Darius, page 3
“Please.” His eyes roamed her face, and she wondered what he saw. “You need to do this for my peace of mind, okay?”
“You don’t owe me anything.”
“That’s not how common decency works. Let’s just make sure nothing is broken and then we’ll go our separate ways. You’ll never have to see me again.”
Now why would that strike her as a loss, she wondered. He was a perfect stranger—
“Whoa! I got you,” he blurted.
“What—”
And that was when the world went around in circles, the concrete underfoot turning into decking on a boat in high seas.
As Anne weaved on her feet, strong arms shot around her, and she was back where she started, once again up on the solid wall of a chest that made her feel safe.
Even though she didn’t know this man from a hole in the wall.
Maybe she had been knocked senseless, after all.
“I’ve got you,” he said softly. “You can trust me.”
CHAPTER THREE
As Darius waited on the far side of a screen of privacy draping, he pulled at his jacket to make sure his autoloaders weren’t showing. Then he glanced around on a reflex that had developed over centuries of fighting. This part of the ER’s treatment area had a dozen or so examination bays, each station separated by these bolts of dull green curtains that were closed if the bed was occupied. The center aisle created by the layout was a highway for gurneys, medical staff, and equipment, and there were all kinds of patients and family members floating around the periphery.
Nothing threatening, anywhere, and no one paying much attention to him. He was just another kibitzer.
Things had to stay like that—
“Okay, you can come back in.”
Ducking through the drapes, he made sure that the part in the fall closed properly in his wake, and he found himself bracing his shoulders as he looked up.
Patricia Anne Wurster, or Anne, as she’d introduced herself, was back on the bed, but the thing had been jacked forward to a ninety-degree angle, so it was as if she were sitting up. She looked… well, like she’d been hit by a car. Her long, dark hair was tangled. There were bruises on her face and a nasty scrape over her left eye. And one arm was raw like it had been worked over with sandpaper.
God, he could have killed her.
Trying to forget all the might-have-happened’s, he glanced at her change of clothing. The blue-and-pink hospital gown she was now wearing dwarfed her, the collar hanging loose around the base of her throat, the sleeves billowing. Blankets had been pulled up to her waist, and she worried their hems with pale, blunt-nailed hands.
He thought of her lying in the middle of that road. Then he remembered when she’d come to in the back of that car. And finally he concluded… not for the first time… that she was captivating in a way that had nothing to do with being beautiful, and everything to do with being her.
Which, of course, didn’t make a lot of sense. But what part of this evening had anything to do with logic?
“I don’t know how we got this room so fast.” She tugged the thin covers higher. “Guess we hit things at just the right time.”
Can we please not use the H-word, he thought.
“Guess so.” He took a seat in one of two plastic chairs. “Maybe our luck is changing.”
“Considering your car got wrecked and I’m in a hospital johnny, I think that would be a good thing.”
As he stared at her, he wanted to smooth the loose brunette hair back from her face. “Hopefully the doctor will be in soon.”
“You don’t have to stay,” she said. “I mean, you were worried I’d walk, but I’m all registered and stuff. I’m in the system until they let me out.”
“There’s still a bill involved.” He put up his hands. “If you’d rather me hang out in the waiting room or something—”
Overhead, a canned voice announced: “Dr. Peters, line two. Dr. Peters, line two.”
“No, it’s all right.” Anne fiddled with the blankets some more. “As long as I’m, you know, not naked or anything—”
“Oh, yes. Obviously, I wouldn’t stay when they examine you—”
They both stopped short. Laughed awkwardly. Looked elsewhere.
Darius cleared his throat. “Is there anyone I should call? For you, I mean.”
“No.” The answer was quick. “Thank you.”
“Parents?” he prompted.
She shook her head. “No.”
When she didn’t expand on the details, he was tempted to get into her mind and access the information for himself. But an invasion of privacy was still wrong even if the person didn’t know they’d been violated.
“I’m okay, though,” she tacked on. In the way people did when they were lonely, and a little afraid, and didn’t want anybody to know.
She wasn’t looking to him to solve anything, however. Then again, what was he to her, motor vehicle assaults aside.
While Darius kept staring at her, he wondered whether the red patches on her neck and the side of her face were from the accident… or from the man who had so clearly been chasing after her.
So can I take care of whoever was trying to hurt you? he wondered as the curtain was pushed back.
“Hi, I’m Dr. Robert Bluff—”
The physician who stepped into the bay stopped dead. And he had reason to.
Well, hello there, my friend, Darius thought as he looked at the guy.
Or male, rather.
The vampire in the white coat had hazel eyes and dark hair, and a face with the kind of symmetry and features that equated to a conventional standard of attractiveness. He was also equally surprised to see another member of the species. Meanwhile, Darius didn’t personally recognize him—and surmised for the male to be working here, with whatever degrees and credentialing he had to have to get that “M.D.” stitched after his name, he must be a half-breed who could go out in the sunlight and who had worked his way up the human ranks.
Mind control and manipulation were good tools one-on-one, but they couldn’t be used to snow an entire community of humans over a long period of time.
