Phantom Series Boxed Set (54 page)

The assailant scuttled toward the door.

In a flash Aiden blocked his path.

“Holy shit! How did you—”

Aiden snatched the man by the collar and lifted him to his feet, then higher, his shoes dangling and his clothing tightening around his neck.

“Tell me who you are before I tear your head from your shoulders with my bare hands.”

Nothing but choking noises gurgled from the man’s gasping mouth.

“Don’t,” Lauren croaked, her voice a forced whisper. “Don’t kill him. I called…the nurse.”

With a growl, Aiden flung him hard against the nearest wall.

“What is your purpose here?” he demanded, but the door behind him slammed open, and a nurse burst into the room. Aiden called on the magic to fade into the shadows, but the man on the ground continued to struggle with his now invisible assailant. The nurse screamed at the stranger on the floor, which brought a burly orderly into the room.

“Tried…to…kill…” Lauren forced the words out, and each syllable drained the color from the nurse’s face.

“Get him! Hold him!” she commanded.

The orderly had him in a headlock so quickly, the attacker had neither time nor opportunity to say more.

In a rush of activity a uniformed officer appeared. The nurse positioned herself beside Lauren, her arms outstretched protectively as the attacker rambled and raged about a disappearing man.

“He attacked me! Nearly broke my neck! Then, ‘poof,’ he’s gone. She saw him! Ask her!”

The nurse turned to Lauren.

“He’s crazy,” Lauren replied. “I woke up with him on top of me. He had a scalpel or something. He nearly killed me.”

The guard was dragging the man out of the room when someone else forced his way inside—someone in a dark suit, with a clipboard and a pinched face—demanding to know who was causing the ruckus in his hospital. In the confusion, the attacker threw his head back hard, knocking the guard off of him, and bolted out the door. Aiden nearly sprang forward to pursue, but caught himself.

He could not go far. The sword saw to that. The orderly, the guard and the man in the suit gave chase. The nurse remained at her post, speaking in soothing tones, reassuring Lauren, whose blue eyes were wide with terror.

“You’re all right. Please, Ms. Cole. You need to calm down.”

“But security—”

“They’ll catch him, I swear,” the nurse said, but the quaver in her voice was not reassuring. “You need to lie back. Your heart might not be able to take another shock. Please, Ms. Cole, you need to lie back.”

Lauren struggled against the nurse’s hands, but she’d been weakened by the drugs. Aiden, still invisible by choice, leaned close to Lauren and whispered, “I’m here, my lady. Do not fight.”

The nurse jumped back and spun around. “Who was that?”

She turned on the lights, then scrambled around the room, searching every possible hiding place for another intruder.

“Tell her to leave,” Aiden suggested, this time pressing close to Lauren and speaking directly into her ear.

Lauren, who’d relaxed into the pillows with the curve of a smile on her lips, waved her hand at the frantic nurse.

“You’re making me dizzy.”

The nurse stopped. “I heard someone.”

“Why don’t you go see if they caught that man?”

“But I shouldn’t leave you—”

The guard slipped back inside, panting. “Ms. Cole, are you—”

“Did you catch him?” she asked.

The guard glanced sheepishly at the ground. “Not yet. The hospital is in lockdown. We’ll find him. But the chief wants me to stay with you until we’re all clear.”

Lauren shook her head. “I’m sure he meant for you to wait outside.”

The guard shifted uneasily, but Lauren gave the nurse a quelling look, so she shooed the man out. “You can stay right outside by the door. I’ll wait with—”

“No,” Lauren interrupted. “I’ll be fine. The other patients must need you. I just want to go back to sleep.”

Reluctantly the nurse complied. Though alarms sounded and frantic voices from the other side of the door testified that the entire floor was in a panic, Lauren looked utterly bucolic the moment the nurse shut off the light and, with a promise to return when the attacker was caught, left the room.

Aiden made himself visible just as a twinkle of a smile danced across Lauren’s face.

“You saved my life,” she said. “Thank you.”

He gestured at his now-solid body. “You did the same for me, my lady. I wonder, however, why your life is in such constant jeopardy.”

“Never was before yesterday,” she muttered. “He said he wanted the sword.”

Aiden frowned. “So did your former husband. Perhaps he—”

“—hired someone to rough me up?” Lauren asked. “Doesn’t seem like his style.”

