She should call the cops and get them out to that horrid place where she’d been accosted. They needed to fumigate that area, round up those bastards who had tortured her and send them off to where the sun never shone.
She needed a few more minutes on this computer to recheck her last bit of research—the reason she’d been near that wall on the far side of the park in the first place. She should input some details about the police officer she had followed out there, as soon as she asked the cops to chase the scourge from public places.
Yes, her brain was working now. She remembered why she had gone out. She had been tracking a female officer with an unnatural, unknown, mutated gene. A gene like nothing she had ever seen before.
She’d discovered it by accident, by stumbling across the cop’s supposedly discarded blood sample for a rabies test, from her last hospital visit on record. Something in that sample had flagged Chloe’s notice.
Thinking to do some unscheduled work—aka unpaid overtime—she’d tested for an anomaly in the officer’s blood. A female officer named Delmonico.
The sample had tested positive for a gene that caused some interesting complications in her research. She had wanted more information about Delmonico.
Although spying wasn’t actually in the fine print of her job description, she had followed the officer—God, was it only last night?—as Delmonico left the police station. Chloe had followed her on foot across that park, all the way to a set of wrought-iron gates leading to the big estate beyond. In hindsight, a stupid move. She shouldn’t have been out there alone. Her boss at the university was not going to condone this highly irregular routine, since it had ended badly. But Chloe was good at her job, and took it seriously. An anomaly like the one she had found in Officer Delmonico’s blood sample needed to be cataloged and explored. The officer herself needed to be studied. Possibly even quarantined.
Delmonico had met a man at the gate. Chloe had recognized Dylan Landau immediately. He was Miami’s current deputy district attorney, and there was no mistaking him, with all that thick, shoulder-length blond hair she’d seen on TV on numerous occasions.
Delmonico and Landau had disappeared behind those towering walls. And five heathens had found her trying to scramble up one wall for a better look. After the first blow, she had been out of commission. As for the rest…
“No. Don’t go there. Not yet.”
There was so much to do. She needed to find out if those animals were watchdogs hired to protect that estate, and to sue them if they were. And if those scary, tattooed baboons weren’t somehow related to the people on that estate, then what had they been doing there? Why had they come after her?
It would be impossible for her to go back out there now. She doubted if she could survive it. But the research was important, necessary. What if that cop harbored a contagious pathogen in her bloodstream and didn’t know it? How many people did a police officer have contact with in a single day?
Chloe had been sidelined, big-time, by that gang. She had lost valuable time. But she was all right. Outside of a little pain, once she healed she would ask Delmonico to participate in further tests.
Chloe hit more keys, ignoring the insistent aches. Spying might not have turned out to be her forte, but knowing her way around a computer was.
D-y-l-a-n L-a-n-d-a-u, she typed. What would a D.A. think about the things tweaking his girlfriend’s DNA?
Bingo! Dylan’s father was Judge James Landau. She had not known that.
L-a-n-d-a-u. She cross-referenced the name to title companies. Some illegal hacking was involved, but she was fairly sure property ownership was public record. Bingo! Judge Landau owed that estate.
And for all her own efforts at becoming a one-person center for disease control, Chloe thought, she had almost died coming up with this information. Would have died, if it hadn’t been for Parker Paul Madison, M.D., in all his tan, chiseled, werewolfian glory.
She stopped typing. Did it make sense that each and every time he came to mind, both the pain and pangs of longing mingled like drops of colored dye in a petri dish?
And wasn’t it strange how the lines of information on the monitor had begun to swim in a wavy, greenish haze…? How her head’s pounding had approached critical levels?
The aftereffects of someone who had been sliced open and left to die.
Chloe staggered to her feet. Each attempt to open her eyes brought sharp, piercing distress.
The tech closing up shop for the day grimaced and moved out of the way when she reached for the back of the chair with both hands, to steady herself.
“What? Do I look that bad?” she croaked, sensing his presence.
“Worse,” he replied.
“Unable-to-escape-this-hospital-in-my-present-state kind of worse?”
“If you were a horse, I’d put you down.”
“Damn.”
“You’re actually trying to get out? For real?” he asked, slinging on his backpack. “Without being noticed?”
“Yes, and the reason why is privileged information.”
“Then check the drawers,” he suggested. “I found Ray-Bans in that desk last week. Shades ought to do it, if you pull a blanket over your head and if no one looks too closely at the rest of you.”
“You think?”
The tech shrugged. “Need I mention that your regulation hospital bathrobe has conspicuous embroidered all over it?”
“Thanks,” she said, waving him away. Managing to hold on to the chair until he had left the room, she then reached for her head with shaky hands. Sickness roiled in her stomach. Her bare legs felt cold and weak.
If she did get away, where would she go? Back upstairs? Bad things were catching up with her. She was seeing glimpses of a man with very light hair in every shadowed corner, there and gone in a flash of incomplete memory each time she blinked. A big man. An evil man. The ghost of surgeries past, maybe? The result of all those medicines she had been fed? Why did she imagine she felt that bastard’s breath on her face? Not Death’s, his.