As the male tried to hide the alarm he was clearly feeling, Darius thought back to the way things had been in the Old Country, when there had been a proper King and court, when there had been a strict division between humans and vampires. Now? In the New World? Standards were more loose, as long as you weren’t a member of the aristocracy.
Maybe the male was antsy because he had blood ties to the glymera? As a half-breed he couldn’t be in it officially, of course, but he was certainly looking like he’d put his foot in a pile out on the proverbial lawn.
The doctor cleared his throat. “Ah…”
Not interested in creating any problems, Darius nodded curtly, acknowledging the fact that, yup, they were both who they were, but nope, he wasn’t going to do anything about it.
The doctor took a deep breath and turned to his patient. After he tugged at the lapels of his white coat, he did another round of throat clearing. “As I was saying, I’m Dr. Bluff and I’m going to take care of you. Do you want to tell me what transpired tonight, Patricia?”
“I go by Anne, actually. It’s my middle name.”
The partial vampire smiled at her without flashing fangs, assuming he had any. “Anne, please call me Rob. Now, what happened? I know you already told triage, and your intake nurse, but I’d like to hear it for myself.”
Anne looked down at where her hands had twisted around themselves. “It was an accident. I crossed the street without looking and it was dark.” She nodded in Darius’s direction. “He wasn’t speeding or anything. It was all my fault.”
Darius frowned, but kept quiet. He wanted to bring up the other half of the truth, that she’d been chased, but he figured the medical types would find all her injuries, even if they didn’t know the why’s of her entry onto the roadway.
“So you were hit by a car.”
“Yes, but as I said, it wasn’t his fault. There’s no reason to get the police involved or anything.”
Dr. Bluff nodded. “And I understand you came in here on your own.”
“Sort of.” Her anxious eyes shot over to Darius. “He carried me in, I think.”
“Okay.” Dr. Bluff got a stethoscope out of his white coat’s pocket. “While I listen to your heart and lungs, and check your pupils, I hate to ask the unoriginal question, but where does it hurt?”
As the male plugged his ears with his instrument and leaned over the bed, Anne started going through the rest of the spiel she’d shared two other times. On the sidelines, Darius closed his eyes and listened to the rise and fall of her voice. The words she spoke were simple ones, rarely anything multi-syllabic, and certainly nothing terribly complicated in terms of translation. They focused him like a laser, however.
On her. And whatever she wanted, needed.
Ordered him to do.
“You’re not going to pass out, are you?”
Darius popped his lids. The other vampire in the room was right in front of him, face banked with panic. Like the last thing he wanted were all of the physical anomalies of the species showing up during the treatment of what was supposed to be just another queasy bystander.
“No, no, I’m fine.”
A knowing look came into the male’s eyes. “I’m going to order some X-rays of her right shoulder and her right lower leg. I’m also going to have to perform a full physical exam. Unless you’d prefer me to have a female doctor do it?”
“Oh, it’s fine,” Anne said from over on the bed. “I’m not shy.”
The other vampire didn’t acknowledge his patient’s consent. Instead, he waited for permission to proceed… as was the way when any healer dealt with a bonded male and his female: No one wanted the kind of trouble that arrived swiftly and surely if the protective instinct of a male was triggered.
Clearly, the doctor thought some of the story was a ruse.
And besides, Darius hadn’t bonded.
“Um… hello?” Anne prompted. “You boys finished making decisions for me, or are you expecting me to wait a little longer while you figure out my consent?”
As Darius glanced over to the bed, he couldn’t explain to her why the deference was being paid. And in any event, she wasn’t his mate—
“Yes, a female doctor would be best,” he heard himself say. And then he switched into the Old Language. “And I shall be right on the other side of that thin curtain during the exam.”
“But of course, sire,” Dr. Bluff replied with an incline of the head. “We shall not have it any other way. Are there any other special provisions you require for her?”
Darius could feel the woman’s eyes narrowing on him. “No, that is all.”
“She shall be treated with the utmost consideration.”
“She better be,” he growled.
* * *
A mere half hour later, Anne and her bed were wheeled back into her little green-draped subdivision. And what do you know, the man with the blue eyes and the big body was just where she’d left him, waiting on that flimsy plastic chair like a dog at the front door during a workday.
“Dr. Bluff will be back in very soon,” the orderly said. “You good?”
“Yes, thank you.”
The guy nodded. “You take care now.”
And then she and her mystery man were alone again. As she glanced over at him, she had a feeling he was trying not to stare at her, and there was the temptation to think it was because he found her alluring in some way.
Yeah, because this hospital gown really brought out the red in all of her bruises.
“Did they treat you in an acceptable manner?” he asked as he continued to focus on the floor.
He had the strangest way of putting things, so formal, so precise.
“They were great, thanks. Although I think I glow in the dark now from all the X-rays.” She pulled her blankets up a little higher. “I really can’t believe how quickly this is going.”
