Glancing at the bottle of Lagavulin, he was surprised to find it was three-quarters of the way empty. He’d only opened it the day before and no one else drank the shit.

  “You’re back.”

  Butch was already looking up as Marissa spoke, his bonded male called to attention by her presence—and oh, what a presence it was. His mate was dressed in a silk nightgown that brushed the tops of her pretty bare feet, the color a blush pink that looked like it had been created especially for her and a select few tea roses. Her blond hair, which she had cut shoulder length a while ago, was growing out, at his urging, and the thick locks curled into spirals that were now down past her collarbones in front and her shoulder bones in back.

  He took a moment to study her face. Word had always had it that hers was the greatest beauty in the species, and he knew this to be fact, not rumor. Ever since the first moment he had seen her at Darius’s old place—back when he’d been a human and had no idea what he was getting himself into—she had struck him stupid. Except for him, it was not her looks that created such a compelling, compulsive attraction. It was the soul behind the lovely eyes, the voice that came out of those perfect lips, the heartbeat behind the curves.

  Her soul was what really did it for him.

  “Are you okay?” she said as she came forward. “What’s wrong?”

  The silk nightgown flowed behind her with the grace of contrails in the sky, and he was reminded, not for the first time, that he wished he brought better things to her life. He had a brutal job with little good news and much bloodshed, and then there was his side gig as the Omega’s buck-stops-here.

  “Same ol’, same ol’.” They kissed as he held her close. “You know.”

  “Not with the way you’re hitting that scotch.”

  “You’re too good at reading my tells.”

  “It’s not that hard.”

  On that note, he finished the Lag in his glass and had to force himself not to pour another. Man, he wanted to manage his emotions better. Going the yoga and meditation route seemed so much more virtuous, and then there was his alkie history to worry about. But somehow, the booze was where it was at.

  “Come here,” he said, taking his shellan’s hand.

  As he drew her over to the sofa, she asked, “Your limp is still pronounced. What happened? You didn’t tell me at Last Meal.”

  “It’s not important.”

  “Should you see Doc Jane?”

  Sitting down, he grunted—then winced and tried to rearrange himself in his slacks, although he didn’t think any particular position was going to help his nads. He felt like they were swollen ten times their normal size, and nightmare scenarios of them exploding in his boxer shorts like overinflated balloons made him look at the bottle of Lag he’d left on the counter.

  “It’s fine.” He turned and tucked her hair behind her ear. “But you’re right, I feel like we didn’t get to catch up properly during dinner.”

  He didn’t like the way she stared at him, like she had lifted his a-okay curtain and was seeing the hot mess of garbage he was hiding.

  “You haven’t been sleeping and your eyes aren’t focusing on anything.”

  “Untrue.” He smiled a little. “I couldn’t take them off you as you came in here and I don’t want to look anywhere else right now.”

  “You can tell me anything, you know that.”

  “I do.”

  Marissa shook her head like he was frustrating her. “So how about we start with how you got hurt.”

  “I ran into a car.” Butch let his head fall back against the cushions. When he’d been talking about “catching up,” it had been more about what her night had been like. “No big deal.”

  “What if your leg is broken?”

  “It wasn’t my leg.”

  “Where did you get hit then?”

  He tilted his head toward her. “Little Butchie took it like a man.”

  Marissa’s eyebrows went up. “Oh, my God. I’m so sorry . . . I, ah, exactly how did it happen? Did you run into the hood ornament?”

  “I became the hood ornament. I turned a Chrysler LeBaron into a LeBrian.”

  “That’s horrible!”

  “I stopped—” He was going to say “pissing.” “—peeing blood about four hours ago.”

  “You need to go to the clinic, right now—”

  Butch caught her hand as she went to stand up. “I’m just fine, now that I’m with you.”

  Crossing her arms, she set a level stare on him, like she was taking his vitals with her eyes. “I overheard V telling Jane that he needed to cleanse you tonight. That’s three times in the last week.”

