Mine, page 26
“What’s happening?” Lydia demanded. “Is he going to—what can we do?”
A mask with positive flow oxygen was strapped on Daniel’s face, and Gus stayed still as he looked at the monitor. “Come on,” he murmured. “Let’s see some better numbers.”
As he waited, he could feel the presence of everybody else in the room—where they were standing, how they were moving, whether they were talking, if they were silent—but all that was a distilled awareness. Daniel was his sole focus, everything else fading away into a buffer zone that he could call on if he needed, but that, if it wasn’t immediately relevant to the survival of the patient on the bed, he could completely disregard.
Fuck. The numbers were not improving. Oxygen stats remained in the low 80s, and heart rate continued to spin out.
Time to up the interventions or they were going to lose the man.
As Gus started barking orders, a split of consciousness happened—most of his mind remained trained on his professional duty, yet a vital part of him got sucked back to when he’d been strapped to that chair and getting tased by a man whose face he never saw and whose motivations had been evil. He just remembered that accented voice talking to him, and the pain wrecking his will to protect this site.
And the woman who owned it—
From out of nowhere, Gus’s brain coughed up a missing piece of what had happened to him: Suddenly, he remembered being carried by someone—carried… across the field outside of Phalen’s house. He must have come around for a moment or two because he’d become aware that he was being brought back to the estate.
By a man in a red priest’s robe—
“What was that, doctor?”
Forcing himself to fully engage, he communicated a second round of instructions. As medical staff followed his directives and things got really busy over Daniel’s body, Gus glanced across at C.P. Phalen. She was staring at him, and there was an accusation in those eyes.
Then again, they hadn’t left on a good note.
He’d told her no. That he wouldn’t administer the drug to her. After that, shit had gotten critical and she’d ramped it up with a shrug and a drawl that had lit his temper like a flare.
Fine, you’re ripping up the contract? I’ll just get someone else to give Vita-12b to me.
At which point he’d informed her that he was going to keep the goddamn contract intact. Like he was a twelve-year-old sassing a teacher by defiantly eating all the paste.
It had been a fantastic conversation, and after she’d marched off, he’d had the cold comfort of knowing that he’d won.
Now, as she glared at him, he thought of the red-robed stranger who had come and gotten him, who risked their own life to get him out—and bring him to where he was most likely to survive. It must have been one of her guards. Who decided to do one last mission before he took his oath to the Catholic Church and cardinal’d himself.
If that man, that savior, hadn’t come? Gus would be dead.
As he thought of Vita-12b, and all the lives it might save, he knew he had to try it on a human. That was the next step. But not on C.P.—and yes, he was letting his personal feelings get in the way of her freely given consent.
Snapping back into the present once again, his last thought on the matter was how in all cases, it was best to be objective.
Emotions were the worst kind of complication in life.
Especially when shit got critical.
* * *
Up on Deer Mountain, halfway to the summit, Xhex was certain that she hadn’t heard that right. Even though her brother had said the words twice.
Although to be fair, it wasn’t so much his syllables as the tone of voice that had shaken her. And then there was that pause, like he’d had to gather himself to continue speaking at all.
I have never… forgotten why or how you left the Colony.
Called forward by all the things she didn’t comprehend, Xhex walked over to him, the sounds of her boots over the loose gravel of the trail loud in the silence.
“I don’t understand,” she heard herself say.
As she realized what she’d spoken, she wanted to take it back. That was not what she’d intended to lead with. Blade was never someone anybody should trust… yet the way he was staring over at her made her narrow her eyes on him in a way she never had.
And then she realized what it was. The whites around his irises were pink. And there was a perfectly formed blood-red teardrop just under one of his eyes.
“Are you crying,” she breathed. Because she could read his grid… and she wasn’t sure whether she could believe what she was seeing.
What he was choosing to allow her to see.
He was devastated by inner turmoil—and it seemed to be somehow all tied to her? How was this possible? Except she couldn’t deny how—and why—the three-dimensional structure of his emotions was blazing with energy.
His grid was glowing bright as the sun.
With pain… and regret.
Blade shook his head. Cleared his throat. Brushed under his eye with impatience and rubbed the blood away between his fingertips.
“I watched you go that night, sister mine. I watched… the van go. And I knew…” His voice cracked again and he put his hands up, covering his face. “I knew where they were taking you, and what was going to happen to you. And I let you go. Oh… fuck—I am—”
As he stuttered over his words, a bizarre inner calm came over Xhex. It was the strangest thing: All of her thoughts quieted, the chaos she had been struggling with like a snow globe settling after a shaking, her mind clearing from the confusion that had plagued her… for decades, it felt like.
Abruptly, her brother’s rambling came back to her ears.
“—I tried to get them out. I tried to save them because they were you. They were… you… but…” When Blade dropped his hands, blood was running down his face, the true tears of a symphath so rare that they were indeed squeezed from the marrow. “They were dead. They were always… dead…”
Xhex blinked a couple of times. “I don’t understand what you are telling me.”