When he just nodded, Anne reached up and probed the white bandage that was over her eyebrow. A female doctor had come in and listened to her lungs and checked her stomach and torso for problems, and then, when there had been a short wait for the X-ray machine to be free, the woman had cleaned and covered anything that required a clinical-grade Band-Aid.
“Were they gentle with you?”
She turned her head on the thin pillow. The mystery man who seemed to be orchestrating the whole ER visit had crossed his legs knee to knee, and had one long, elegant hand hanging off his thigh, his perfect posture turning that flimsy chair into a throne. Unsurprisingly, his profile was every bit as good as the head-on of his face, his nose a straight shot down from his brows, his jaw strong, his broad shoulders and pronounced upper arms the perfect frame to it all. Even though his hair was dark, he had no five-o’clock shadow, and she wondered if his chest was bare or—
Flushing, she looked away. Then she rearranged her-self on the hospital bed with a groan. Things were already stiffening up on her, her muscles tightening, certain joints locking into place. Likewise, contusions were settling in for a duration on what felt like most of her body, the focal points of soreness like bad-apple roses, all thorns.
“Who are you?” she blurted. “To this hospital, I mean.”
There was a pause. “Just another onlooker.”
“You know the doctor, though.”
“Not really.”
She had to glance back at him. “What was the language you spoke to him in? I didn’t recognize it.”
“It’s just an obscure European dialect. It doesn’t matter.”
“So how did you know he’d speak it?”
Before he could reply, the curtain was pulled back, and Dr. Bluff stepped in. “Everything looks good.” He focused on the mystery man. “Nothing is broken. I think she’ll have some lingering swelling and soreness—”
“Hey, Doc,” Anne interrupted. When both men looked at her in surprise, she smiled tightly and gave them a little wave. “When you’re reporting the results of my X-rays, I’d appreciate it if I’m the one you’re giving them to.”
Dr. Bluff blinked. Glanced at the man.
When the man nodded, the doctor came up to the foot of the bed. “I’m sorry I focused on your husband. Of course, you’re right.”
Anne sat up a little higher, ignoring the way her shoulder thumped with pain. “He’s not my husband.”
“I—all right then.” Dr. Bluff shook his head like he was confused, but not going to dwell on business that was none of his own. “At any rate, we don’t see any fractures or misalignments. Your vitals are great, your wounds attended to. I’m comfortable releasing you with just a light pain reliever. But if you experience any double vision, nausea or vomiting, new or worsening headache, or any other symptoms that concern you, I want you to get in touch with your doctor or come back here.”
“I don’t have a physician.”
“Then you need to return to St. Francis and ask for me.” Dr. Bluff glanced back at the man. “I’ll take care of her. Don’t you worry.”
Okaaaaaay, she was really ready for the day when adult women weren’t treated like children.
“Great,” she muttered. “I appreciate it.”
“You’re welcome,” Dr. Bluff murmured to the man with a little bow. “I’ll just go write a prescription and she can be on her way.”
After the doctor left, Anne closed her eyes in frustration, but decided to move on from being treated like a child—because she had a bigger problem than the kind of benevolent misogyny she dealt with at work. Or in her neighborhood. Or out in the world, in general.
“I don’t have my purse,” she said to herself. “So I don’t have my keys… my ID…”
“I am so sorry. I didn’t see anything in the road—”
“No, it’s because I left it in his…” She went to rub her face and poked herself in the bandage, right where it hurt. Cursing, she put her head back and stared at the ceiling. “This night just keeps getting longer, it really does.”
“Where did you leave your things?”
“Back with him.”
As a strange sound weaved around her bed, she looked over to it. The man’s brows were down low, and his eyes gleamed with something that she couldn’t define—no, wait. She knew what it was.
She wasn’t threatened by the fury, however.
In a low voice, he said, “I’ll get your things back from whoever, wherever. Just say the word and it is done.”
The words were spoken quietly, but somehow, the lack of volume made them scarier than if he’d yelled them. And as much as it didn’t reflect well on her character, she entertained a brief, but very vivid, fantasy of this man she didn’t know at all showing up on the doorstep of a man she’d thought she’d known very well.
“It’s okay,” she murmured. “I’ll take care of myself.”
The curtain pulled back again and Dr. Bluff reentered. “All right, here’s the prescription. It’s just a little Tylenol with codeine to help her sleep. Take as needed. She should expect to feel pretty sore for the next couple of days.”
As he went to give the slip to the man, there was another exchange in that language she couldn’t translate—and then the man who’d been sitting with her frowned and leaned forward in the plastic chair. With a shake of the head, the doctor put his hands out as if he were insisting—after which Anne’s mystery man got to his feet and offered his palm. As they shook, that slip changed possession.
“You take care,” Dr. Bluff said to her. “You’re going to be just fine.”
Gritting her teeth, Anne didn’t respond to the doctor leaving, even though that was rude. What did it matter, though. He wasn’t going to get a pater familias personality transplant just because she wasn’t polite to him, and she needed to save her energy for part II of this nightmare.
“I’ll just wait outside for you,” the man told her. “While you change.”
