So he just barreled into her personal space and threw his arms around her. “Praise God! Grandpa’s here. Grandma and Aunt Betty were so worried.”
“What are you doing?” she hissed, her face against his chest as she simultaneously attempted both to not touch him and to look as if she were returning his embrace. She was thinner in places—more fragile-seeming. Less muscular. Which was strange. He liked her better when she was herself. Except maybe this was her real self.
Either way, he was hit with some pretty X-rated images upon contact, and he was certain she was experiencing the same. Were they his memories or hers?
It almost didn’t matter.
“I’m playing along,” Shane whispered back, adding in his regular voice, “Oh, sweetheart, this is such good news.” He pulled her chin up to kiss her because, damn it, he wasn’t likely to have this chance again, but she stepped on his foot. Hard enough for him to let her go. “Ow! Is he? How is he?”
She shot him a darkly exasperated look even as she motioned for him to follow, so he did just that as she led the way back into the ER, dodging several nurses and a doctor or two. “He’s not doing well. I need to call, um, Aunt Betty, to arrange for a private ambulance to pick him up so we can get him the care he needs.” She took his arm and pulled him closer, but only to whisper, “Did you really think that I ditched you?”
She let go of him again, a little too fast.
Obviously Mac knew what he’d been thinking—or more likely what he’d been feeling, since empathy was her strength. So he didn’t try to bullshit her as they swiftly walked past a dozen curtained-off rooms, the beds filled with people in need of medical help. “Yeah. You were gone. I thought—”
“While you were parking,” she told him, her voice still low, “an ambulance brought in an elderly man I met just this morning in a parking lot and—” She cut herself off. “It doesn’t matter where or how I met him. I just did. He was living out of his car and it had just broken down and he was going to work for JLG—a drug-testing lab. I told him not to—I gave him some money—but I think he went anyway. Shit, I know he went, and I know they tested Destiny on him, because he’s accessed some powers that he didn’t have before.”
Shane stopped short. “Did he joker?”
“I don’t think so, but I don’t know.” Mac shook her head, her face grim as she refused to stop walking—to the point of taking him by his sleeve and dragging him with her. Despite her fragile appearance, she was still quite strong. “He’s unconscious. The paramedics told me they answered a call about a man lying in the street, so the drug-lab motherfuckers must’ve dumped him—they do that. His med scan shows that he’s had a massive heart attack. I’m pretty sure most of the powers he acquired have been shut down as his body focuses on repairing itself.”
“Most of the powers?” Shane repeated.
“Yeah, he can still throw a kind of feeble mental bitchslap,” she told him. “But even that’s fading fast. When he first came in, it was like an ice pick in my sinuses—like, damn. But then I realized that the guy at the triage desk felt it, too. He goes, Ooh, weird, an ice cream headache—where’d that come from? And I turned around, and they were wheeling this guy in and … I recognized him. And I knew. So I went into the bathroom to change”—she said it so casually, but Shane knew she meant more than simply to change her shirt—“so I could come back out and be his worried granddaughter. If we have any hope of saving him, we’ve got to get him to OI. Immediately.”
She pulled Shane with her behind the curtain down at the very end of the entire row, where a very old man was strapped into a bed and hooked up to an IV, oxygen tubing beneath his nose. His eyes were closed. He didn’t look dangerous, but Rickie Littleton hadn’t looked very menacing when he wasn’t flying around and breathing fire.
Still, Shane turned to Mac, and said, “What can I do to help make that happen?”
She exhaled, as if she’d been holding her breath for a long time, and said, “Stay with him. Make sure no one gives him anything—no medication, nothing. Don’t let them move him and don’t let anyone get too close. I didn’t want to bind his hands”—she handed him several standard issue plastic restraints that she’d apparently been carrying in her pocket—“but if you can figure out a way to do it without killing him, go wild. I honestly don’t know if he jokered, or if he’s just under the influence of the drug. I can’t use my cell phone in here, so I’m going out to the lobby to call Elliot and arrange for the medevac chopper to come pick him up. I’ll be fast.”
