Lover Unleashed

EIGHTEEN

Down in the training center’s clinic, Payne was doing her exercises, as she’d come to think of them.

Lying in the hospital bed with the pillows pushed to the side, she crossed her arms over her chest and tightened her stomach, pulling her torso upright on a slow rise. When she was perpendicular to the mattress, she extended her arms straight out and held them there while she eased back down. After even one round, her heart was pounding and her breath was short, but she gave herself only a brief recovery and repeated. And repeated. And repeated.

Each time the effort grew progressively more strenuous, until sweat beaded on her forehead and her stomach muscles strained into pain. Jane had shown her how to do this, and she supposed it was a benefit—although compared to what she had been capable of, it was a spark measured against a bonfire.

Indeed, Jane had tried to get her to do so much more . . . had even wheeled in a chair for her to sit in and ambulate, but Payne couldn’t bear the sight of the thing, or the idea of spending her life rolling from place to place.

In the past week, she had summarily closed off all avenues of accommodation in the hopes of a singular miracle . . . that had never materialized.

It felt like centuries since she’d fought with Wrath . . . since she had known the coordination and strength of her limbs. She had taken so much for granted, and now she missed who she had once been with a grief that she’d assumed one had only for the dead.

Then again, she supposed she had died. Her body just wasn’t smart enough to stop working.

With a curse in the Old Language, she collapsed back and left herself lying there. When she was able, she found the leather strap that she had cranked down over her thighs. The thing was so tight, she knew it was cutting off circulation, but she felt neither the constriction of the binding nor any sweet release as she sprang the clasp and the leather popped loose.

It had been thus since the night she had returned herein.

No change.

Closing her eyes, she reentered into an inner war whereupon her fears drew swords against her mind, and the results were e’er more tragic. After seven cycles of night and day, her army of rationality was suffering from a sorry lack of ammunition and deep fatigue amongst its troops. Thus, the tide was turning. First, she had been buoyed by optimism, but that had faded, and then there had been a period of resolved patience, which had not lasted long. Since then, she had tarried along this barren road of baseless hope.

Alone.

Verily, the loneliness was the worst part of the ordeal: For all the people who were free to come and go, in and out of her room, she was utterly separate even when they sat and talked to her or attended to her very basic needs. Confined to this bed, she was on another plane of reality from them, separated by a vast, invisible desert that she could see clearly o’er, but was unable to cross.

And it was strange. All that she had lost became most acute whenever she thought of her human healer—which was so often she could not count the times.

Oh, how she missed that man. Many were the hours she had spent remembering his voice and his face and that last moment between them . . . until her memories became a blanket with which to warm herself during the long, cold stretches of worry and concern.

Unfortunately, however, much like her rational side, that blanket was fraying from overuse, and there was no repairing it.

Her healer was not of her world and ne’er to return—nothing but a brief, vivid dream that had disintegrated into filaments and fragments now that she had awoken.

“Cease,” she said to herself out loud.

With the upper-body strength she was trying to maintain, she turned to the side for the two pillows, fighting against the deadweight of her lower body as she strained to—

Her balance failed in a flash, and sent her careening even in her prone position, her arm knocking the glass of water from the table next to her.

And alas, it was not an object well suited for impact.

As it shattered, Payne closed her mouth, which was the only way she knew to keep her screams in her lungs. Otherwise, they would breach the seal of her lips and ne’er stop.

When she thought she had enough self-control, she looked over the side of the bed at the mess on the floor. Ordinarily, it would be so simple—something spilled and one would clean it up.

Previously, all she would have done was bend over and mop it up.

Now? She had two choices: Lie here and call for help like an invalid. Or prethink and strategize and make an attempt to be independent.

It took her some time to figure out the bracing points for her hands and then judge the distance to the floor. Fortunately, she was unplugged from all the tubing that had been running into her arm, but a catheter remained . . . so mayhap trying to do this herself was a bad idea.

Yet she could not bear the indignity of just lying here. No soldier was she; now she was a child incapable of caring for herself.

It was no longer supportable.

Snapping out squares of “Kleenex,” as people called them, she lowered the railing on the bed, gripped the top of it, and curled herself over onto her side. The torsion caused her legs to flop around like those of a puppet, all motion without grace, but at least she could reach downward to the smooth floor with the white fluff on her palm.

