Lover Enshrined (26 page)

None of the nurses liked dealing with him. It was female intuition. Even though there was no mention in his chart that he was a half-breed
symphath
, they could sense the evil in him. His sister, Bella, and his former flame, Marissa, were the only notable exceptions, because they both brought out his good side: He cared for them and they sensed it. As for the rest of the race, though? Anonymous folks meant absolutely nothing to him, and somehow the fairer sex always picked up on that.

The nurse came at him with a little tray of vials and a rubber tourniquet, and he rolled up his sleeve. She worked fast and didn’t say a word as she drew the blood then hit the door as quickly as she could.

“How much longer is it going to be?” he asked before she could get away.

“An emergency’s come in. It’s going to be a while.”

The door clapped shut.

Shit.
He didn’t want to leave his club alone all night. With both Trez and Xhex off-site . . . yeah, that was no good. iAm was a hard-ass, for sure, but even ruff-tuffs needed solid backup when they were facing a crowd of four hundred fucked-up humans.

Rehv popped open his phone, dialed Xhex, and fought with her for about ten minutes. Which wasn’t fun but helped kill some time. She wouldn’t budge on him pulling out, but at least he got her to agree to go back to the club with Trez.

Of course, that was only after he direct-ordered the both of them.

“Fine,” she snapped.

“Fine,” he bit out, ending the call.

He shoved his phone in his pocket. Cursed a couple of times. Took the fucking thing back out and texted:
I’m sorry I’m such a shit. Forgive me?

Just as he hit send, a text came through from her:
U can be such a shit abt this. I only ride u cuz I care.

He had to laugh, especially when she texted again:
UR 4given but ur still a shit
.
TTYL

Rehv put his phone back in his pocket and looked around, cataloging the tongue depressors in their glass jar by the sink and the blood-pressure cuff hanging off the wall and the desk and computer setup in the corner. He’d been in this room before. He’d been in all the examination rooms before.

He and Havers had been doing the doctor/patient thing for quite a while, and it was tricky shit. If anyone had evidence that there was a
symphath
around, even a half-breed, by law they had to report the individual so they could be removed from the general population and dumped off at the colony up north. Which would ruin everything. So each time Rehv came for one of these visits, he burrowed into the good doctor’s brain and opened what he liked to think of as his own personal trunk in Havers’s attic.

The trick wasn’t dissimilar to what vampires could do to erase the short-term memories of humans, just more in-depth. After putting the doc in a trance, Rehv sprang the information about himself and his “condition,” and Havers was able to treat him accurately—and without all the unpleasant social ramifications. When the appointment was over, Rehv packed up his “belongings” in the guy’s brain and secured them again, locking them down tight in the doctor’s cerebral cortex until the next time.

Was it sneaky? Yes. Was there another option? No. He needed treatment—he wasn’t like Xhex, who managed to quell her urges on her own. Although God only knew how she did—

Rehv straightened, his spine tingling in a rush, his instincts pulling a ring-a-ding-ding.

His palm found his cane and he slid off the table, landing on two feet he couldn’t feel. The trip to the door was three steps, and then his hand grabbed onto the handle and twisted. Outside, the corridor was empty in both directions. Down far to the left, the nursing station and the waiting room seemed all business as usual. To the right, there were more patient rooms and beyond them, the double doors that led to the morgue.

No drama.

Yeah . . . nothing appeared out of place. Medical staff walked with purpose. Someone coughed in the examination room next door. The hum of the HVAC system was a constant slow boil of white noise.

He squinted and was tempted to reach out with his
symphath
side, but it was too risky. He’d just gotten himself restabilized. Pandora and her box needed to stay closed.

Ducking back into the exam room, he got out his phone and started to dial Xhex to call her back to the clinic, but the door opened before the call went through.

His brother-in-law, Zsadist, put his head through the door. “Heard you were in.”

“Hey.” Rehv put the phone away and chalked up the surge of anxiety to the paranoia that seemed to come with double-dosing. Ah, the joy of side effects.

Shit.
“Tell me you’re not here because of Bella.”

