The Nightlife San Antonio: (Urban Fantasy Romance) (The Nightlife Series) (4 page)

She knew this stre
ngth. This was how it should be. She had always been this way, powerful, aggressive, a predator entrapping her prey. He moaned and floundered in her grip, falling into spasm. His knees buckled, and she went down with him, landing on his chest, still clamped tightly onto his lovely neck.

Slurping and gulping all
she could take, as fast as she could suck it down, his heart began to thump hard and heavy, lumbering under the strain of her attack. She knew the man would die if she continued. He only had about another minute or two before his heart quit. She wanted to savor that minute, to enjoy every last second of his precious life.

Wait,
I’m not a killer.

The idea of killing him stopped her short. She released him with a squishy sucking sound, her lips still pursed, and her tongue licking away all that it could reach around her mouth. Lord she wanted to kill him, to take it all.

“No, I am not a killer. No.”

The wondrous fluid had cleaned away the nasty dry taste of her mouth, refreshed her to
the point she could speak. She may not be a killer, not in this moment, but she knew how to kill a man this way, to drink him dry until his heart burst from laboring so hard to continue the flow of life.

“I don’t want to kill him.”
But she did want to.

S
he tried to reconcile her conscience with the desires consuming her. Digging deeper into her memory, seeking to learn how she could do this to a man, she found only a black, yawning chasm of emptiness.

Nothingness.

Who was she? Where was she? Where did she come from? A blank void existed where answers should have been. And yet, she knew how to kill, could have done it easily. That scared her more than anything. What kind of creature kills a man without consideration?

She c
ould. She suspected she had, perhaps more than once.

The click
of the door opening alerted her to a new obstacle, a new threat. A black-clad uniformed arm followed the swinging door and a Hispanic officer stepped into the room. His eyes blossomed in shock at the sight of her. “Holy Mother Mary!”

His hand reached for his holster, so fast it was
probably an ingrained response from his training as a cop.

Sh
e was faster. She flew at him in a leap and connected with a solid left cross. His head cracked back and sideways as his knees gave out. He sighed into unconsciousness as his head bounced off the tiled floor following his back-flop landing.

Threat handled.

She stood over him, waiting for him to move. All he did was breathe, in and out, in and out. She could hear his strong heartbeat. This one was fresh. She could feed again, just a little, just enough to refresh herself a little more. Then a noise came from the hallway. A woman’s squeaky nurse shoes treading towards her door.

No time for food. I
t was time to go.

* * * *

Adrian headed for
his Chevy pickup at the far corner of the parking lot, Jose’s fifty dollars tucked into his back pocket. Out of the corner of his eye, he caught sight of a pale blue fabric flitting past between two cars. In the strange pallor cast by the parking lot lights, he could’ve sworn he saw a flash of butt cheek from a woman wearing one of those open-backed hospital gowns. He changed course and headed straight for this wisp of fabric, intrigued.

He reached the shadows between two vehicles and pau
sed, a sense of wrongness flashing in his mind. He made an about-face and headed back to his pickup truck. He had learned that it didn’t pay to stick his nose into things not his business. He had a date with a Serta Perfect Sleeper mattress in his air-conditioned apartment.

As he reached the truck, he glanced around once more and considered
calling hospital security. A renegade patient was their job, not his.

Without a single sound,
she
was suddenly there, right next to him, her pale blood-splattered hand on his arm – the gunshot victim, the woman who damn near died in the back of his ambulance.

Her weak grip tugged at his arm.
“I need your help. You have to help me.”

Her black hair hung limp, plastered to her forehead.
Blood speckled her chin, neck and light blue gown. She must have coughed up blood, which would mean her lungs were not doing so good. Pneumonia, collapsed lung, punctured lung, all the possibilities slid across his mind as he stared at her, perplexed. What the hell was she doing out here? Walking around? The woman had flat-lined a couple of days ago.

“
Let’s get you back to the Emergency Room. They’ll take care of everything.” At the risk of ruining his jacket with blood stains and who knew what other bodily fluids, he put his arm around her and pulled her close to hold her weight. She wasn’t wearing anything under the paper-thin gown. The contours of her naked hip fit his hand perfectly. He tried to ignore those thoughts and instead steered her back towards the hospital.