The words that came out of him next were halting—and she wasn’t sure what she said in return. But as streaks of moonlight flickered over his red-washed face, the strobing created by the wind teasing the pine boughs, a picture emerged that took her breath from her.
Labs. Explosions. Rescues that were recoveries because it was too late.
Vengeance. Taken out on those who had hurt her, whether or not they were directly involved with what had been done to her.
As the truth of what her brother had been doing for the last two and a half decades hit her, she was vaguely aware of a wolf howling off in the distance.
And the call was answered by another.
And another.
Abruptly, a chorus of wolves she could not see began to sing to the night, and oddly, in the cresting and falling of the harmonies, she heard something that she not only understood, but felt like was directed to her.
Believe. Believe. Believe…
“I’m sorry,” she stuttered. “I still don’t…”
After a shuddering breath, Blade seemed to pull himself together. As if he knew he was not going to have a second chance at their conversation.
“I went to the labs.”
“What labs…” Although why did she have to ask that?
“The ones that you were in,” he repeated. “The underground facilities with the humans and the experimentation. I tried to find you. For years.”
“You went… looking for me?” she mumbled.
“For years. And after I heard you were out, that you had gotten yourself free, I went to Caldwell and located you in that club, Screamers. It took me a good year to track you down. But I had to see for myself that you were okay.”
“You went to that club?” She had to have him repeat everything because the recasting of reality that was required to take what he was saying as truth was so vast, so deep, that she had to be sure. “The club I was working in?”
“Indeed, I went with some regularity. I never intended for you to see me. I blended in, and you were not looking for me, so I passed among the crowds you were hired to control.” As the sounds of wolves rose in volume, he had to speak more loudly to project over the din of the howling. “By then, I had already taken out five of the underground labs looking for you, and it occurred to me that I must finish the job. Even if you hated me for all the right reasons, there were other people’s sisters out there. Other people’s… brothers. Sons. Daughters. I did not save you… but I could ahvenge you and make amends to others, even if they never knew it or understood my motivations. Even if you never did.”
Xhex put her hands on her head as her heart pounded and she got dizzy. “You went after the labs… for me?”
“I wanted… to be forgiven. By you, by my own conscience. I should never have let them take you. I knew what our bloodline intended to do. I should have warned you so that even if you couldn’t have gotten out before the van came, you could have been prepared and escaped en route. I should have…”
Jesus, she wished like hell the wolves would shut up. This was the most important conversation she was ever going to have with one of her relatives, and the lupine community had decided it was time to tune up their sirens—except then she thought of the ghostly entity, the older female that Xhex had come to seek.
She had engineered this.
And though the entity was not visible, she was here, somewhere, in and among the pines. That was why the wolves were singing. She was of them somehow…
“Blade,” she interrupted her brother.
As he stopped talking, she stared into his face. They had similar coloring, the pair of them… and she had thought that was all they had in common as half-breeds, both of them part of an experiment to mix the blood of symphaths with powerful vampires to see if there was an evolutionary advantage.
Back some twenty years ago, when she had begun seeing a vampire, she’d been viewed as compromising the integrity of the research—and there had been a fear, never expressed, that the program had all been a very grave mistake. Their bloodline hadn’t wanted to be punished for what had been a heretical idea to begin with, so she had been sacrificed for the protection of her family for a number of reasons.
“How many of these… labs did you close down,” she said.
“All of them.”
Xhex leaned forward onto the balls of her feet. “I’m sorry, what did you say?”
“Every one of them,” came the rock-solid reply. “I took them all out—well, except for the one under us now, and Daniel tells me they do no experimenting on your kind. So I am leaving it be.”
“You closed down…”
“All of them. It took me over two decades, and it does not feel like enough.”
The male’s face seemed to change shape for her, the features at once familiar and yet completely new.
“You did that for me?” she whispered.
“It was the only way to make amends.”
All around, the howling continued, becoming even louder still, if that were possible. And that was when she saw it, over in a clearing by a stream… a wolf that was like no other, a silver lupine form who was watching them as if in approval.
Finally, she thought, as she raised her hand in greeting.
As Blade caught the direction of her focus, he glanced over to the side of the trail. And then he said the strangest thing: “It’s her.”
Xhex did a double take. “You mean… she came to you, too? Up here?”
“An entity like none I had ever seen before. An old—”
“—woman,” Xhex finished. “With a message.”
“Yes, did you—”
“She told me I had a journey and that my only hope was for me to start on it or die.” Xhex glanced down at the ground, and saw that her brother’s boots and hers were toe to toe. “A journey…”
To this spot here. Right here.
Her whole adult life, she had been meant to come here, to this spot on the trail that led up the mountain, to… her brother.