As she stretched whilst trying to maintain a precarious balance on the ledge of the bed, she was tired of being done for, tended to, washed and wrapped like a young newly born unto the world—

Her body went the way of the glass.

Without warning, her grip slipped off the smooth rail, and with her hips so far off the mattress, she fell headfirst toward the floor, the grab of gravity too strong for her to overcome. Throwing out her hands, she caught herself on the wet flooring, but both palms shot from under her and she took the force of impact on the side of the face, breath exploding out of her lungs.

And then there was no movement.

She was trapped, the bed buttressing her useless limbs so that they remained directly over her head and torso, cramming her into the floor.

Dragging air down her throat, she called out, “Help . . . hellllp . . .”

With her face squeezed, her arms starting to go numb, and her lungs burning from suffocation, rage lit up within her until her body trembled—

It started as a squeak. Then the noise turned into movement as her cheek began to skid on the tile, the skin stretching so thin, she felt like it was being peeled off her skull. And then pressure grew on the nape of her neck, her thick braid pulling her head in one direction at the same time her strange position drove her forward.

Summoning all her strength, she focused her rage and maneuvered her arms so that her palms were back flat to the floor. After a tremendous inhale, she shoved hard, pushing herself up and flipping herself on her back—

Her rope of hair fell in and among the railing’s supports and locked in tight, the thick length keeping her in place, whilst wrenching her neck to her shoulder. Trapped and going nowhere, she could see only her legs from her vantage point, her long, slender legs that she had never before given any particular thought to.

As the blood gradually pooled into her torso, she watched the skin on her calves get paper white.

Fists curling, she willed her toes to move.

“Damn you . . . move. . . .” She would have closed her eyes to concentrate, but she didn’t want to miss the miracle if it happened.

It did not.

It had not.

And she was coming to realize . . . it would not.

As the pads of her toenails went from pink to gray, she knew she had to come to terms with where she was. And was not there a fine analogy to her current physical position.

Broken. Useless. Deadweight.

The breakdown that finally ensued carried with it no tears or sobs. Instead, the snap was demarcated by a grim resolve.

“Payne!”

At the sound of Jane’s voice, she closed her eyes. This was not the savior she wanted. Her twin . . . she needed her twin to do right by her.

“Please get Vishous,” she said hoarsely. “Please.”

Jane’s voice got very close. “Let’s get you up off the floor.”

“Vishous.”

There was a click and she knew that the alarm she had not been able to reach had been sounded.

“Please,” she groaned. “Get Vishous.”

“Let’s get you—”

“Vishous.”

Silence. Until the door was thrown open.

“Help me, Ehlena,” she heard Jane say.

Payne was aware that her own mouth was moving, but she went deaf as the two females hefted her back upon the bed and resettled her legs, lining them up parallel to each other before covering them with white sheeting.

Whilst various and sundry cleaning endeavors occurred both upon the bed and the floor, she focused across the room at the white wall she had stared at for the eternity since she had been moved into this space.

“Payne?”

When she didn’t reply, Jane repeated, “Payne. Look at me.”

She shifted her eyes over and felt nothing as she stared into the worried face of her twin’s shellan. “I need my brother.”

“Of course I’ll get him. He’s in a meeting right now, but I’ll have him come down before he leaves for the night.” Long pause. “Can I ask you why you want him?”

The even, level words told her clearly that the good healer was no imbecile.

“Payne?”

Payne shut her eyes and heard herself say, “He made me a promise when this all started. And I need him to keep it.”

In spite of the fact that she was a ghost, Jane’s heart was still capable of stopping in her chest.

And as she eased down onto the edge of the hospital bed, there was nothing moving behind her sternum. “What promise was that,” she said to her patient.

“It is a matter betwixt the pair of us.”

The hell it was, Jane thought. Assuming that she was guessing right.

“Payne, there might be something else we can do.”

Although what that was, she hadn’t a clue. The X-rays were showing that the bones had been aligned properly, Manny’s skills having fixed them perfectly. That spinal cord, though—that was the wild card. She’d had a hope that some regeneration of nerves might be possible—she was still learning about the vampire body’s capabilities, many of which seemed like pure magic compared to what humans could do in terms of healing.

But no luck. Not in this case.

And it didn’t take an Einstein extrapolation to figure out what Payne was looking for.

“Be honest with me, shellan of my twin.” Payne’s crystal eyes locked on hers. “Be honest with yourself.”