  Annnnnnnd Butch went back to staring at the counter again, like the scotch was his best friend. “Was it that much? I don’t think it was—”

  “Yes. Three times.”

  Closing his eyes briefly, he said, “Please don’t take this the wrong way, but I can’t talk about work right now. I just can’t. There are eleven hours between this moment and when I have to leave to go out into the field again. I need to spend this precious time thinking about something, anything, else than the war.”

  Assuming that was even possible.

  After a moment, Marissa resettled beside him and tucked her feet under herself. Leaning into his chest, she tugged his heavy gold cross out of his shirt.

  “I love how this gets warm when it lays on your skin,” she murmured. “It makes me feel that you’re protected.”

  “I am. God is always with me.”

  “Good.” As her eyes became teary, she blinked fast. “I know you don’t want to talk about this . . . but I love you and I don’t want to live my life without you. You’re everything to me. If something were to happen—”

  “Shh.” He covered her hand with his own, so that they were both holding the symbol of his faith. Then he leaned in and kissed her mouth. “Don’t think like that. Don’t talk like that. I’ll be fine.”

  “Promise me that you’ll . . .” She looked deeply into his eyes, as if she could pull something out of him by will alone. “. . . be careful.”

  He had a feeling that she wanted to make him vow to get through the Dhestroyer Prophecy alive. But the sadness in her face told him she was confronting the fact that that was not his call. Being careful with himself? That was within his control to some degree. Being upright in his boots at the end? Way above his pay grade.

  She cleared her throat. “Do you remember when they found you, after the Omega got ahold of you and did . . . what he did to you?”

  “Let’s not talk about—”

  “They brought you to my brother’s clinic, the one he had before the raids.” She carefully tucked the cross back inside his shirt, as if she wanted it closer to his heart, closer to his soul. “I remember when V told me where they were keeping you. I ran to that isolation room. I was relieved you were alive, but horrified by the condition you were in—and you didn’t want me in there with you.”

  “Only because I couldn’t have you infected with the evil. And that’s still true to this day.”

  “I know.” Marissa took a deep breath. “The thing is, I’ve been through a lot in my life. All those centuries as Wrath’s unclaimed shellan. The trip across the ocean from the Old Country when I didn’t think we were going to make the crossing alive. Being judged by the glymera, by my brother, by the Council. Things only got better when I met you. You made me feel alive . . . you were such a revelation. And then I almost lost you.”

  “Don’t go back there—”

  “That’s my point. I don’t want to ever mourn you again.”

  “You aren’t going to have to.”

  In a small voice, she spoke the very thing that worried him most. “The prophecy only provides that you eradicate the Omega. It doesn’t say anything about what survives.”

  Butch stared somberly at his mate. “With everything I am, and all that I will ever be, I swear, I will come back to you.”

  Eventually, she nodded. And she was looking at where the cross hung under his shirt when she did.

  “Let me hold you,” he murmured as he drew her against his chest.

  Making circles with his palm across her back, he felt his love for his female take on a new dimension . . . but not for a happy reason. The sense that their time together could be cut short deepened his emotions to a painful degree, and in the overwhelming quiet of their home, he felt true fear. It was as if their separation was in the wind, a leaf falling through the air. Whether it landed on his grave or not, no one knew.

  “I just have this bad feeling,” she said against his pec.

  Butch kept his mouth shut on that one, closing his eyes and running through some Hail Marys in his head. It was the only thing he could think to do, and that reality made him feel his vulnerability more than anything else. His faith was strong. His love for Marissa was even stronger. His control over destiny? Big nope on that one.

  After a moment, she stirred against him, her lips pressing into the front of his shirt at his sternum. Then she released a button and kissed a little further down, on his diaphragm. Then . . . she shifted her body between his legs, sliding off the sofa so she was kneeling in front of him. As her hands traveled up his thighs, he felt things stir in a place he’d been a little worried about ever working right again.