She looked at Blade. Over twenty years. All the labs. And he had never said a thing to anybody—a wise survival skill up in the Colony, but something that would have gotten him help if he had told the right people in Caldwell. But that hadn’t been the point for him, had it.
The Federal Bureau of Genetics, she thought. Blade as Daniel’s boss. The work that Blade had gotten humans to do with him because he’d needed backup that no one knew about.
Because all that had been his journey.
And now they were both here.
Xhex reached up to the slick cheek of her brother. Swiping her forefinger down the red tears he cried, she retracted her hand and turned her fingertips around.
After a long stretch of silence, she streaked her own cheeks with his blood. “I… forgive you.”
All at once, the howling stopped, and the silence of the night returning was such a shock, they both jumped as if the void were a loud noise.
And then Blade refocused on her, his eyes gleaming with the red wash of his emotions. “You do not have to.”
“I know.” Xhex put her hand on his shoulder. “I forgive you. Now forgive yourself and let it go. We both need to… let this go.”
As she spoke the words, a soaring feeling buoyed her body sure as if her feet had left the ground, and all at once, a rushing sensation in her head burned—but not in a way that hurt. It was like a reinflation.
“Your grid,” Blade whispered with wonder.
The embrace that followed happened naturally, the both of them stepping in together, and as Xhex wrapped her arms around Blade’s heavy shoulders, she felt as though they were cocooned in a peace that was tangible. Protective.
Healing.
A journey coming to a peaceful end.
They stayed together for the longest time, the cold air not touching them, the moon bathing them in soft light. And when they finally parted, they each stared at the other. Then she laughed a little.
“Well. That happened.”
Blade laughed as well, then looked around—and recoiled.
“She’s not there anymore,” he said, pointing to the spot in the trees where the ghostly gray wolf had been.
Xhex went back to the night she had come up the trail for the first time, and had found the old woman. She had never thought it would lead here, to her… beginnings. But maybe that was the thing with healing. If only the surface of a wound reknits, the injury festers as an infection. Only by going deep, to the very source, and clearing the base of it all, could health be restored.
Family had betrayed her… but family had ahvenged her, too.
“I guess her job with us is done.” Xhex glanced down at her body, then patted at herself to make sure this wasn’t a dream. “With me… with you.”
When she looked back up, she had to know. “Blade… about my grid…”
There was a long moment. And then her brother slowly smiled. “The rebuilding is happening, as we speak. I can see it plainly, so no, you are not deluding yourself.”
“I can feel it.” She touched her ribs again and her head. “I swear I can.”
“Good. I am glad.”
As a smile stretched her mouth—it didn’t stay put. Just as he could read her grid… his was obvious to her, and the stress remained.
Only this time, it was unhappiness, not regret.
And she knew what it was about.
“You’ve got to leave Lydia alone,” Xhex said roughly. “If not for her own good, for yours. You don’t know the hell where I’ve been in my head, my soul—and we don’t need two people in the family there.”
Blade took a deep breath. “Family.”
“Yeah. Family who looks out for each other. And if you keep holding on to the thing with that wolven, what happened to me… is going to happen to you.”
THIRTY-FIVE
THINGS WENT DOWNHILL so fast, Lydia thought as she sat at the bedside.
Daniel had been fine in the library, and then he’d gotten to their room, collapsed on the bed, and started coughing up all that bright red blood. And now, as she found herself in the midst of a throng of medical staff, with all kinds of drugs being pumped into him and vitals monitoring that was going badly, she couldn’t grapple with where they were. How was it possible that he’d been doing so well—hell, they had had sex, twice, for godsakes—but then all of a sudden, he was slipping into a coma?
But come on, like making love was a physical fitness test.
“I’m right here,” she said roughly as she stroked his dusting of hair. “I need you to stay with me—”
“Lydia.”
The sound of her name, so close by, and spoken so insistently—like she hadn’t heard it a couple of times—made her jump and glance up. “Gus…?”
“Hey, honey.” The doctor got down on his knees in front of her, his bruised and swollen face a reminder of how much other people were suffering right now. “Can you focus on me for a sec?”
She nodded, even though she wasn’t sure she could look away from Daniel for even that long. “What can we do?” she asked. “Please…”
“He’s had a bleed in his left lung from a bronchial arterial breach inside one of the tumors. Remember how I told you this could happen?”
“He’s had them before, though. Why is he…”
“The bleeding’s under control and he’s better, right? You can see, he’s breathing more easily and he’s relaxed. Look at the monitor, no alarms going off.”
She glanced to the screen behind his head, with all its numbers and the mountain ranges of his heart rate. “He’s had that happen before. So why… did he collapse?”
“His oxygen got low because of the coughing, but we’re supporting his breathing and he’s stable now, and I need you to start breathing again yourself.” As she began to well up, Gus put his hand on her shoulder. “Listen to me, I’ve got him, okay? You can trust me.”
“But then what. What happens tomorrow. What happens…”