If there was one thing that Jane hated about being a doctor, it was the judgment call. There were a lot of incidents when decisions were clear: Some guy presented at the ER with his hand in an ice cooler and a tourniquet around his arm? Reattach the appendage and run those nerves back where they needed to be. Woman in labor with a preemergent cord? C-section her. Compound fracture? Open it up and set it.

But not everything was that “simple.” On a regular basis, the gray fog of maybe-this, maybe-that rolled in, and she had to stare into the cloudy and the murky—

Oh, who was she kidding.

The clinical side of this equation had reached its correct sum. She just didn’t want to believe the answer.

“Payne, let me go get Mary—”

“I did not wish to speak with the counseling female two nights ago, and I shan’t speak unto her now. This is over for me, healer. And as much as it pains me to call upon my twin, please go and get him. You are a good female and you should not be the one.”

Jane looked at her hands. She had never once used them to kill. Ever. It was antithetical not just to her calling and her commitment to her profession, but her as a person.

And yet as she thought about her hellren and the time they’d spent together when she’d woken up with him, she knew she couldn’t let him come here and do what Payne wanted him to: He’d taken a small step back from the precipice he’d been about to jump off of, and there was nothing Jane wouldn’t do to keep him from that ledge.

“I can’t go get him,” she said. “I’m sorry. I just won’t put him in that position.”

The moan that rose from Payne’s throat was despair from the heart given wings and released. “Healer, this is my choice. My life. Not yours. You wish to be a true savior, then make it look accidental, or get me a weapon and I’ll do it. But leave me not in this state. I cannot bear it, and you have done no good for your patient if I continue thus.”

On some level, Jane had known this was coming. She had seen it clear as the pale shadows in the dark X-rays, the ones that told her everything should be working right—and if it wasn’t, the spinal cord had been irreparably injured.

She stared at those legs that lay under the sheet so still and thought of the Hippocratic oath she had taken years ago: “Do no harm” was the first commandment.

It was hard not to see Payne as having been harmed if she were left like this—especially because she hadn’t wanted the procedure in the first place. Jane had been the one urging the salvation, pushing it on the female for her own reasons—and V had been the same.

“I shall find a way,” Payne said. “Somehow, I shall find a way.”

Hard not to believe that.

And there was a greater chance of safe success if Jane helped in some manner—Payne was weak, and any weapon in her hand would be a disaster waiting to happen.

“I don’t know if I can do this.” The words left Jane’s mouth slowly. “You’re his sister. I don’t know if he’d ever forgive me.”

“He need never know.”

God, what a bind. If she were stuck in that bed, she would feel exactly as Payne did, and she would want someone to help her execute her final wish. But the burden of keeping something like that from V? How could she do that?

Except . . . the only thing worse would be his not coming back from that dark side of himself. And killing his sister? Well, that was an express train right into that part of his neighborhood, wasn’t it.

The hand of her patient found her own. “Help me, Jane. Help me. . . .”

As Vishous left the nightly meeting with the Brotherhood and headed for the training center’s clinic, he was feeling more like himself—and not in a bad way. The sex with his shellan had been mission critical for them both, a kind of reboot that hadn’t just been physical.

God, it had felt good to be back with his female. Yeah, sure, there were problems still waiting for him . . . and, well, shit, the closer he got to the clinic, the more the mantle of stress returned, hitting his shoulders like a pair of cars: He had seen his sister at the beginning of every evening and then again at dawn. For the first few days, there had been a lot of hope, but now . . . that had mostly passed.

Whatever, though. She needed to get out of that room, and that was what he was going to do tonight. He was off rotation, and he was going to take her to the mansion and show her there was something other than that white cage of a recovery room to live for.

She wasn’t getting better physically.

So the mental was going to have to carry her through. It just had to.

Bottom line? He was not prepared to lose her now. Yeah, he’d been around her for a week, but that didn’t mean he knew her any better than he had when this had all started—and he was thinking they both needed each other. No one else was the offspring of that goddamn deity mother of theirs, and maybe together they could sort out the crap that came with their birthright. For shit’s sake, it wasn’t like there was a twelve-step for being the Scribe Virgin’s kid:

Hi, I’m Vishous. I’m her son and I’ve been her son for three hundred years.

HI, VISHOUS.

She’s done a head job on me again, and I’m trying not to go to the Other Side and scream bloody murder at her.