  A rumble rose up his throat. And he repeated the sound as her hands went to the Hermès belt he wore.

  “I’m sorry you were hurt,” she murmured as she undid the supple leather strap. And started working on the button of his fly. And the zipper.

  Butch’s pelvis rolled and he braced his arms, his hands sinking into the soft cushions. “I’m not that hurt.”

  Marissa eyed the enormous erection that begged for any morsel of her attention. “So I see. But how about I kiss it to make it feel better anyway?”

  “Fuck . . . yes, please . . .” he breathed.

  The St. Francis Hospital System’s Urgent Care facility was only about ten blocks from the medical center’s campus, eight blocks from the CCJ’s newsroom. So it was a toss-up. Given how tired Jo was, she couldn’t decide whether she should walk or drive, but the day was sunny and warm for March. Under the theory that scurvy was a possibility after the long winter in upstate New York, she decided to hoof it. Unfortunately, she forgot her sunglasses in her car, and halfway between her office and the doc-in-a-box, she came to a decision tree. Did she go back and get them? Or soldier on?

  You’re going to die.

  That mysterious man in leather’s bald statement, spoken in his deep, accented voice, spurred her on in spite of the way the sunlight stung her eyes—sure as if her mortal hourglass was running out of sand, and she needed to go faster to make it to medical help before she went into multi-organ failure.

  Not that she was catastrophizing at all.

  Nah.

  Wincing up at the sky, she cursed and put her hand up to her aching forehead. Screw her liver, kidneys, heart, and lungs giving out. She was liable to have her head explode, parts of her gray matter becoming airborne shrapnel as the tumor she was clearly growing under her skull like a fat August tomato spontaneously quadrupled in size.

  By the time she pulled open the glass door to the clinic, and stepped inside its Lysol-scented air, she was nauseous, a little dizzy, and a whole lot convinced it was cancer. Of course, the fact that she hadn’t slept since the night before, and she’d seen her first decapitated corpse, and she was sad for Bill and Lydia, was likely not helping her hypothetical CNS non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.

  Thank you for that differential diagnosis, WebMD.

  Offering a wan smile to a receptionist who seemed absolutely uninterested in receiving anyone, Jo wrote her name on the lined sheet that read “Sign In Here” and then gratefully sank into a plastic chair directly under the TV. There were two other people stationed at quarantine-like quadrants around the waiting area, as if no one was sure who had what communicable disease, and therefore, nobody was taking any chances catching something they didn’t already have.

  She closed her eyes and breathed through her nose. When that did nothing to quell the rolling swells atop the bilious green sea in her stomach, she tried cracking her lips and redirecting her inhales and exhales through that route.

  “Ms. Early?” the receptionist said some time later.

  After checking in with her driver’s license and her insurance card, it was back to waiting, and then she was finally in a room. The male nurse who took her weight, her vitals, and her temperature seemed nice enough, and she prayed she didn’t throw up on him.

  “So,” he said as he entered her blood pressure into her electronic chart, “tell me a little about what’s been going on.”

  “Is my blood pressure, okay?”

  “It’s on the low side. But your oxygen stats are great and your pulse is fine. You’re running a low-grade fever, though.”

  “So I’m sick.”

  He stopped typing into the computer and faced her. He was probably thirty, and he had a good haircut, a precisely trimmed beard, and eyes that were not anywhere near as tired as she felt.

  “What have your symptoms been?” he asked.

  “I’ve been feeling sick. Fatigued. Headachy.”

  “Hmm . . .” He went back to typing. “There’s a lot of that going around. Flu season is heartier than usual this year, it seems. So how long has this been going on?”

  “Three months. Maybe four.”

  He stopped again and looked over at her with a frown. “Since November, then?”

  “I mean, I’m sure I’m fine.” Which, of course, was exactly why she was sitting in this exam room, telling herself not to barf on the guy’s white uniform. She was just GREAT. “Really.”

  “Okay.” He typed some more. “Anything else?”

