The Beast

THREE

Havers’s new clinic was located across the river, in the center of some four hundred acres of forest that were vacant but for an old farmhouse and three or four new-built kiosks for entry into the subterranean facility. As Mary drove the last stretch of the twenty-minute trip in her Volvo XC70, she kept glancing in the rearview mirror at Bitty. The girl was sitting in the backseat of the station wagon and staring out the darkened window next to her as if the thing were a television and whatever show was on was captivating.

Every time Mary refocused on the road ahead, she cranked down harder on the steering wheel. And the accelerator.

“We’re almost there,” she said. Yet again.

The meant-to-be-reassuring statement was doing nothing for Bitty, and Mary knew she was just trying to soothe herself. The idea that they might not make it to the bedside in time was a hypothetical burden that she couldn’t help trying on for size—and, man, did that crying-shame corset make her feel like she couldn’t breathe.

“Here’s the turn-off.”

Mary hit the blinker and took a right onto a single-laner that was uneven and exactly what all her internal rush-rush didn’t need.

Then again, she could have been on a perfectly paved super-highway and her heart still would have been conga-lining it up in her chest.

The vampire race’s only healthcare facility was set up to evade both human attention and sunlight’s merciless effects, and when you brought someone in, or sought treatment yourself, you were assigned one of several entry points. When the nurse had called with the sad news, Mary had been told to proceed directly to the farmhouse and park there, and that was what she did, pulling in between a pickup truck that was new and a Nissan sedan that was not.

“You ready?” she asked the rearview mirror as she cut the engine.

When there was no response, she got out and went around to Bitty’s door. The girl seemed surprised to find they’d arrived, and small hands fumbled to release the seat belt.

“Do you need help?”

“No, thank you.”

Bitty was clearly determined to get out of the car on her own, even if it took her a little longer than it might have otherwise. And the delay was maybe intentional. The what-next that was coming after this death was almost too terrible to contemplate. No family. No money. No education.

Mary pointed to a barn behind the house. “We’re going over there.”

Five minutes later, they were through a number of checkpoints and down an elevator shaft, whereupon they stepped out into a sparkling-clean, well-lit reception and waiting area that smelled exactly like all the ones in human hospitals did: fake lemon, faded perfume, and faintly of someone’s dinner.

Pavlov had a point, Mary thought as she approached the front desk. All it took was that combination of antiseptic and stale air in her nose and she was flat on her back in a hospital bed, tubes running in and out of her, the drugs trying to kill off the cancer in her blood making her feel at best like she had the flu, and at worst like she was going to die then and there.

Fun times.

As the uniformed blonde behind the computer screen looked up, Mary said, “Hi, I’m—”

“Go that way,” the female said urgently. “To the double doors. I’ll release the lock. The nursing station is right ahead of you. They’ll take her in directly.”

Mary didn’t wait to even say thank-you. Grabbing Bitty’s hand, she rushed across the buffed, shiny floor and punched through the metal panels as soon as she heard the clunk of the mechanism shift free.

On the far side of the cozy chairs and the well-thumbed magazines of the waiting area, it was all clinical business, people in scrubs and traditional white nursing uniforms striding around with trays and laptops and stethoscopes.

“Over here,” someone called out.

The nurse in question had black hair cut short, blue eyes that matched her scrubs, and a face like Paloma Picasso’s. “I’ll take you to her.”

Mary fell in behind Bitty, guiding the girl now by the shoulders as they went down one hallway and then another to what was obviously the ICU section of the place: Normal hospital rooms didn’t have glass walls with curtains on the insides. Didn’t have this much staff around. Didn’t have dashboards with stats flashing behind the nursing station.

As the nurse stopped and opened one of the panels, the beeping of the medical equipment was urgent, all kinds of frantic blips and squeaks suggesting that the computers were worried about whatever was going on with their patient.

The female held the curtain aside. “You can go right in.”

When Bitty hesitated, Mary leaned down. “I’m not leaving you.”

And again, that was something Mary was saying for herself. The girl had never seemed to particularly care which of Safe Place’s staff were or were not around her.

As Bitty remained in place, Mary looked up. There were two nurses checking Annalye’s vitals, one on each side of the bed, and Havers was there, too, putting some kind of drug into the IV that ran into a shockingly thin arm.

For a split second, the tableau sank in hard. The figure on the bed had dark hair that had thinned out and skin that was gray and eyes that were closed and a mouth that was lax—and during that first infinite instant as Mary took in the female who was dying, she couldn’t decide whether she was seeing her own mother or herself on that bright white pillow.

I can’t do this, she thought.

“Come on, Bitty,” she said hoarsely. “Let’s go hold her hand. She’s going to want to know you’re here.”

As Mary led the girl in, Havers and his staff disappeared into the background, retreating without a fuss as if they knew damn well that there was nothing they could do to stop the inevitable, so Bitty’s chance to say her good-bye was the critical path.

Over at the bedside, Mary kept her palm on Bitty’s shoulder. “It’s okay, you can touch her. Here.”

Mary leaned forward and took the soft, cold hand. “Hello, Annalye. Bitty’s come to see you.”

Glancing at the girl, she nodded encouragement . . . and Bitty frowned.

“Is she dead already?” the girl whispered.

