Being in his own apartment, if only for an hour, felt good, normal. Parker forced himself to eat a stale bagel, for fuel, and gulped down one more cup of strong, hot coffee. Eyeing his soft leather couch with regret, and giving the newspaper-strewn living room a last glance, he closed the door on his small haven. He’d be lucky if he got back there today. Really lucky.
“Time to face the firing squad.”
Time also to figure out how to ditch the cops if they tailed him after work, so he could get on with the current progression of things. Tonight, he would go back to the Landau estate. He’d go there as so much more than himself. And if he met another wolf or two, all the better.
He kept the top down on his red Jeep, liking the hot air. At nine o’clock the sun was already hot enough to fry an egg on his hood, and maybe a pancake or two.
Nostalgia trip. His parents had made pancakes often. Pancakes had been his father’s favorite food. Parker had always liked them, too, loaded with blueberries, and couldn’t remember the last time he’d eaten a hearty meal. Food didn’t top his priority list these days, although the lack of it hadn’t affected the size or shape of the muscles he’d inherited along with the curse.
And now that he’d taken that short journey down Memory Lane, Parker found himself wondering what his folks might have eaten on the morning they’d died. He hoped it had been pancakes, in outback Brazil. He also wondered what they would feed her today, his Jane Doe, when she woke. Lime Jell-O? Orange juice through a flexible straw? Would she be able to stomach anything? Did she like her coffee black? Did she like pancakes?
Would she have miraculously healed by the time he got back?
An impossible thought, yet wasn’t there a chance of such a thing happening if she now had wolf in her blood? And if she did make a swift recovery, how would that be explained?
Driving took concentration in Miami, where traffic got worse in the summer. For that reason, and for convenience, Parker lived close to the hospital, even though downtime was a joke.
Ten minutes after leaving his apartment, he pulled into the hospital garage, welcoming now the coolness of its shade. There were fifty stairs up to the lobby, then he walked undisturbed through the corridors to the physicians’ locker room. He climbed out of his jeans, hung them on a peg. Ready to pull on his scrubs, he heard a sound alerting him that he wasn’t alone. A purposefully cleared throat. For all intents and purposes naked, save for his dark blue underwear and bandages, Parker turned toward the noise.
“Sorry,” an unusually throaty female voice apologized. “They said I’d find you here, but they didn’t warn me you’d be naked if I did.”
A female police officer faced him. Parker grinned in surprise and his inventory switch turned on. Attractive female of the cop persuasion. Maybe some Italian tossed in. Classic features. Creamy bronzed skin. Dark hair pulled back severely from her face. No hat. Large eyes. Full mouth wrapped around very white teeth. Not quite tall enough to reach his chin, the woman was curvy beneath her crisp uniform. His attention didn’t stray any further. After all, he was in a hurry. And she had a gun.
“Name’s Delmonico,” she said. “Detective Wilson sent me to check in with you. I’ll wait outside while you get dressed.”
“Yes,” Parker said. “This isn’t Chippendale’s, though it might look that way at the moment.”
Officer Delmonico did not blush or smile. She did, however, pass very close to him on her way out, hesitating briefly when she caught sight of the bandage covering his upper arm.
“Knife?” she asked.
“Tetanus shot,” he replied.
The officer raised an eyebrow at that but continued toward the door. Parker stared after her, disturbed in a way he was unable to name. Having a cop visit this early wasn’t a good omen. And he hadn’t realized that police officers were allowed to wear perfume. Then again, he supposed he’d never thought about it before. He hadn’t encountered many female cops.
This officer definitely smelled like gardenias, and also a trace of another indiscernible fragrance buried beneath the florals. Damp hair? Probably she was as fresh from a shower as he was. Of more importance was the fact that Officer Delmonico’s presence shouted loudly and clearly that not only were the police going to watch over the woman upstairs, they were going to keep him on their radar, as well.
