A woman in a formfitting dress and incredibly uncomfortable-looking shoes warned drivers of a longer than usual commute. Apparently a four-car accident had brought traffic to a standstill. The muscles in his shoulders began to relax. The intersection mentioned was likely one Kayla was trying to get through to reach her dentist’s office, so she must have been held up in—
His mind blanked when the helicopter’s camera zoomed in on the scene.
That had been one hell of an accident. And one of the mangled cars was the same color as Kayla’s.
“There are lots of silver cars in Houston,” he murmured. And many of the models looked similar.
Even if they didn’t, the car in question was so banged up he couldn’t identify the make or model. According to the traffic reporter, some dumbass who was texting while driving had slammed full speed into the back of a car waiting at a red light, forcing it into traffic where another car plowed into it from the side and spun it in front of a third. Firefighters had to use the Jaws of Life to remove the driver, whom the traffic reporter said was en route to the hospital in critical condition.
His cell phone rang. Nick strode into the kitchen to answer it. There were millions of people in Houston. The chances that Kayla had been involved in that accident had to be slim.
He didn’t recognize the number displayed on his phone. “Hello?”
“Mr. Nick?” a tearful female voice said. “It’s Rebecca Dorman from next door.”
Oh shit. His hand tightened on the receiver. “Becca? What is it? Are you okay?”
“No,” she blurted, her voice breaking on a sob. “The hospital just called. They said my mom’s been in an accident.”
Yanking the charging cord out of his cell, he raced for the stairs and took them three at a time.
“They said it’s bad.” She began to cry harder. “M-Mom said if anything happened… and she w-wasn’t around… I should call you or M-Mr. Oliver. I don’t know what to do. I’m in N-North Carolina.”
Nick put the phone on speaker and—with preternatural speed—yanked a pair of jeans on over his boxers and added a shirt.
He heard a door open on Becca’s end.
“Ugh,” a girl murmured disparagingly in the background, “she’s crying. Looks like she’s missing her mommy again.”
“Fuck off, you stupid bitch!” Becca shouted at her roommate. “My mom’s been in an accident!”
“Becca,” Nick said, trying to keep his voice calm, “I’m going to have someone come pick you up, okay? I have friends in North Carolina. They’ll arrange a flight for you and get you here as quickly as possible. What hospital did they take your mom to?”
Despite her tears, she managed to give him the name of the hospital and the person she’d spoken to.
“Okay. I’m heading there now. I’ll call my friends on the way, and a man named Chris Reordon will call you soon with details.”
“Okay. Thank you.”
Eliana appeared in his doorway, her face creased with concern, as he disconnected the call. “Kayla’s been in an accident?”
He nodded. “It was on the news. They said she’s in critical condition.”
“I’ll call Seth.”
“Thank you. I have to call Reordon and see how fast he can get Becca here.” He dialed the head of the East Coast division of the network.
“Reordon,” a distracted male answered.
“Chris, it’s Nick Belanger in Houston. I need a favor.” He gave Chris a quick rundown of the situation as he tugged on his boots. His damned hands shook so much the task took longer than it should have.
Critical condition. What if Kayla died before Seth could reach her?
“What’s the girl’s number?” Chris asked.
Nick recited the number that had appeared on caller ID. “She stays in one of the dorms, but I don’t know which one.”
“Don’t worry about that. I’ve got it. I’ll send a man to pick her up now and can have her there in a few hours. I take it this woman Kayla means something to you?”
“Yes.”
“Have you called Seth?”
“Eliana is calling him now.”
“Good. Henderson no doubt has contacts at Memorial. I’ll give him a heads-up that you and Seth are on the way.”
“Thank you.”
Heart racing, Nick zipped down to the living room in a blur.
Eliana waited near the kitchen, a cell phone pressed to her ear.
Seth, the immensely powerful leader of the Immortal Guardians, abruptly appeared beside her.
“Kayla Dorman has been injured?” His deep voice was flavored with a British accent tinged with a little something else Nick had never been able to identify.