Mary blinked hard. “Ah, no, sweetheart. She’s not. And she can hear you.”

“How?”

“She just can. Go ahead. Talk to her. I know she’ll want to hear your voice.”

“Mahmen?” Bitty said.

“Take her hand. It’s all right.”

As Mary inched back, Bitty reached out . . . and when contact was made, the girl frowned again.

“Mahmen?”

All at once, alarms started to go off with renewed panic, the shrill sounds cutting through the fragile connection between mother and daughter, bringing the medical staff toward the bed in a rush.

“Mahmen!” Bitty grabbed on with both hands. “Mahmen! Don’t go!”

Mary was forced to pull Bitty out of the way as Havers started barking orders. The girl fought against the hold, but then collapsed as she screamed, her arms stretching toward her mother, her hair tangling.

Mary held on to the small straining body. “Bitty, oh, God . . .”

Havers got up on the bed and began chest compressions as the crash cart was brought over.

“We’ve got to go,” Mary said, pulling Bitty back toward the door. “We’ll wait outside—”

“I killed her! I killed her!”

As Vishous skidded up to Rhage, he fell to his knees and went for the brother’s leather jacket and shirt, ripping the layers wide, exposing—

“Oh . . . fuck.”

The bullet had entered to the right of center, exactly where the six-chambered heart of a vampire beat within its cage of bone. And as Rhage gasped for breath and spit blood, V looked around with a whole lot of frantic. Fighting everywhere. Cover nowhere. Time . . . running out—

Butch came running at them, head ducked, body hauling ass and then some as he shot a pair of forties all around himself, pumping rounds off so that the slayers in range had to hit the ground and go fetal to avoid getting plugged with lead. The former cop slid into base feet-first, his weapons still up and kicking, his bulldog legs and torso plowing to a stop in the thick brown grass.

“We gotta move him,” that Boston accent announced.

Rhage’s mouth opened wide, and the inhale that came next rattled like a box of rocks.

Ordinarily, V’s brain was slick as shit, his intelligence so great that it was as much a personal characteristic as a faculty, defining everything about his life. He was the rational one, the logical one, the cynical sonofabitch who was never wrong.

And yet his gray matter promptly crashed.

Years of performing medical assessment and intervention in the field told him that his brother was going to die within a minute or two, assuming that the heart muscle had in fact been torn or pierced and one, or more than one, of the chambers was spilling blood into the chest cavity.

Which would both cut off cardiac function as the peritoneal sac flooded and fatally compromise blood pressure.

It was the kind of catastrophic injury that required immediate surgical intervention—and even assuming you had all the necessary technology and equipment available in a sterile clinical situation, success wasn’t on lock.

“V! We gotta move him—”

Bullets sizzled by and they both hit the ground. And with a terrible mental recalculation, V’s processing unit came to an untenable conclusion: Rhage’s life or theirs.

Fuck! I did this to him, V thought.

If he hadn’t told the brother about the vision, Rhage wouldn’t have run out early and he would have been more in control during the fight—

Vishous upped his muzzles and dropped three slayers who were closing in, while Butch twisted on the ground and did the same in the opposite direction.

“Rhage, stay with us,” V grunted as he popped out the empty clips and refilled the butts of his guns one after the other. “Rhage, you’ve got to—shit!”

More shooting. And he was hit in the goddamn arm.

As his own blood flowed, he ignored it, his brain reengaging to find a solution that didn’t equal Rhage on a funeral fucking pyre. He could call his Jane in, because she couldn’t be killed. But she couldn’t perform open-heart surgery here, for fuck’s sake. What if—

The flash of light was so bright, so sudden, that he wondered who the hell was wasting time stabbing a slayer back to the Omega—

The second blast of illumination had him cranking around and looking down at Rhage. Oh . . . shit. Twin shafts of brilliant light streamed out of the brother’s eye sockets, lasering up into the sky in parallel streams that could have bull’s-eyed the face of the moon.

“Fuuuuuck!”

Total change of plan. The motherfucking theme of the night.

V hauled over to Butch and peeled him off Rhage. “Move it!”

“What are you doing—Holy Mary, mother of God!”

The pair of them broke out in a crouched run, their heads ducked, their legs ripping across the open area as they jumped over writhing lessers and varied their course to make themselves more difficult targets. When they reached the closest abandoned classroom building, they one-after-the-othered around the corner and went into auto-cover, V taking the front, Butch on the back.

With his chest pumping, Vishous leaned around. Out in the center of the clearing, the change was torturing Rhage’s downed body, his arms and legs contorting as his torso jerked and twisted, the beast emerging from the flesh of the male, the great dragon breaking free from the DNA it was forced to share.

If Rhage hadn’t died out there already, this was surely going to kill him.

And yet there was no way of stopping the transformation. The Scribe Virgin had embedded the curse into every single one of Rhage’s cells, and when the thing came out, the process was a train that no one could slow down or stop.

Death was going to take care of the problem.

Rhage’s death . . . was going to stop all this.

V closed his eyes and screamed inside.

A second later, he popped his lids and thought, No fucking way. No fucking way he was going to let this happen.

“Butch,” he barked. “I gotta go.”

“What? Where are you—”

That was the last thing Vishous heard as he up and disappeared.