Unable to take a necessary breath, and hence supply oxygen to her brain—and with Parker Madison’s name on her lips—Chloe felt the floor rush up to meet her.
Chapter 10
Parker heard the call for a cart to be sent to the research lab, and nerves churned in his gut.
The staff hadn’t been able to find the girl. She had disappeared without a trace, and even his extraordinary senses hadn’t picked up her trail in such an antiseptic environment. The hospital was too damned clean.
Now, though, with that call, a fresh sense of urgency curled up inside him. Moonrise was only minutes away, a fact he felt in the steadily rising thump of his pulse.
Working the rest of the afternoon had been difficult, with the woman out there somewhere. Normal daytime events in the E.R., such as kids falling from trees, had taken on a sinister cast. He scanned each body for potential teeth marks, bites. People were hurting all over the place, and he looked for her in the face of every patient he attended to. Would she show up again? Would he find her behind the next curtain?
His mouth tasted of burned coffee. The stale bagel he’d eaten was a distant memory. Was, in fact, hours ago. He’d worked right through his shift, staring at the door, the same door that Nikki Reese came walking through now, wearing a frown.
“Thought you might like to know about this first,” she said, waving him over to a corner.
Parker knew what she was going to say before she said it. His body had already geared up to move.
“Some guy found our truant patient collapsed in the research lab, where she’s been all day, apparently.”
Parker thought he’d gotten past the phase of feeling responsible, but his heart resonated like thunder.
The doors to the E.R. opened again. Two attendants were wheeling in a cart. Not her. He glanced to Reese.
“She wouldn’t come,” the nurse said. “She got as far as the hallway down there, then vehemently refused treatment or assistanc
e. She’s asking for you.”
Parker dashed from the room before Nikki had finished speaking, his heart virtually taking over his chest. This reaction was too much; he knew that. He didn’t owe the young woman anything. He’d done his bit. The moon was calling to him through all six stories of the hospital, as if her light were seeping through the windows and walls. At the same time, his thoughts were scrambling. He wanted very much to see the wounded girl again. He would ask her about the marks on her arm before Wilson did. Parker had to find out about the other wolf he’d seen, and whether that creature had played a role in her injuries.
Dammit, Parker had to make sure she was all right.
He hit the stairwell running. The research floor was underground, beneath the hospital’s main lobby. He reached the corridor before remembering to breathe, and halted when he saw two attendants on their knees flanking a length of bare leg that was shaking as if it had been Tasered.
Parker stifled the howl that would have threatened his current camouflage, and worked hard to control himself. His anonymous blonde sat propped against a wall, on the floor, with her head in her hands. She ignored the attendants’ chatter, every few seconds gasping for air and swinging her head from side to side.
With whatever tenuous connection they had between them, she seemed to immediately feel his presence. Her body stilled as he approached.
She feels it, too.
Parker didn’t speak to her. Not one word. Was he seeing something different now that he had added two and two together in a jumble of half-baked ideas?
He watched her green eyes open. As her gaze met his, Parker had no more doubt about their connection; he heard the damn thing snap into place. She also recognized it, Parker saw, in the widening of her haunting eyes—eyes that also revealed the extent of her pain. Dark bruises colored the skin beneath them. She had removed her bandages, leaving her facial wounds exposed. She had bitten her lower lip; tiny drops of blood pooled there.
And he noticed something beneath her pain, underlining it, hinting at a darker presence. He hadn’t been wrong. This new presence had a scent that filled the space between them and left the air thinner.
It seemed to Parker as though she reached out to him, though her arms didn’t move. The fine, undamaged skin beneath her left ear visibly pulsed, unbelievably fast, then slowing slightly to match the rhythm of his own racing beat. Using him as a model.
Parker held his breath. She held hers. He struggled to inhale, and she did the same. Although this woman might have looked to the casual observer like a patient desperately in need of help—damaged and petite, pretty and sick—the otherness in her slid behind her eyes like a splash of black liquid, there and gone in the dilating aperture of her irises.
Wolf.
The proof had been there, on her arm, all along. Whatever reaction that bite had caused was now transferring to other parts of her, while her body put up a fight.
This young woman was about say goodbye to her former life, the one she had clung so hard to. Soon she would confront the total, horrific rewiring of her system, if what had happened to Parker was routine. She would transition from human to woman-wolf hybrid soon now. Very soon. As if the pain gripping her at the moment wasn’t bad enough.
Parker wanted to rip apart the walls, toss the attendants aside and freak out, because the legends were true, after all. And the timing couldn’t possibly have been worse. Her eyes were pleading with him for help, and his own transition was on its way.
For whatever reason, he and this woman were tethered together by an invisible rope. She tugged on that rope while feeding off his every move. One beast looking for another.
Be careful what you wish for….
Not only had he found another werewolf, he had found two—if this girl managed to make it through the initial stage of her evolution. This lovely, damaged Jane Doe was no longer merely a patient, or merely human. And being close to her, after searching so long for another being like himself, felt like the final straw to Parker. The straw that might break him.
“I have her,” he told the attendants, his vocal cords seizing as he waved them off. “I know her. I’ll handle this. It’s a mental case. Please leave us.”