Nick halted before them. “Yes. Do you know her?”
Seth nodded. “She’s a gifted one.”
Shock hit him like a punch to the chest, but Nick filed that away for later. “It sounds bad. Time may be of the essence.”
“Then we’ll go to the hospital now.” Tucking his cell phone into the pocket of his long black coat, Seth reached out and grabbed Nick’s and Eliana’s shoulders.
The room around them darkened. A strange feeling of weightlessness gripped Nick, not unlike that which he sometimes felt in an elevator. Then their surroundings brightened and he found himself standing in an office lit by a wall of windows.
A doctor seated behind a desk that dominated the room jumped at their sudden appearance, sending whatever paper he’d been reading flying into the air. Upon recognizing Seth, he relaxed. “Shit, that startled me.” He rose, brow furrowing. “What’s up?”
“Dr. Ranz, this is Nick and Eliana. A gifted one by the name of Kayla Dorman was just brought to your emergency room. She’s been in an accident and is described as being in critical condition. I need you to take us to her.”
“Yes, sir.” He rounded his desk. “Are you planning to heal her?”
“Yes.”
“You’ll have to bury a lot of memories if you do. Doctors, nurses, paramedics, any technicians who might have performed scans—”
“I’m aware,” Seth answered. “I would appreciate your assistance in locating them all.”
“Yes, sir.”
Nick and Eliana followed Seth and the doctor out of the office.
Dr. Ranz drew his cell phone from his pocket and made a call. “Mike,” he murmured, keeping his voice low enough that it wouldn’t carry to the medical personnel they passed as they navigated one hallway after another. “We’ve got IGs on the premises. I need you to give me the current location of a patient named Kayla Dorman.”
“Kayla Dorman,” a man repeated on the other end. “Yeah. Here she is. They’re prepping her for surgery in OR 3.”
“Okay. Call your guys in security and give them a heads-up that we’re on our way, then get Henderson’s tech crew to remotely help you deal with whatever shows up on the security-camera feeds and prepare to alter her medical records.”
“Will do.”
“Thanks.”
It didn’t surprise Nick that the network had connections inside the hospital. They probably had such in every major hospital in town. Houston was a big city with a lot of crime. Vampires loved that shit. And they didn’t always kill when they sought blood sources, so sometimes their victims wound up in the hospital.
It was a lot easier to camouflage a vampire attack as something else if you had people working inside such institutions.
Nick followed the others into a large elevator. The ride down seemed to last forever. Then Dr. Ranz led them down more hallways to OR 3.
No one stopped them as they strode boldly through a set of double doors. The nurses, surgical techs, and a man Nick thought might be an anesthesiologist looked up. Their expressions instantly blanked. The anesthesiologist set down the syringe he held before they all left the room.
Through a glass window, Nick saw a doctor who was scrubbing up in the next room frown and open his mouth to protest. Then his expression went blank. Stepping b
ack from the sink, he dried his hands and left.
Seth’s telepathic abilities were truly remarkable.
Nick crossed to the small figure on the table in the center of the room. A lump rose in his throat. “Kayla.”
A sheet was draped across her hips and over her right leg, leaving the rest of her bare. The left side of her face bore multiple gashes embedded with glass, most of which still bled. Her eye on that side was discolored and almost swollen shut. Her left arm was broken. Her leg was, too, the femur visible through the jagged hole it had torn through her skin. Her slender torso was bare, badly bruised, her breasts exposed. And a long, jagged piece of metal stuck out of her chest.
He rested a shaking hand on her forehead. “Kayla.”
She moaned. Her eyelashes fluttered, then opened. “N-Nick?” she whispered.
He nodded and leaned down until his face hovered just over hers. “I’m here.”
“Hurts.”
“I know, honey. But it’s going to be okay.”
“C-Call Becca.”
“I already talked to Becca. She’s on her way.”
Dr. Ranz began to rattle off all the things Seth needed to heal.
