Night Huntress 07 - This Side of the Grave (5 page)

“How the
hell’d
you know about Don?” I heard Tate demand of Bones.

“From the scurry of activity going on to make him presentable for her” was
Bones’s
short reply. “Mind reading, remember?”

The elevator doors opened and I went inside, not caring to listen to anything else. Normally I’d be worried about leaving Bones alone with Tate since the two of them mixed like oil and water. But now, all my thoughts were on my uncle. What was wrong with him? And
why
would he forbid anyone to tell me about it?

I almost ran out of the elevator when it opened on the second floor, dashing down the hallway and through the doors marked MEDICAL. I ignored the staff I passed along the way, not needing them to tell me where my uncle was. Don’s coughing and muttering to someone in the last room on the right told me that.

I slowed when I reached the door, not wanting to burst in if my normally debonair uncle wasn’t dressed.

“Don?” I called out, feeling hesitant now that only a few feet separated us.

“Give me a moment, Cat” was his response, sounding hoarse but not like he was in imminent danger of dying. Relief swept through me. Maybe Don had caught swine flu or something equally nasty, but now he was recovering.

A nurse I didn’t recognize came out of his room, giving me a look that required no mind-reading skills to interpret.

“He’s getting dressed,” she said in a crisp tone while the
ammonialike
scent of annoyance drifted from her.

“I take it he’s not supposed to be up doing that?” I asked her.

“No, but that’s not stopping him,” she replied bluntly.

“I can hear you, Anne,” my uncle snapped.

She gave me another pointed look before lowering her voice to a whisper. “Don’t let him overexert himself.”

A round of coughing prefaced my uncle muttering, “I can still hear you.” My brows rose. Whatever was wrong with Don’s health, his ears were sharp as ever.

After another series of fumbling sounds, my uncle opened the door. He had on a slightly wrinkled pullover shirt paired with gray pants that matched the color of his eyes. For a second, I just blinked, realizing this was the first time I’d seen Don with his hair mussed and wearing something other than a suit and tie.

“Cat. I’m afraid you’ve caught me a bit by surprise.”

The irony in his voice was familiar, even if his appearance wasn’t. In the months since I’d seen my uncle, he seemed to have aged ten years. The lines around his mouth and eyes were pronounced, his gray hair was nearly white, and his impeccable posture was slightly stooped. I swallowed the lump that worked its way into my throat.

“You know me,” I managed.
“Always a pain in the ass.”

Don reached out to squeeze my shoulder. “No you’re not. Not even when you’re trying to be.”

The way he said that, combined with the sadness that flitted across his expression, almost made me lose it. Right then I knew that his condition was terminal. Otherwise, Don would’ve told me with sardonic affection that
yes,
I
was
a colossal pain in the ass and always would be. Not held on to my shoulder with a grip that trembled even as he managed to flash me a smile.

All the things I’d dismissed before came back in sharp focus. Don’s recurring cough the past several times I’d spoken to him, brushed off as “just a cold.” The plans canceled at the last minute, rescheduled just to be canceled again…

I wrapped my arms around him, feeling the weight loss that his clothes concealed, taking in a deep breath that filled my lungs with the scent of antiseptics, sweat, and sickness. More tears burned my eyes that I blinked back.
Whatever’s wrong with him, vampire blood will cure it
, I reminded myself, trying to get a grip on my emotions. Don was probably just being stubborn and refusing to drink any, even though he of all people knew the amazing healing powers of undead blood.

Well, I’d get him to rethink that stupid decision.

“So, I hear you didn’t want me to know you were sick,” I said, managing to sound mildly chiding instead of hysterically worried. Point for me.

“You’ve had enough to deal with lately,” Don replied.

I let go of him and swept my gaze around the room. His bed was one of those adjustable ones where the head and foot could be raised, but it lacked the normal hospital rails on either side of it. An open laptop was perched on a rolling tray nearby, alongside several stacked folders, his cell phone, pagers, and an in-house office phone.

“How typical of you not to stop working even though you looked like death warmed over,” I said in a half-joking, half-censuring way.

My uncle gave me a baleful look. “I might look like death warmed over, but now you
are
death warmed over, remember?”

I would’ve smiled at his quip, but I was too worried by the grayish tone to his skin and the slow, painful way he moved as he took a step away from me. My uncle always had a commanding presence no matter the circumstances, but now, he seemed frail. That scared me more than facing enemy forces while unarmed.

“What’s wrong that’s got you here?” I asked, again controlling the fear that made my voice higher than normal.

“I have a bad flu,” Don replied, his words roughened by a cough.

“Don’t lie to her.”

Bones’s
voice flowed into the room, and a few booted strides later, so did he. His dark brown gaze focused on Don, who visibly stiffened.

“Your abilities don’t give you the right to—”

“My bloodline does,” I interrupted Don, clenching my hands into fists. “You’re my family. That means I have a right to know.”
And if you don’t tell me, I’ll just green-eye your nurse until
she
does
, I mentally added.

Don was silent for a long moment, looking between me and Bones. Finally, his shoulder lifted in a faint shrug.

“I have lung cancer.” His smile was strained, but his trademark dry wit still rose to the occasion. “Appears those warnings on cigarette packages are correct.”

Everything in me tensed as soon as he said the C word. “But I’ve never seen you smoke,” I blurted, stunned into denial.

“I quit before we met, but for thirty years before that, I had a pack-a-day habit.”

Lung cancer
.
Advanced, too, for him to look this way and allow himself to stay in the compound’s medical facility. To say Don was a workaholic was to put it mildly. In all the time I’d known
him,
my uncle hadn’t taken time off for vacations, holidays, or birthdays, let alone sick days. Then amidst my stunned absorption of this news, a businesslike mentality swept over me, mercifully blocking out the grief that made me feel like I’d just been shot in the gut.