Aiden’s chest filled with a rage that might have exploded had Ross Marchand been in the room. His veins sizzled with a bloodlust he hadn’t experienced since the battlefields of Scotland, and which he had hoped he’d never feel again. “Perhaps his style has changed.”

Fifteen

The moment the goon he’d sent into Lauren Cole’s room slid, breathless and sweating, into the limousine parked a block away from the hospital, Farrow knew the idiot had failed.

“What happened?”

The man clutched at his chest, trying to pull enough oxygen into his lungs to speak. Farrow grabbed the collar of the man’s stolen white coat and tugged him forward. Though he’d come with a reputation for being ruthless and wiry, the man’s intense shaking made Farrow wonder if he’d been misled. Seriously misled.

“Breathe later,” Farrow said evenly. “Talk now.”

“Attacked. Appeared. Out of nowhere.”

Farrow released the man and sat back into the plush leather seat and considered this odd turn of events. Could this be possible? Had Ross Marchand told him the truth when he claimed to have been accosted by an unseen force when in his ex-wife’s hospital room?

Farrow had assumed the film producer had simply spent too much time sniffing coke with his A-list stars, or that he was concocting a wild tale to buy his ex-wife more time with the sword. Now Farrow had what appeared to be unbiased corroboration of a magical force at play.

“You didn’t see the sword?”

The man shook his head furiously. “Looked everywhere. Nothing there. No one there. Then—”

Farrow held up his hand, instructed the driver to proceed, and then poured the man a finger of scotch, which he offered with a calm smile. The man was not a follower, so Farrow had no sway over him except that he’d promised him a generous payment for an hour’s work. The K’vr had few contacts in Los Angeles, and with Lauren Cole being such a high-profile patient, he hadn’t wanted any of his own men to risk breaking into a hospital they hadn’t been able to reconnoiter. This man, at the very least, claimed to know the lay of the land.

“It was fucking messed up,” he went on. “I’ve dealt with dudes who were fast, but this guy…he was a goddamned ghost. I checked the room before I grabbed her, man. Every inch. She was alone. But the minute I touched her he was there. Strong as a fucking bear. Could have thrown me through a wall. Would have snapped my neck, but she stopped him.”

Farrow forced his expression to remain cool. “Tell me what you saw. Precisely.”

For a man of less than average intelligence, he recounted the story with adequate detail. A forged security badge had given him access to Lauren’s floor, and he’d quickly found her room. Luckily the security guard had been more interested in flirting with chatty nurses than standing vigil. When Farrow’s man had finally slipped inside, Lauren Cole had been unconscious and drugged.

“I looked all over, but I couldn’t find no sword. Decided I had no choice. Had to wake the bitch up. She was just coming to when this son of a bitch attacked. Came out of nowhere.”

“When you say, ‘out of nowhere,’ do you mean—”

“I mean he fucking appeared where no one was before, got it? She started talking. Distracted him. I was almost out the door; then he just…appeared right in front of me. Black hair. Fucked-up gray eyes. Like ice, man. Like ice.”

Farrow could feel his own dyes widening to saucers. All these years, all these generations, he’d heard tales of magic, but had never seen any evidence to make him a true believer. Former leaders of the K’vr, like Gemma’s father, had often exhibited psychic talent that could not be explained—but he’d always considered the tricks mental sleight of hand.

Not that he didn’t believe in the source of Rogan’s magic—it was, after all, what had driven him to the leadership in the first place. History was littered with tales of talismans and charms that had increased the power and wealth of men cunning enough to exploit their magical properties. But he’d never imagined any magic that could allow a man to appear and disappear at will.

The possibilities made him dizzy.

“You’ve done very well,” Farrow said with a grin. “Pull over behind that warehouse,” he instructed his driver. Then he addressed the man again. “We’ll let you off here.”

He waited until the car was hidden on all sides before he nodded to his driver to let the man out. His useful envoy was now a loose end. But the problem was easily solved with a pistol and a silencer and one bullet.

Farrow instructed the driver to depart immediately as he mulled over the possibilities.

Magic.

Real magic.

Rogan’s magic.

He slipped his cell phone out of his pocket and pressed a speed dial number.