Kayla glanced down at the metal sticking out of her chest, then met Nick’s gaze.
“It’s okay,” he murmured. “Everything’s going to be okay. I promise.” He pressed a kiss to her bloody forehead. “Just close your eyes and rest.”
Tears slid from the corners of her eyes, sparking a burn at the backs of his own. Something tugged on his shirt.
Nick glanced down and found her uninjured hand fisted in his shirt.
“Tell her… I love her,” she whispered, voice harsh.
Gently prying her fingers loose, he pressed a kiss to her knuckles. “I will. It’s going to be okay. I promise.”
“Nick,” Seth murmured, “we need to do this now.”
Nodding, he withdrew the hand on her hair and straightened.
Kayla’s gaze clung to his, her clutch on his hand painfully tight.
Seth rested a large hand on her forehead. “Sleep.”
Her lashes closed. Her hand went limp in Nick’s as the tension in her body vanished and she sank into unconsciousness.
Seth kept one hand on her forehead and rested the other on her chest, fingers splayed next to the metal that protruded from it. His eyes met Nick’s. “You’ll have to remove the metal.”
Nick lowered Kayla’s hand and released her. His own hand shook as he curled his fingers around the chunk of metal he couldn’t even identify. He looked at Seth.
Seth applied pressure to Kayla’s chest to hold her still, then nodded.
Nick tried to ease the chunk free slowly, but it was really lodged in there. Clamping his lips together, he exerted more force and yanked the metal free.
Eliana gasped as blood gushed from the wound.
Nick stared down at Kayla, his fingers tightening around the metal.
Seth closed his eyes. Seconds later the blood flow stopped. The ragged edges of the wound slowly drew together, sealing, forming scar tissue, then fading away entirely. The bruising that graced it darkened to purples before rapidly slipping into shades of brown and yellow and disappearing altogether.
Seth’s hands began to glow faintly, heat radiating from them and raising the temperature in the room.
The broken bones in Kayla’s forearm shifted beneath the skin, repositioning themselves until they were properly aligned and weaving back together. Her femur sank beneath the skin. As it realigned itself and healed, the skin it had pierced drew together and sealed.
“Damn, I wish I had the ability to do that,” Dr. Ranz whispered.
Nick turned his gaze to Kayla’s face. The swelling around her eye decreased. Shards of glass embedded in the cuts that scored her cheek and temple glinted in the bright overhead light as they backed out of the wounds and fell to the table.
Seth opened his eyes. “She suffered partial vision loss in her left eye. I’ve restored it but will leave the bruising around it. I’ll also leave some cuts and abrasions on her face.”
Nick opened his mouth to object.
Seth cut him off with a shake of his head. “The accident made the news, Nick, on television and online. The network can’t cover it up and make it disappear the way they could a fall in the shower that doesn’t make headlines, and there really isn’t a need to. We’ll put a cast on Kayla’s arm for appearances, but she’ll feel no pain. This way the network can simply revise her records to make the injuries reported less severe, and I’ll have fewer memories to alter. Eliminating her visit entirely would pose too many problems.”
He saw the logic in it but…
Nick stared down at her battered face.
“She won’t scar,” Seth said softly. “I’ll make sure of it.”
He nodded.
Seth withdrew his healing touch and turned to Dr. Ranz. “She needs a blood transfusion.”
The doctor nodded. “I’m on it.” In short order, he set up an IV.
Nick adjusted the sheet so it covered both Kayla’s legs, then gently drew it up to cover her bare breasts.
Seth caught his eye. “I’m going to get to work altering memories.”
“Thank you.”
The Immortal Guardians leader left the operating room.
Dr. Ranz retreated to the scrub room and began talking softly on his cell phone, guiding the network in the changes they should make to Kayla’s records.
Eliana stepped up beside Nick as he reclaimed Kayla’s hand. “She’s okay.”
He released a long breath, trying to calm his frayed nerves. “I know. But it scared the hell out of me.” His hands still shook from it.