“I’ll be here,” Shane told her.
“Thanks,” Mac said, adding, “If he comes to, and you believe that he has jokered? Don’t wait for him to start flying around the room. Kill him.”
And with that she was gone.
Bach was, as he’d written in his note, out in Anna’s living room.
He was asleep on the sofa, only slightly sprawled so that his head was against the back of the thing, but both of his feet were still firmly on the floor.
He slept as he did nearly everything—quietly. Carefully. Formally—much like the way he’d signed that note with his full name. Joseph Bach.
He’d asked Anna to wake him, but there was still about twenty-five minutes before he was due at that meeting he’d mentioned in that note.
Besides, she could see, from across the room, that the comm-station over near the window was active, so she moved quietly toward it. Bach didn’t stir, and as she sat in the chair in front of it, she glanced back at him.…
He was still asleep.
So Anna typed the name Devon Caine into the search engine.
The first link that appeared took her—oh, dear God—to the Commonwealth of Massachusetts sex offender database, where sure enough, there was a picture—a younger version—of the bigger of the two men who’d abducted her sister. Caine’s address was also listed, and she leaned in closer to read the small font.
“He’s no longer at that address.”
Anna jumped and sure enough, Bach had awakened and was watching her from the sofa.
“We already checked,” he continued as he stretched and smoothed down his hair, even though it wasn’t messy. At least not compared to her own unruly curls. “We’ve also discovered that his driver’s license was revoked five years ago—and he’s not at that address, either. He’s got a long list of priors, including some DUIs, and he’s also no longer at the address he filed with his parole officer—whom he’s failed to visit for nearly two years. There’s an eighteen-month-old warrant out for his arrest—which doesn’t necessarily mean that he’s going to be hard to find, but rather that the police haven’t been actively looking for him. But we are.”
His message was clear. The team from OI wasn’t going to take eighteen months to find Caine—or Nika.
Or so they hoped.
“I didn’t mean to disturb you,” she said.
“It was time to wake up.”
Despite the sleep he’d gotten, Bach still looked tired—in fact, there seemed to be new lines of strain on his face. And at some point in the night or the very early morning, he’d changed out of his blue sweater and into an almost identical green one. It looked good on him, too.
“Any luck with the projections from Nika?” she asked, not daring to hope. She’d had no dreams of any kind—not about Nika, not about anything—so she didn’t expect much.
He closed his eyes for a moment, as if checking his memory, but then shook his head. “No.”
She’d been holding her breath. Despite her denial, she had been hoping. And she was more disappointed and frustrated than she’d expected to be.
“I’m sorry,” Bach said.
“It was worth a try,” Anna said. “And even worth trying again. Maybe you could sleep over again tonight?” She felt her face flushing slightly at her own words. There were sleepovers and there were sleepovers, and she didn’t want him to think she was being at all suggestive.
But Bach didn’t seem to notice. He just nodded.
“I’m going to talk to Elliot—Dr. Zerkowski—see if we can’t figure out exactly what happened that first time. If you’re open to even more testing—”
“I am,” she said. They’d only had time for some preliminary tests earlier, before Bach had been called away. “Whatever it takes.”
He nodded again. Pushed himself to his feet. “I should go. I’ll have someone pick you up—escort you down to my office. That’s where we’re meeting. Although it’s going to be awhile. We have some other things to discuss before we get to Nika.”
“I wanted to ask you, what were those sirens?” Anna asked him, standing up, too. “From before?”
“We had an event.” His answer was as vague as she’d expected. But then he surprised her by adding, “An unfortunate one. The man that Mac identified from the satellite images …”
“Rickie Littleton,” Anna supplied the name. She glanced back at the computer. That was the next name she’d been planning to search for.