Great. Who the hell else would Detective Wilson send calling? Whoever they might be, Parker sincerely hoped they weren’t so well trained in stealth that he wouldn’t notice them following him after dark. Tagalong cops would pose a real problem in terms of his agenda, and be a big thorn in his side. If there were wolves at the Landau estate, they certainly wouldn’t want Miami law enforcement to know.
He pulled on his scrubs slowly, his thoughts again on the pale wolf, and the possibility of that wolf having faked him out. Of that wolf having beaten the malicious gang members to the girl.
Parker closed his locker and headed toward the door to the hallway, but stopped with his hand on the knob. “Okay,” he told himself. “Enough with the conspiracy theories. Wilson did not purposefully send the female into this locker room to check out my bandages. Surely detectives have better things to do than pimp out their female counterparts.”
All well and good as a pep talk; nevertheless, the officer’s presence made Parker uneasy. With an overexuberant tug, he flung open the door and almost ran into Officer Delmonico, waiting right outside. She hadn’t been peeping through a keyhole or anything, he noted with satisfaction. She stood with one shoulder against the far wall and her arms crossed.
“I can only talk if you follow,” he said to her.
“Are you going to check on the girl?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“Then I’ll follow.”
The elevator took them to the surgery recovery floor. The female officer who marched after him down the hallway garnered plenty of attention. A pretty cop was an anomaly, as was her adherence to silence. Officer Delmonico didn’t speak or try to slow him down. For that, Parker felt grateful.
Halting at the end of the corridor, his nerves starting to jump, he faced his police shadow. “I need to go in there alone first,” he said. “When I come out, I’ll answer any questions you have for me. Is that all right?”
Officer Delmonico nodded and again leaned a shoulder against the wall. She was probably used to waiting.
Feeling the female cop’s eyes on him, Parker headed for room where his true interest lay.
Chloe had been shaking so badly, she’d brought the nurses in seven times after the man she called her savior had gone. She had pretended to be asleep.
With his company, the level of pain had been relatively manageable. But now it seemed as if it had been lying in wait until she was alone. First returning as a trickle of awareness, as a dull but persistent ache, that ache then began its wicked attack. Slowly, steadily it progressed, and from the inside out.
Her head felt as if it had been hammered, then split open like an overripe melon. It seemed as though her organs had caught fire, having first been dowsed with flammable liquid to ensure they burned for a very long time. Next, her skin had caught the heat of those internal flames and seemed to bubble, though no blister became visible.
Immediately after that awful burning sensation came chills, a galloping external fire department with the objective of putting out those invisible flames. The chills were severe in intensity, and the shaking they caused doubled the pain and allowed the internal fire to spread.
Fire on the inside, cold on the outside. A damned reverse chicken barbecue. Throughout this worrisome event, a fresh onslaught of pain, shockingly electric and way too persistent, took over. Her head really was going to explode. Her eyes burned and watered. Stifling a shout, Chloe glanced to the drip line attached to her arm, then to the monitor by the bed, then to the curtains at the window between her and the hallway. The nurses would probably be on her in another minute, checking her vitals for the eighteenth time.
Have to ge
t out of here!
Not only had the room become stifling, she couldn’t afford this kind of treatment on a genetic researcher’s meager salary. The man she so stupidly longed for in a completely unvirginal way, though a doctor in this place, was quite probably insane. Either that, or the meds had allowed her some pretty strange dreams.
He said he’d come back.
The thought flitted across her mental screen. The man, her savior, would return. The guy who thought he was a werewolf. The guy who went out after dark looking for other werewolves. A werewolf doctor.
Well, whatever the hell he thought he was, he wasn’t here now. And he wouldn’t have let her go anywhere if he were. Things were clearer this morning. He would have helped her because he felt responsible for her. Nothing personal about saving her and then tending to her afterward, just the Hippocratic oath he’d taken to do those very things. She was probably just one in a long line of patients.
Did he confess his own nightmares to everyone he rescued?