“Nah. She’s good.” Z shut the door and leaned back against it, effectively locking them in together.

The Brother’s eyes were black. Which meant he was pissed off.

Rehvenge brought his cane up and let it dangle between his legs just in case he needed it. He and Z had been cool following some dick tossing when the Brother and Bella had started off, but things could change. And given the way that stare was dark as the inside of a crypt, evidently they had.

“You got something on your mind there, big man?” Rehv asked.

“I want you to do me a personal favor.”

The term
favor
was likely a misnomer. “Talk.”

“I don’t want you dealing to my twin anymore. You’re going to cut off his supply.” Z leaned forward on his hips. “And if you don’t, I will make it impossible for you to sell so much as a fucking cocktail straw in that pit of yours.”

Rehv tapped the tip of his cane against the exam table and wondered if the Brother would change his tune if he knew the profit from the club kept his
shellan
’s brother out of a
symphath
colony. Z knew about the half-breed thing; he didn’t know about the Princess and her games.

“How is my sister?” Rehv drawled. “Doing well? Keeping calm? That would be important for her, wouldn’t it. Not getting unnecessarily upset.”

Zsadist’s eyes narrowed to slits, his scarred face the kind of thing folks saw in nightmares. “I really don’t think you want to go there, do you?”

“You fuck with my business and the repercussions will hurt her as well. Trust me.” Rehv positioned his cane so it stood upright in his palm. “Your twin is an adult male. If you have problems with his usage maybe you need to talk with him, huh.”

“Oh, I’m going to deal with Phury. But I want your word. You don’t sell to him anymore.”

Rehv stared at his cane as it stood up in the air, perfectly balanced. He’d long ago made peace with his business, no doubt with help from his
symphath
side, which made seizing opportunity from the weaknesses of others a kind of moral imperative.

The way he justified his dealing was that his customers ’ choices had nothing to do with him. If they fucked up their lives because of what he sold them, that was their prerogative—and no different from the more socially acceptable ways people destroyed themselves, like eating their way into cardiac disease because of what McDonald’s peddled, or drinking themselves into liver failure thanks to the good folks at Anheuser-Busch, or gambling on reservations until they lost their houses.

Drugs were a commodity and he was a businessman, and users would just find their devastation somewhere else if his doors closed. The best he could do was make sure that if they bought from him, their shit was uncontaminated with dangerous fillers, and the purity was consistent so that they could tailor their doses reliably.

“Your word, vampire,” Zsadist growled.

Rehv looked down at the sleeve covering his left forearm and thought of Xhex’s expression when she’d seen what he’d done to himself. Odd, the parallels. Just because his drug of choice was prescribed didn’t mean he was immune from abusing the shit.

Rehv lifted his eyes, then closed his lids and stopped breathing. He reached out through the air between him and the Brother and entered the male’s mind. Yeah . . . underneath his anger was rank terror.

And memories . . . of Phury. A scene a while ago . . . seventy years or so earlier . . . a deathbed. Phury’s.

Z was wrapping his twin in blankets and moving him closer to a coal-burning fire. He was worried . . . For the first time since he’d lost his soul to slavery, he was looking on someone with concern and compassion. In the scene, he blotted Phury’s fever-soaked brow and then strapped on weapons and left.

“Vampire . . .” Rehv murmured. “Look at you go with the nursing care.”

“Get out of my fucking past.”

“You saved him, didn’t you.” Rehv flipped his eyes open. “Phury was sick. You went and got Wrath because you had nowhere else to go. The savage as savior.”

“FYI, I’m in a bad mood, and you’re making me lethal.”

“That’s how you both ended up in the Brotherhood.

Interesting.”

“I want your word, sin-eater. Not a narrative that bores me.”

Moved by something Rehv didn’t want to name, he placed his hand over his heart. In the Old Language, he said clearly,
“I hereby proffer my vow unto you. Never again shall your blooded twin leave my premises with drugs upon him.”

Surprise flared in Z’s scarred face. Then he nodded. “They say never to trust a
symphath
. So I’m going to bank on the half of you that’s my Bella’s brother, feel me?”

