back the breakers of numbness and dread. “I’m on it. But you can help.”
Please understand, Matt, if I do the wrong thing. Please help me. Hang on.
“Get me IV access.” I shoved a cannula, a syringe and a dextrose bag into Damian’s hands. “Administer fifty cc in one push.”
I rummaged through my bag, the creeping dawn of a weirdly clear February day doing nothing to help its battery-powered illumination. Ingrained practice tided me over as I found the necessary anticonvulsant and loaded a 0.15-mg/kg dose into a syringe. I loaded another with the follow-up drug. I thought I heard weeping.
“I’m done.” Damian shifted aside for me as I fumbled for Matt’s thrashing arm, put the syringe to the cannula and started pushing the drug in. “It has to go in over five minutes, followed by the fosphenytoin, 20 mg/kg,” I muttered. My hands shook, dislodging the syringe.
Damian pushed me away, gentle, final, took over the injection. “See what else you have to do.”
I allowed myself a moment, subsiding beside him as Matt began to calm. Then I assembled my intubation kit. I removed the last of the inescapable net off Matt, took his still-rigid head on my lap, tilted it to open his mouth. His throat was clogged by secretions. I suctioned them, clearing his airway as Damian finished the injection. I felt Matt loosening by degrees until he went flaccid.
“Help me,” I said. Without a word, Damian arranged Matt’s now-limp head in position for me to slip the endotracheal tube in and start one hundred percent oxygen. “He’s hyperthermic—usual with convulsions. Let’s remove his clothes. Can your team get us cold packs?”
He stood up. “Continue your measures at the Sanctuary.”
“I need to make sure he’s stabilized.”
“He is, for now. To do more, you’ll need more equipment, more help than I can give you.”
I knew that. It made no difference to the phobias
howling through my nerves, shrieking for me not to move him.
Damian drew me to my feet, replacing my fear’s inescapable grip with his own. “For once, Calista, do as you’re told.”
Six
Weren’t nightmares supposed to end at some point?
Like when you woke up screaming? I’d done my share of screaming tonight. I’d scream again, I wouldn’t stop, if that would end it.
But this nightmare seemed to be here to stay. It was even getting more creative. More cruel. It gave hope, waited until we doubled over, gulping air, twitching in relief and expectation, then smashed our faces in again.
Right now, it seemed over. Again. But was it?
I leaned my forehead on the glass window of IC, acid in my eyes and veins, gazing at Matt. He lay there absent and subdued, hooked to a dozen monitors and drug-delivery systems.
Are you still in there, Matt? Is it over? Or over?
Hands on my shoulders jerked me out of the mire of unanswered, unanswerable questions. Damian.
It was his first time in one of our Sanctuaries. I’d never invited him. He’d invited himself this time. I couldn’t even have thought of objecting. He’d just saved Matt. And it wasn’t as if this Sanctuary’s location was a secret to him.
Oh, why don’t you face it, St. James? You want him here. You want him, period.
Yeah. I wasn’t so stupid as to try to deny how much. With-every-fiber-of-my-being level. It didn’t mean a thing to the issues left hanging between us, though.
Just let him touch you, and I bet you won’t even remember afterward what those issues are.
Yeah. Exactly what I was afraid of.
“How is he?” His eyes swept their golden warmth and worry over me, asked another question. How are you?
I ignored the rush of comfort his concern, his presence, cloaked me in. Being in his debt forever, over Matt among other things, wouldn’t change a thing. So I’d pay him back with my very life, on demand, anytime. I would defend him with it anyway, debt or not, but that was it. A second crack at my faith didn’t figure into what I owed him.