There was no need to hang around or make him feel any more responsible. She’d send him a thank-you card and a box of chocolates. She’d even pay her bill someday, if she got ten raises in a row.
Chloe’s mind flipped through the reasons for feeling so bad. Being a geneticist, she knew that some of the pain might be a reaction to the meds. She’d also be groggy from surgery, whatever they’d done to repair her. In the past few hours they had injected a lot of pain-killing liquid into her drip line.
But she was wide-awake now, and wondering how bad the damage had been. Her chart wasn’t hanging on the end of the bed or on the bedside table. No help to be had there. She had been struck by a hard object out there in the night, by the feel of the thudding above her eyebrows. Her dark angel had confirmed this. She didn’t remember all of the details, and that was frustrating. Concussion? Minor brain malfunction?
Had it been only last night?
Nearly her entire head was covered in gauze, she discovered by feeling around with the fingers of her right hand. Her left arm, from the elbow down, was hindered by a splint. Navy blue, with a white racing stripe.
Maybe the blow truly had addled her brain, and the bandages worked to keep her head together. Her torso was bound by a girdle of tape that smelled like a men’s locker room prior to a football game. Diagnosis: her ribs had to have been bruised, maybe fractured. Probably that’s why she couldn’t breathe.
All of that, and a totally illogical directive rose up so strongly that she gasped.
Run! an inner voice told her.
Don’t make him feel responsible for you.
Feelings of being trapped, tubed and isolated added to her claustrophobia. The bed was small. The room had snowy-white walls and lots of steel.
Run.
With the quickness and precision of a veteran scientist, and with a stern reminder that she could do this, that it was possible to rise above the debilitating pain threatening to take her down, Chloe switched off the valve near the clamp of her drip line, then hit the off button on the machine beside her.
She had about two minutes before the nurses would notice the sudden lack of wavy green lines, she figured. She’d heard them moving around outside and guessed they’d be busy changing schedules. Not so good for other patients with beep-loss, perhaps, but good for her.
How fast could she get up and out of here?
Fighting off wave after wave of light-headedness as she sat up, Chloe slid her legs over the side of the bed. She would go to the hospital lab and find a computer. She had work to do. Her medical chart would be there, and she knew how to access it, had accessed files in those same computers hundreds of times, since she’d been hired by the university to help track statistics on unusual viruses passing across Florida’s state line.
Her research had been sidetracked by those bastards in the park, important research needing follow-through.
“You can do it. You will do it.”
The tile floor felt chilly under her bare feet. There were no tubes sticking out of her to catch body fluids, she found with relief. Chloe tore off the tape holding the needle in her arm and groaned, ignoring the drops of blood pooling at the IV’s insertion site. Tossing the needle onto the bed, she got to her feet. Next to come off were the heart-rate monitor attachments.
“Two minutes and counting.”
All well and good in theory, of course, but her legs didn’t want to move. She made them. Both knees refused to bend, so she shuffled, feeling as if she’d been dipped in lead.
Leaning in any direction from her waist was impossible; she’d been taped too snugly. Dragging the blanket with her to the tiny bathroom, Chloe latched onto the sink to support herself, and took a look in the mirror.
Whoa! She flew backward, startled. Was that thing in the mirror herself? The thing that looked like death warmed over? Worse even than that?
She tried to swallow around the lump in her throat. Her heart thudded rapidly against her taped torso. But she had always been tough, she reminded herself. An only child growing up in the desert had to be. Cacti and rattlesnakes made for major alertness training. There was nothing to be done about the way she looked at the moment.
In need of clothes, she scanned the space, found a robe on a hook. She put it on with difficulty, panting from the effort of covering the ungainly blue hospital gown that would leave her rear end visible to the world were she to exit sans robe. And, lucky for her, her jeans were also there, wadded up on a shelf. She’d slip them on in some other bathroom down the hall. Time was wasting.
Barefoot, holding the sides of the robe to her body and knowing she didn’t have time to remove the turban of bandages in order to be more inconspicuous, Chloe Tyler, mummified, unable to draw one significant breath, lifted her head as regally as a queen’s and walked right out into the hallway as if she owned the place.