“We need to get close to Lauren Cole,” he said into the mouthpiece. “And when I say close, I mean
intimately
close.”

***

“ ‘Tis not my sword,” Aiden countered, incensed. He wanted nothing more to do with the weapon, and had so far enjoyed the fact that it had been hidden from sight. “The blade was forged by Gypsies and cursed by evil.”

Lauren rubbed at her neck. “He couldn’t have taken it, right? Because you’re still here. But that’s what he wanted. He wanted your sword.”

Aiden swallowed a second denial of ownership and decided to allow the matter to rest. While she was under the influence of pain numbing drugs, sleep deprived and frightened, she was also in no state to be literal or rational. In the aftermath of the assault on her person, the guard around her would undoubtedly be doubled. And until sunrise, at least, Aiden would not leave her side.

For now, she was safe.

And so was the sword.

He retrieved the sword from beneath the bed. “Helen brought the sword from your trailer.”

Lauren looked at him quizzically. “Why?”

“She struck me from the start as a very intelligent woman, but now I see her as crafty as a queen.”

“She is that,” Lauren agreed, though her voice drifted distractedly, her gaze snared by the dark canvas bag. “May I?”

After locking the door with a silent flick of his fingers, Aiden took the sword out of the bag and placed it gingerly in Lauren’s hands. Even in the sparse light streaming in from beneath the door, the blade glowed cool and blue. The tiny rubies on the handle, however, sparkled with red flames.

“It’s so beautiful,” she said with a sigh.

Aiden scowled. “ ‘Tis evil.”

She looked up, her expression confused. “But you aren’t.”

Even in the strange light, he could tell she had not yet regained her color. Her eyelids were heavy on her face, accentuated by dark circles around her sapphire irises and a thin white line around her lips.

And yet she was beautiful. Her tiny smile alleviated the sting of knowing how tightly bound he was to Rogan’s magic—and to her.

“Thank you for coming back,” she said.

“I never left,” he replied.

“I know, but thanks for not disappearing entirely on me.”

He nearly said, “I had no choice,” but he kept the honest admission to himself. In another time, another place, another circumstance, Aiden would have pursued Lauren relentlessly. She was beautiful, smart and strong. But he’d learned his first night with her that seducing a woman of this century went beyond achieving sexual surrender. She’d made love with him, but had given up nothing.

The hours he’d spent invisible and ineffective as the world raged on around him convinced him more than ever that he needed to be free.
Completely
free. Free to pursue her as the man he once was. At least, the man he was before war shredded his soul.

With a soft grunt, Lauren pulled herself into a sitting position, the sword nestled beside her. “What’s wrong?”

Aiden, with more effort this time, pushed unbidden, bloody images out of his mind.

“Besides the fact that you nearly died, twice, in my presence?”

“ ‘Nearly’ being the operative word,” she replied, running her hands down a thin wire and then pressing the mechanism at the end, which caused the back of the bed to rise perpendicular to the base.

As the bed moved, he swallowed a gasp of amazement. He had already seen more amazing wonders during his brief stay in this modern hospital than he had in a lifetime with the Gypsies of Valoren. Their magic, their healing skills, bore no equal to what he’d seen today. How many of his regiment might not have died on the bloody battlefield if doctors had had such magic at their disposal?

“How do you feel?” Aiden asked, focusing his entire attention on her.

“Like I was hit by a Mack truck,” Lauren replied. She noticed his perplexed look and added, “It’s a horseless carriage about the size of a small house.”

“Horseless?”

After adjusting the pillows behind her, she relaxed against the starkly white sheets and closed her eyes until she stopped panting from the exertion.

“I have a lot to catch you up on,” she said with a sigh.

Unable to resist, he eased as much of his body as he could beside hers on her bed, the sword nestled between them. Sometime before the attack, the nurses had removed her tubes and wires. IVs, they called them. And monitors. Except for a single transparent tube that pumped oxygen into her nostrils, she was free of the doctor’s healing instruments, and while he wished to do nothing that would compromise her recovery, he could not fight the need to lie beside her, to feel her warmth. To have her feel his.

“You may fill me in on the details of modern life at another time,” he told her, focusing on the exotic scent lingering in her hair, such a contrast to the alcohol essence so pungent around them. “The nurse insists you need rest.”