Bach nodded. “He’s a low-level dealer,” he told her. “Specializing in Destiny. Mac and Diaz found him and brought him in for me to take a little walk through his mind, see if we couldn’t find out what he did with your sister. But the security team didn’t realize—none of us did—that Destiny is now being packaged and sold as something that looks rather disturbingly like an Epi Pen.”
“A what?”
“People with severe allergies—to bee stings or peanut butter. They carry them around. It’s a device that administers medication through an easy injection. You punch it into your thigh.” He smiled grimly. “And yes, our lives just got a whole lot harder. Most people are put off by the idea of a recreational drug that they need to inject into a vein with a needle and syringe. But using one of those injection devices …? Significantly less of a big deal.”
“And Littleton had some and took it?” she asked.
Bach nodded. “He was a walking pharmacy, and nearly all of his supply was confiscated. One of the guards who searched him has a kid with a shellfish allergy, and she thought the Epi Pens—he had two—were for Littleton’s own health. So she left them in his pocket, and he used them both. I’m certain he was hoping it would give him the powers he needed to break free. Instead, he jokered.”
Oh God. “Was anyone hurt?” Anna asked.
Bach nodded. “He was. He was killed in our attempt to subdue him.”
“So we’re down to Devon Caine,” she surmised, her stomach clenching.
“We are,” he agreed.
Anna glanced back at the computer monitor and that sex offender registry listing—which Bach had no doubt intended for her to find. He was not a man who would allow a comm-station to be just carelessly left active.
“What can I do to help?” she asked. “Instead of just sitting here waiting, may I use the computer, and try to identify that man from Nika’s projection—the one with the scars on his face?”
Bach smiled, and she got the sense that he’d expected her to ask just that.
“Please,” he said. “Analysis is overworked and … You’ve seen things they haven’t.”
She’d already turned back to the computer, sitting in front of it, already typing the words “victims of facially disfiguring accidents” into the search engine.
“See you in a bit,” Bach said and she heard the click of the door as he let himself out.
Elliot picked up on the first ring. “What the fuck, Mac? Where the hell are you?”
“St. Elizabeth’s Medical Center,” she told him from the waiting room, as she moved out of earshot of a mother holding a child with a horrible cough. “What the fuck I’m doing here is moot—”
“To you, maybe,” he interrupted. “But it’s sure not going to be to Dr. Bach and—”
Bach was going to be disappointed in her yet again, blah blah blah. Mac loved Elliot, she did, but shit. She spoke over him. “There’s an eighty-year-old male in the ER and I’m ninety-nine percent certain that he’s been a recent crash-test-dummy for JLG’s drug lab. And I’m ninety-nine-point-nine percent certain that the drug they tested on him earlier today was Destiny. I don’t know if he jokered or what, but I do know this: If he has any chance of survival, it’ll be because you stop what-the-fucking and instead call for a helicopter pickup, so we can get him over to OI, stat—where the doctors actually know what-the-fuck they’re doing.”
“Patient’s name?” Elliot asked, which was more like it.
“Edward O’Keefe,” Mac told him. “He’s in bed thirty-four, in the ER’s red wing.” Which meant they expected him to die within hours. They were just keeping him comfortable. And that meant they’d be more than happy to send him over to another facility, ASAP.
Where he’d be someone else’s problem, and someone else’s body to dispose of.
“Get him ready to go. Chopper’s on its way,” Elliot said and hung up on her.
Mac pocketed her phone and headed back into the ER as quickly as she could move without raising eyebrows.
Shane was standing at the curtain partition, waiting for her, and she could feel his relief when he spotted her.
She felt his desire, too—and that was her fault, entirely, for ramping up her powers while they were in the car.
Still, he kept it all business and respect—pure officer-and-gentleman—and as she approached, he gave her a sit-rep: “No change, no movement—and no one’s been in to see him, either.”
Mac nodded, keeping it all business, too. The hook holding the old man’s saline bag was already attached to the bed, as was his oxygen tank. “Help me figure out how to get this bed ready to roll,” she ordered, and Shane jumped to assist.