Parker came up short after entering the room. He stared at the two nurses who were staring at the empty bed with expressions of mingled surprise and horror, and managed to find his voice.
“Where is she?”
Nurse Perez, as her name tag read, looked to him with startled brown eyes and didn’t say a word.
“Gone,” the other nurse said. Nikki Reese, either still there or returned after a couple of hours of sleep.
Frustrated, Parker surveyed the scene. “How can she be gone?”
“No visitors have been in or out,” Nikki replied. “No time for that. So I can only assume she walked out.”
Parker’s shoulders knotted. Had she…had she healed enough to do that?
“She was too ill to walk out,” he snapped.
“It appears not,” Nikki countered, pointing to the clamp on the drip line and to the heart-rate monitor attachments discarded on the bed. “It also appears that she knows something about medical equipment.”
“When?” Parker demanded.
“Not more than a couple of minutes ago.”
“How did she get by the desk?”
“She couldn’t get by the desk, in theory.”
“Were you on duty, Reese?”
“I just got here. We were chasing down charts. She might have exited at that time. We watch and listen for the monitors, but we don’t expect anyone on a recovery floor to be able to untangle themselves and run away. Or even want to.”
“Unheard-of,” Nurse Perez seconded.
“Well, let’s look for her, shall we? She couldn’t have gotten far.” The word bite appeared before Parker’s eyes in large blinking letters that left him breathless. “Put an APB over the speakers for a mummy walking the hallways.”
“On it,” Nikki said.
“Those broken ribs should have been hurting like a son of a—” He broke off, noticing Officer Delmonico beside him. Facing her, he threw up his hands. “I’m sorry, Officer. We seem to have lost your victim.”
Delmonico didn’t rant, rave or throw accusations. Instead, she went into a corner and spoke softly into the radio attached to a curly cord at her sh
oulder, most likely to Detective Wilson. When she had finished, she said calmly to Parker, “Maybe you have time for that talk now, while the others search for her? If it’s possible, over a cup of coffee?”
Every singe emotion known to man, plus a few beyond those, were pummeling at Parker. He couldn’t rant or rave, either. Not here. What good would it do, anyway? The staff would find the girl. As Nurse Reese had pointed out, she couldn’t have gotten far. A first transition from human to wolf didn’t work as easily as that, if his own experience was anything to go by. She would soon, if not already, be in serious trouble. If they did find her, she wouldn’t be long here at Metro. Treating a wolf would be far too dangerous and disconcerting for everybody. Most likely, they’d put her in a zoo.
Certainly, she would be easy to spot in the crowd, a standout, wearing all that gauze. But why had she gone? Should he feel better, more optimistic that there didn’t appear to be that same sense of connection on her part? That she might just up and walk away? If he’d been mistaken about her condition, how could she have disappeared?
No. Optimism wasn’t an option. He felt sicker than ever. And if they didn’t find her, he’d be free to follow his own path toward enlightenment, toward his own kind.
Parker took another long look at the empty bed, and wanted to shout.
“Coffee? Sure,” he said to Delmonico, hating the thought of sitting nose to nose with a cop when he needed to find the girl, but not wanting to call further attention to either her or himself. “I have some time before reporting in.”
Delmonico smiled, as though losing a patient, aka crime victim, was routine. Noting the brightness of her slightly crooked, contagious smile, Parker gestured for the officer to precede him to the hallway.
Only when she’d turned her back did he allow the terrible internal turmoil he was experiencing to have its way with his expression.
Chapter 9
Chloe made it to a public restroom one floor down and locked herself into a stall. There wasn’t any way she could get into her jeans with a splint on her good arm, a girdle of tape on her torso and her head throwing fresh rounds of dizziness at her every time she tried for a decent breath. She’d need to continue to the lab dressed as she was, and hope hospital personnel would ignore her.
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