“Me, too.”
“Mortals are so fragile,” he said with some despair. “What if she hadn’t made it to the hospital? She could have died before I even heard about the accident.”
Eliana nodded. “You should tell her how you feel, Nick. She’s a gifted one. There’s no reason not to now.”
He shook his head. “You’re assuming one, that she’s interested in me—”
“She is.”
“And two, that she would be willing to transform and become immortal if things worked out between us.”
“Why wouldn’t she? Sarah did. And Melanie. And Krysta.”
He glanced down at her. “But they didn’t have children. How many parents do you know who wouldn’t dread the idea of outliving their children? And their grandchildren? And their grandchildren? Look what it did to Roland. Until Sarah, he never let anyone get close to him, and it still tore him up inside every time one of his descendants died.”
She bit her lip, her look turning pensive. “Jenna transformed for Richart, and she has a son.”
He shook his head. “Jenna had no choice. A vampire had already begun transforming her.”
Surprise lit her features. “What?”
“By the time Richart realized what was happening, her immune system had already been compromised, and her only options were death or becoming immortal.”
“I didn’t know that.”
“Her son was only a couple of years older than Becca and felt responsible. So it would’ve crushed him—Richart, too—if she had opted to die instead.”
“Shit.”
“Exactly.”
Silence fell between them. Or as much silence as their preternatural hearing would permit in a building this size packed with so many voices.
“I still think you’d be a fool not to tell her.” Eliana’s voice carried such sadness that he studied her. “I mean… don’t you get lonely?”
When her brown eyes met his, he swallowed hard at the stark pain he read in them.
He knew that pain, that loneliness well. One of the other reasons Seth insisted all Immortal Guardians have mortal Seconds who lived with them was to try to ease the loneliness that so often prevailed in their long lives.
Though it helped, it wasn’t the same.
“Yeah, I do,” he
admitted.
She shifted her focus to Kayla’s still form. “I think Tomasso got it right. Though he’s destined to lose Cassandra in the end, they’ve had over a hundred years of love and affection and happiness together. I know losing her will tear his fucking heart out… but he’ll at least have the memory of those years together to keep him going.” Her throat worked in a swallow. “I would give anything for that.”
Regret filled him. Eliana was always so full of energy and had such a friendly, buoyant personality, often laughing and teasing, that he had never suspected her smiles might hide a deep loneliness and unhappiness.
He opened his mouth to say… he wasn’t sure what. What could he say?
The doors swung open, and a pretty Latina woman wearing scrubs entered. Her steps slowed as she approached them uncertainly.
Nick and Eliana shared a look. Crap.
Dr. Ranz rejoined them. “It’s okay. Isabel is going to take Kayla to another room where Dr. Kim will put a cast on her arm for me. Both moonlight for the network. I’ll stick with you until we reach Dr. Kim, then I need to catch up with Seth and lend him a hand.”
Nick relaxed.
Dr. Ranz returned to his cell phone conversation.
Isabel’s eyes widened as she approached them. “Are you Immortal Guardians?” she whispered.
He and Eliana shared another look, then nodded.
She smiled. “You’re the first ones I’ve met in person. Thank you so much for everything you do.”
Nick offered her a slight bow. “We couldn’t do it without the support of generous people like you and Dr. Ranz. Thank you for aiding us.”
She nodded to Kayla. “Is she your Second?”
“No. But she’s special to me.”
Her smile softened. “Don’t worry. We’ll take good care of her.”
“Thank you.”
Isabel drew on a pair of blue gloves, then held out a hand. “Let me take that for you.”
Nick glanced down and realized he was still holding the jagged piece of metal he’d yanked out of Kayla’s chest. “Oh. Of course.”
His hands finally stopped shaking as the panic that had flooded his body with adrenaline subsided. Kayla was going to be okay. But damn, it had been close. What if she’d died en route to the hospital? What if she’d been killed instantly in the crash?
Broken Dawn (Immortal Guardians Book 10) Page 5