WE UNDERSTAND, VISHOUS.

And on the bloody note, I’d like to dig up my father and kill him all over again, but I can’t. So I’m just going to try to keep my sister alive even though she’s paralyzed, and attempt to fight the urge to find some pain so I can deal with this Payne.

YOU’RE A STRAIGHT-UP PUSSY, VISHOUS, BUT WE SUPPORT YOUR SORRY ASS.

Pushing his way out of the tunnel and into the office, he crossed over to the glass door and then strode down the corridor. As he went by the workout room, someone was running like their Nikes were on fire, but otherwise, there was a whole lot of no one around—and he had a feeling Jane might still be back in their bed, lounging after he’d done her right.

Which the bonded male in him took a fuckload of satisfaction from. For real.

When he came to the recovery room, he didn’t knock, but—

As he stepped inside, the first thing he saw was the hypodermic needle. The next thing was that it was about to change hands, going from his shellan’s to his twin’s.

No therapeutic reason for that.

“What are you doing?” he breathed, abruptly terrified.

Jane’s head whipped around, but Payne didn’t look at him. Her stare was fixated on that needle like it was the key to the lock on her jail cell.

And sure as shit it was going to help her out of that bed . . . right into a coffin.

“What the fuck are you doing.” Not a question. He already knew.

“My choice,” Payne said grimly.

His shellan met him in the eye. “I’m sorry, V.”

A whitewash cut his vision off, but did nothing to slow his body down as he lunged forward. Just as he reached the bedside, his eyes cleared and he saw his gloved hand latch onto his shellan’s wrist.

His death grip was the only thing keeping his twin from death. And he addressed her, not his mate. “Don’t you fucking dare.”

Payne’s eyes were violent as they met his own. “And do not you dare!”

V recoiled for a moment. He had stared into the faces of bested enemies and discarded subs and forgotten lovers both male and female, but he had never seen such depths of hatred before.

Ever.

“You are not my god!” she screamed at him. “You are but my brother! And you will not chain me unto this body any more than our mahmen will!”

Their fury was so well matched that for the first time in his life, he was at a loss. After all, it made no sense to enter into conflict if your opponent was equal.

Trouble was, if he left now, he was coming back to a funeral.

V wanted to pace to dial down his pissed-off, but he’d be damned if he was looking away for even a split second. “I want two hours,” he said. “I can’t stop you, but I can ask you to give me one hundred and twenty minutes.”

Payne’s eyes narrowed. “Whatever for.”

Because he was going to do something that would have been inconceivable when this whole thing had started. But this was a type of war, and accordingly, he didn’t have the luxury of picking his weapons—he had to use what he had, even if he hated it.

“I’ll tell you exactly why.” V took the needle from Jane’s hold. “You’re going to do it so this doesn’t haunt me for the rest of my fucking life. How ’bout that for a reason. Good enough?”

Payne’s lids sank down and there was a whole lot of silence. Except then she said, “I will give you what you ask, but my mind will not be changed if I remain in this bed. Assure yourself of your expectations afore you depart—and be forewarned if you attempt to reason with our mahmen. I will not trade this prison for one on her side, in her world.”

Vishous shoved the needle in his pocket and unsheathed the hunting knife that was perm-attached to the belt on his leathers. “Give me your hand.”

When she offered it, he sliced her palm with the blade and did the same to his own flesh. Then he clasped the wounds together.

“Vow it. On our shared blood, you take a vow to me.”

Payne’s mouth twitched as if, once again, she would have smiled under different circumstances. “Trust me not?”

“Nope,” he said roughly. “Not in the slightest, sweetheart.”

A moment later, her hand gripped his and a slick of tears formed over her eyes. “I so vow.”

Vishous’s lungs loosened and he drew a deep breath. “Fair enough.”

He dropped his hold, turned around, and strode for the door. As soon as he was in the corridor, he didn’t waste time heading for the tunnel.

“Vishous.”

At the sound of Jane’s voice, he wheeled around and wanted to curse. Shaking his head, he said, “Don’t follow me. Don’t call me. Nothing good is going to come out of my being within earshot of you right now.”

Jane’s arms crossed over her chest. “She’s my patient, V.”

“She’s my blood.” In frustration, he slashed the air with his hand. “I don’t have time for this. I’m out of here.”

At that, he took off at a run. Leaving her behind.