As soon as the men grudgingly rounded the corner, Parker fell to his knees, driven there by lon-pent-up emotion. He brought his heated face close to her ruined one and sniffed. Yes. Unmistakable. Damp hair. Musk. Animal.
He growled and cleared his throat, so that he might make her understand he had only minutes, at most, to speak at all. Certainly not enough time for an explanation. The moon was calling.
“They can’t help you here,” he said, his knuckles aching for change, his shoulders rigid beneath his scrubs. “I can’t help you here.”
Tears of frustration were spilling from her glazed eyes. Her arms and legs twitched repeatedly. It was obvious she had lost control of her movements without being able to fathom why. Parker remembered this stage all too well—the fear, the pain, the uncertainty of a body testing its limits. It had nearly done him in, a man so much stronger than this small bundle of bones.
He winced when his spine cracked, the sound only slightly muffled by the length of empty corridor. He flinched, hearing the answering crack in hers.
In a few more minutes his molecules would rearrange. He would take the shape of the thing he harbored. He could not allow another slip, not inside the hospital. He had to get away from this building, fast.
The best way to help this woman would be to get away from her, too. But he couldn’t leave her, not alone and hurting. How would she possibly have a chance of surviving this impending transformation if he didn’t help? If she didn’t know what her body was about to put her through?
Who else might get her through this night? A night from hell that had almost killed him when his turn had come?
That last thought hung in the air, suspended, almost solid, as Parker touched his cheek to hers. As he ran a fingertip, soon to sprout a long, pointed talon, under her chin. She knew something was dreadfully wrong; her lovely eyes told him so. They also told him that she trusted him fully. Him. Of all the people in the world, in Florida, in Miami, in this hospital—him.
She was struggling to draw air through passages narrowed by pain and panic. She was fighting with every last bit of energy she possessed to hang on to herself.
Careful of her injuries, Parker took her face in his hands and gazed deeply into her eyes, confronting the cause of her trauma. You cannot have her yet, beast.
A tear touched his fingers, warm, wet. He stared at that droplet, then brought his eyes back to hers. Angling his head, he covered her mouth with his, flattening her against the wall that supported her, needing not only to tend to her, but to conquer the thing that lay between them. This particular personal demon.
Two wolves in this hallway.
Her lips were soft, dry. She did not draw back into herself as his mouth shaped to hers. Nor did she cry out or try to move aside. Parker felt the exact second she let go.
Her trembling lips parted. She made a sound—not a groan of discomfort or rebellion, but a deep, low growl of relief.
The inside of her mouth began to heat. She clutched at Parker’s shoulders with rigid fingers, attempting to pull him closer. On his knees, straddling hers, he exhaled a slow breath into her mouth, guessing at what she needed. This strange CPR would force air into her lungs and help her to breathe, even if it further entangled the two of them.
Yes, you can breathe, even if you think you can’t. You will survive this, he silently told her. I will see to it somehow.
Parker blew air into her again, felt her chest expand. He squeezed his eyes shut to block out the thoughts begging for some kind of order.
Officer Delmonico had asked about a bite. Detective Wilson had been intrigued by the wound on this girl’s arm. By all that was holy, both of them had to know about this. They had been looking for confirmation all along. Had they seen this sort of thing before? Did they know?
&
nbsp; Hearing a second crack of bone on bone, Parker knew he was out of time. But his dilemma remained. How could he help this woman? Did he actually wish, now that he’d found her, for her transformation to be completed? Was he so selfish?
Maybe she had a chance to beat what swam through her veins. If it was caught early, would something as simple as a dose of penicillin help?
Maybe a wolf that had not yet shown itself fully could be stopped, its progress halted…despite every fiber of Parker’s being wanting a mate.
There was, he knew, no time for more questions. The clock was ticking.
To hell with yourself! Fix this if you can! Save her the pain. You’re a doctor, Parker. What must you do? What could possibly hinder a burgeoning beast?
Think!
Without the luxury of more time to investigate options, he knew one thing. The girl he wanted so badly had to be hidden from moonlight, removed from all reaches of the moon—and from him, since she was taking his cues.
She’d have to be tucked in a faraway place, kept from seeing him, hearing him, feeling him and his silver mistress. Hopefully, in return for the distance, the awful progression in her body might be stunted, halted, possibly even bested, at least until another day.
What he didn’t know about this could fill a damned textbook. A hundred textbooks. Could a beast be stunted? Held back for a time? Hadn’t he pondered those same questions in relation to himself for eight long months, only to have the answer be no?
“Not this hospital,” Parker barked. “No help here,” he repeated. He’d told the truth about that. The absolute truth. This woman needed a place used to dealing with anomalies, a safe haven, until he could think more clearly.
All right, then.
What he was about to do would amount to abuse, he knew. There was a chance she would never forgive him for this. There was a chance she wouldn’t survive, no matter what he did or didn’t do.
With claws pressing at his knuckles and his mouth still clinging to hers, he scooped the girl up, for the second time in the mere twenty-four hours he’d known her, and into his arms.
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