“Good plan,” Rehv murmured as he dropped his hand. “ ’Cuz that’s the side I pledged with. But tell me something. How’re you going to make sure he doesn’t buy from someone else?”

“To be honest, I have no idea.”

“Well, best of luck with him.”

“We’re going to need it.” Zsadist headed for the door.

"Yo, Z?”

The Brother looked over his shoulder. “What.”

Rehv rubbed his left pec. “Have you . . . ah, have you picked up a bad vibe tonight?”

Z frowned. "Yeah, but how’s that any different? Haven’t had a good one in God only knows how long.”

The door eased shut, and Rehv put his hand back over his heart. The damn thing was racing for no evident reason. Shit, it was probably best that he see the doc. No matter how long it took—

The explosion ripped through the clinic with a roar like thunder.

Chapter Nineteen

Phury took form in the pines behind the garages of Havers’s clinic—just as the security alarms in the place started going off. The shrill electronic screams made the neighborhood’s dogs bark, but there was no danger of the police being called. The warning sounds were calibrated so that they were too high for humans to hear.

Fuck
. . . he was unarmed.

He bolted toward the clinic entrance anyway, ready to fight with his bare hands if he had to.

It was a beyond-worst-case scenario. The steel door was hanging open like a split lip, and inside the vestibule the elevator doors were pushed wide, the shaft with its veins and arteries of cables and wires exposed. Down below, the roof of the elevator car had a blast hole in it, the equivalent of a bullet wound in a male’s chest.

Plumes of smoke and the scent of baby powder boiled up, riding a draft from the underground clinic. The sweet-and -sour combo, along with the sounds of fighting below, unsheathed Phury’s fangs and curled his fists.

He didn’t waste time wondering how the
lessers
had known where the clinic was, and he didn’t bother with the ladder mounted on the shaft’s concrete wall, either. He leaped down and landed on the part of the elevator’s roof that was still solid. Another jump through the blown part and he was facing total chaos.

In the clinic’s waiting area, a trio of granny-haired slayers were doing the thumpty dance with Zsadist and Rehvenge, the fight busting apart the land of plastic chairs and dull magazines and cheerless potted plants. The paled-out bastards were obviously well-trained long-timers, given how strong and sure they were, but Z and Rehv were taking no shit.

With the fight moving so fast, it was a jump-in-and-swim sitch. Phury grabbed a metal chair from the registration desk and swung it like a bat at the nearest slayer. As the
lesser
went down, he lifted the chair up and stabbed one of its spindly legs right into the fucker’s chest.

Just as the pop and flash rang out, screams rippled down the clinic’s hallway from the blocks of patient rooms.

“Go!” Z barked as he threw out a kick and caught one of the
lessers
in the head. “We’ll hold them here!”

Phury exploded through the double flap doors.

There were bodies in the hall. A lot of them. Lying in pools of red blood on the pale green linoleum.

Though it killed him not to stop and check on those he was passing, his focus had to be on the medical staff and patients who were very definitely alive. A group of them was fleeing toward him in a panic, their white coats and hospital johnnies flapping like a load of wash hung out to dry in the wind.

He caught them by grabbing arms and shoulders. “Get in the patient rooms! Lock yourselves in! Lock those damn doors!”

“No locks!” someone hollered. “And they’re taking patients!”

“Damn it.” He looked around and saw a sign. “This medicine closet have a lock?”

A nurse nodded while she unclipped something from her waist. With a shaking hand she held a key out to him. “Only from the outside, though. You’ll have . . . to lock us in.”

He nodded over to the door that read, STAFF ONLY. “Move it.”

The loose group shuffled over and filed into the ten-by-ten room with its floor-to-ceiling shelves of medications and supplies. As he shut the door, he knew he would never forget the way they looked, huddled under the low ceiling’s fluorescent lights: seven panicked faces, fourteen pleading eyes, seventy fingers finding and linking together until their separate bodies were one solid unit of fear.

These were people he knew: people who had taken care of him with his prosthesis issues. People who were vampires like him. People who wanted this war to stop. And they were being forced to trust him because at the moment he had more power than they did.