  “I haven’t been losing weight, though. Kind of a bummer, really.”

  “So you’ve always been . . .” He scrolled up and read a number.

  “That’s what I weigh now?” When he looked at her again, she waved her hand like she could erase the question. “I mean, it’s fine. I’ve lost a little weight, but it’s no big deal.”

  “How much did you lose?”

  “Ten pounds. Fifteen at the most. I’m tall, though.”

  Okay, for all the sense she’d made while drafting the online article on that decapitated body on the fire escape, she had now apparently lost her ability to think. Because she was making no damned sense.

  Unless she’d also made no sense with the article and just hadn’t known it.

  “I’m sorry, but I think I’ve wasted your time.” She made like she was going to slide off the examination table. “I’m fine—”

  The nurse put his hand out like a crossing guard’s stop sign. “Take a deep breath.”

  Figuring it was medical advice—and also a good idea—Jo followed directions. Twice.

  “Okay.” He smiled, but she wasn’t fooled. That was not the casual one he’d given her as he’d wrapped her biceps in a cuff or shoved a thermometer in her mouth. “Good. Why don’t you talk to the doctor when she comes in, okay? Dr. Perez is really easy to speak to. Just tell her what’s been going on. Maybe it’s nothing, but she’ll be able to think the symptoms through with you and give you some options about further diagnostics if she believes it’s warranted. Sound good?”

  Jo nodded because she felt like a fool. And because she was suddenly very terrified.

  She’d been thinking about going to a see a doctor for a good month and a half, maybe two months. And she’d decided to finally follow up on the impulse largely to give herself something to do as she waited for McCordle to check in again. Anything was better than sitting in that empty newsroom with Dick steaming pissed at her behind the closed door of his office—

  Oh, who was she kidding. Someone she didn’t know had spoken her biggest fear out loud to her last night. And she was here to find out if she was dying.

  As if that man in leather was a fortune-teller.

  “Have you been under a lot of stress lately?” the nurse asked.

  “I accused my boss of a pattern of sexual harassment about a half hour ago.”

  The nurse whistled under his breath. “That counts. And I’m sorry that happened to you.”

  “And last night, I saw my first dead body.” As his eyes bugged, she figured she’d keep the head-as-bowling-ball stuff to herself. “And I’m working on my first big story as a reporter—now that you mention it, things have been a little intense.”

  All of that was child’s play, though. That man she’d run from the police with? Who she’d kissed in that abandoned restaurant? He was the real stressor, the first-in-line. Which considering the list of stuff he’d beaten for that coveted pole position was really saying something.

  Jo took a deep breath again—but this time, she relaxed some as she exhaled. “You’re right. This is all probably stress.”

  The nurse smiled again, and she was relieved that the Medical Professional Expression was not on his face anymore.

  “I’ll send Dr. Perez in as soon as she’s done with her current patient.” He extended a card from his lapel, swiped to log out of the computer, and got to his feet. “You take care now.”

  “Thanks,” Jo said.

  After he stepped out of the exam room, she swung her feet as they hung off the lip of the table—and remembered doing the same thing the night before in that kitchen. Stopping herself, she looked around and noted the pamphlets on depression, insomnia, and melanoma. The first two applied to her. The last one? She’d never really been into tanning, but redheads were not known for hearty skin.

  There was also an anatomy chart on the far wall, the human skeleton on one side, the human muscular system on the other. The latter made her think of the skinned corpse, of those photographs that Bill had showed her.

  And then she was back on the man from the night before, the one in leather, the one she should have been afraid of. She could picture him clear as day, sure as if he were in the room with her, and for some reason, the smell of his darkly spiced cologne came back to her—

  As her phone went off in her purse, she snagged the thing out of the sea of Slim Jims like God was calling with the answer to a prayer. Sure enough, she didn’t recognize the number, and as she hit “accept,” her heart pounded, but not from fear. Nope. More like hope that it was that man, although that was not only impossible, it made no sense.

 

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