“I assume your doctors are going to operate? Or do chemo?
Both?
What treatment plan have they given you?”

He sighed. “It’s too advanced for surgery or chemo, Cat. My treatment plan is to make the most of the time I have left.”

No.
The word resounded in my head as loudly as those unwelcome conversations had earlier. Then I uncurled my hands from the tight fists I had clenched at my sides, trying to make my voice very composed. Weeping and panic wouldn’t help, but calm logic would.

“Maybe your condition is past what traditional medicine can treat, but you have other options. Vampire blood will heal your lungs from sustaining further
damage,
maybe even put the cancer into remission—”

“No,” Don interrupted.

“Dammit!” I exclaimed.
So much for the calm, rational approach.
“You’re letting bigotry get in the way of your common sense. Your brother was an asshole before he became a vampire, Don. Changing into one didn’t make
me
evil, and drinking vampire blood to help your condition won’t make
you
evil.”

“I know,” he said, surprising me. “I began drinking vampire blood shortly after I was first diagnosed seven years ago. You made that possible with the captive vampires you brought back from missions when you were working for me. You’re right, it did put the cancer in remission, but time catches up with everyone, and it has, at last, caught up with me.”

Seven
years
! My mind reeled. “You hid this the whole time we’ve known each other?
Why?
”

Don’s sigh rattled in his throat. “I didn’t trust you when you first joined the team, as you remember. Then, I didn’t want to distract you from your job. After you discovered you were my niece… well. Things happened. You’ve had a lot to deal with the past couple years, more than most people have had in their entire lives. I was going to tell you about it, but I wanted to give myself time to sort some things out first.”

I knew my mouth hung open, but I couldn’t seem to summon the willpower to close it. Bones came to me and took my hand, wordlessly squeezing it.

“You must have had an important reason for coming here without calling,” Don said. “What’s going on?”

I couldn’t believe he expected me to just change the subject, as if the topic of his impending death wasn’t worth further discussion.

“Chemo, surgery, and vampire blood might not be able to help you, but
I
still can.” The words spilled out recklessly. “I’m a vampire now and I can make you one, too. You won’t owe me any of that normal fealty
crap,
and changing over will cure everything—”

“No.”

The single word was soft but emphatic. My instant, sputtering argument faded as Don was seized with a wracking cough.

“But you can’t… you can’t just
die
,” I whispered.

He straightened, controlling his cough. The same fierce will that had ordered Tate to shoot me the day we met was still in his gray eyes.

“Yes I can. It’s called being human.”

I swallowed hard. The same argument I’d once used with Bones to rationalize why a relationship between us couldn’t work had just been flung back in my face. Now I knew the frustration Bones must’ve felt at that time, because I had a sudden urge to shake Don until the blind stubbornness rattled right out of his head.

But since I couldn’t do that, I’d try another tactic. “You’re indispensable to this operation. If you were gone, I wouldn’t be the only one who would suffer. Think of the team—”

“They have Tate,” Don interrupted me. “He’s taken over this department for the past three months and he’s doing an excellent job.”

“Tate’s needed out in the field, not for management,” I argued even as I reeled at this new bit of information. “You only have one other vampire and a ghoul on the team aside from Tate. That’s not enough when going after the undead. Plus, some serious shit is brewing with ghouls right now.”

A cough made Don pause before replying. “We may have another vampire on the team soon.”

Must be Cooper.
He was the next in line to lose his pulse. Seems a lot of changes had happened. Even if I wasn’t a member of the team anymore, I’d thought being a friend and family meant
some
one would keep me in the loop.
Boy,
was I wrong.

“Christ Almighty,” Bones muttered.

Don shot him a look. “We’ll talk about that later. Now, tell me what trouble is brewing with the ghouls, Cat.”

My uncle’s expression said that continuing to discuss the obvious reasons why he should save his life would only be pointless right now. I tried to pull myself together enough to focus on why we’d come, but I felt like the floor had just opened up underneath me.

“You remember last year that a ghoul leader,
Apollyon
, was all worked up about me possibly changing into a vampire-ghoul hybrid? Well, he hasn’t calmed down…”

Several minutes later, I’d given Don all the details as we knew them. He tugged on his eyebrow as he listened. When I was finished, he let out a heavy sigh.

“Those vampires reporting back to you are a good start, but I don’t think it’s enough. If hostilities increase between vampires and ghouls, humans will bear the brunt of the fallout. We need someone to infiltrate
Apollyon’s
group. Find out everything we’re only guessing at now.”

I let out a grunt. “That would be great, but there’s a problem. Any ghouls we’d trust enough to spy would be known associates of Bones and would be killed on the spot. Finding someone tough and reliable that
Apollyon
wouldn’t recognize will be hard…”

My voice trailed off even as Bones raised a brow. Don gave me a short nod.

“Dave.”

I closed my eyes, hating the thought of my friend in such a situation, but Don was right. Dave was smart, tough, experienced, and already dead. Bones had raised Dave as a ghoul over two years ago after Dave had been killed on a mission, but few people in the undead world had ever met Dave. He’d been too busy as a member of Don’s team to hang out at many fang or flesh-eater parties.

“We’ll ask him,” I settled on. “Let him decide if he wants to do it. Going undercover is always dangerous, but going undercover to infiltrate a group of murderous undead zealots is too dicey to make it an order.”

“Go get him,” Don said. “He’s in the Wreck Room.”

I met my uncle’s intractable gaze with an equally stubborn one of my own. “I’ll go get him and we’ll deal with the ghoul situation, but I’m not giving up on you. Think about my offer. About all the positive changes you can make in the world if you’re still
alive
.”