“I’m going to tell the truth, you know,” he informed her as he bent down to look at the mechanism. “After we get back to OI. How I forced you to take me with you—”
“You didn’t force me,” Mac said. Ah, that was how the bed’s brakes unlocked. She did the same thing on her side that Shane had done on his. “Don’t be melodramatic, Navy. And don’t worry, they’re not going to kick you out of the program. They haven’t kicked me out yet.”
“The bed’s designed to roll with the patient backward—the head goes first,” Shane told her—apparently he knew that just from looking at the wheels. “So we essentially back him out of this area—”
“Got it,” Mac said. “The chopper bay is up on the seventh floor, this wing. I’m going to go find a nurse or a doctor, so we don’t get stopped on our way to the elevators. Hang tight.”
But she was in luck and a doctor—late twenties, male, and radiating both exhaustion and annoyance—was out in the hall. It was a double win, of sorts, because she knew that Shane still didn’t quite believe in her power. This way, he could watch it work on someone besides himself. He’d already followed her to the edge of the curtain.
“Excuse me, Doctor,” she called, and as the man turned to her and caught a whiff of her skills, his body language changed so drastically, it was almost laughable.
“Wow,” Shane said under his breath as the doctor nearly ran toward her.
Of course, Shane didn’t know that stress and fatigue made a target particularly susceptible to her charms. And it was a well-known fact that ER doctors often went for forty-eight hours without sleep, making them extra malleable.
And it wasn’t just sex appeal that she used. Mac tapped into the very elements of her target’s psyche—in this case the very parts of his personality that had made him want to become a physician—his desire to help people, to save lives, to make a difference.
Too often, locked in as a cog in the workings of the current screwed-up medical system, doctors weren’t able to help people. But the message she was currently sending out was heavy with you are my hero. And this man liked that.
“Dr. Samuels,” she said, reading his name tag, “I know you can help me.” She explained about the helicopter that was coming from OI and couldn’t he bend the rules just this once for her dying grandfather?
He could, and he did.
>
Shane stayed silent, just watching, as the doctor escorted them all the way up to the seventh floor, chatting with Mac the entire way—not just about the fictional hospice program Grandpa was going to be put into, but also personal stuff, like the fact that he’d gone out to Arizona to get his medical degree, but now here he was, back in Boston, living not far from where he’d grown up, didn’t it figure.
Mac maintained eye contact and smiled. And she may have leaned a bit too hard on her ability to be attractive, sending out God-only-knew what kind of pheromones, because as they were wheeling the old man toward the door that led out to the helicopter deck, Dr. Samuels said, “I know we’ve only just met, and I don’t usually do this, but …”
Here it came. He was going to ask her out or request her phone number, and Mac glanced at Shane to make sure he was paying attention—and he was.
“Will you marry me?”
“I’m sorry, what?” Mac turned back to look at the doctor.
“I know.” The man was laughing, but at the same time he was deadly serious. “It’s crazy, but … I don’t think I’ve ever had such an immediate rapport with anyone, in my entire life. It’s as if you … I don’t know, as if you were created specifically for me. I’m afraid if I just let you leave, I’ll miss out on the chance of a lifetime.”
This guy had balls, Mac had to give him that. He saw something he thought he wanted, and he went for it.
Kind of like Shane.
Who was still watching closely, looking from her to the doctor and back, waiting to see what she was going to say or do.
What she did was dial it down. Way down. Still, she knew her effect on the man would take a few hours to wear off, so she said—as gently as possible—“Thank you so much. I’m flattered. I am. A woman doesn’t get that kind of compliment every day, but … I’m already taken. I’m in a relationship, but if it ever ends, I promise I’ll give you a call.”
And now she was sending out serious believe me vibes despite her lie, and she could feel his acceptance. Thank God. Her targets didn’t always take rejection gracefully.
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