“No
, wait, I can’t.” She stopped him from going any farther by turning in his grip to face him.

Shit
.
“Do you need me to carry you?”
Please no. My back can’t take any more tonight
.

“I can’
t be here.”

Her face, which had held a look of
pleading, turned dead serious. Dark eyes bored into his soul with a depth of intensity. “I need you. Take me with you. I must leave now.” There was something fascinating about her eyes. She never blinked even once, and he found he couldn’t look away from her. “You have to help me.”

Yes, of course. He
had
to help her.

He suddenly understood, and really, it was a simple request. She needed a ride. No big deal.
Helping her was the right thing to do. The soldier part of his mind rapidly assessed the risks. The CCTV cameras only covered the entrance area of the hospital. Nobody would know where she went from the parking lot. He glanced around, looking for any sign of a witness to this strange moment. Then he recalled her little issue, she was a mafia target or something like that. He had no desire to become collateral damage on a botched hit job. A saner voice nagged him,
get rid of her
.
No upside in helping her, no upside at all
. She stank like old blood and medicine, that sick-hospital smell. She stood in his arms staring at him, unblinking, her dark eyes a well filled with raw, intense need.

Something stirred inside him. Even in her present condition, she was eerily compelling.

He had deliberately trained as a paramedic to help people. The bastard shrink had called him a
sociopath
, unable to care about people. So, here he was, trying to care, trying to help, trying to be like everyone else, normal. It was his job to help people like her, more so than the police who were probably looking for her right now.

Do your job
, Adrian. Prove the bastard shrink wrong.

“Okay, I’ll give you a ride. Come on.” She snuggled into his embrace with a grateful smile on her bloody lips as he pulled her back towards his truck.
He reacted to her appreciation low in his groin. Obviously it had been way too long since he got laid. Messing around with patients was a major fail, quick way to get fired and prosecuted.

He helped
her up into the truck – impossible not to end up with a handful of her ass in the process. She held his gaze with that creepy look, and a small grin split her lips. Adrian smiled back at her reassuringly, then shut the door and jetted around to the driver side for the packet of Clorox wet wipes on the seat. Without surgical gloves, no knowing what nasty germs he might get from touching her.

She just sat there, blood splattered, in nothing but he
r paper-thin gown, watching him. She looked so vulnerable, and she had put so much trust in him. He started the truck and navigated out of the parking lot with her furtively watching him all the while. She kept glancing back at the hospital entrance, as if looking for someone in pursuit.

“Shit!”
She dropped flat on the truck bench seat as a police car sped past. The car screeched to a stop at the emergency entrance and two cops piled out, jogging into the hospital.

Her huge brown
eyes looked up at him. She had laid her head in his lap. The girl might be afraid of the police and everyone else, but she trusted him.

He tried not to think about her face on his thigh, or the complete absurdity of the moment. He just kept on driving
up to the intersection at the highway. Then it occurred to him he had no idea which direction to take.

“
So, where are we headed? We’re on I-35 and I-37, on the south side.”

S
till she just stared at him, head resting on his lap like he had become her personal pillow. Damn, he’d have to wash his jeans with Lysol disinfectant.

She shook her hea
d, rubbing her lank black hair all over his jeans. “I … I don’t know.”

Fucking great.

“Look, I understand you’re afraid. I was one of the paramedics who brought you in. Somebody tried to kill you. It’s amazing you can even walk, and you don’t need me to tell you that you need medical attention. You should be in a hospital.”

She shook her head. “I can’t go back.”

He knew she was gonna say that. “If you won’t go to a hospital, then I’ll take you home. I can check your wounds, change your bandages, but I’m not a doctor. I’m not qualified for anything else. Tell me where you live. I’ll get you there, do what I can to help, and then we’re done. We never met. You don’t know who I am, and I don’t know who you are. I could lose my job for this.”

He felt a twinge of something as her emotions flickered across her face
. She was afraid. He’d seen plenty of that in Iraq. He stared at her for a minute, until a honking car behind him drew his attention to the stale green light. He took off for the north onramp to I-35. Cruising the highway, he kept glancing down at her. She had her hands over her face, like an ostrich hoping the problem would go away if they simply didn’t see it anymore.

On
e more exit and they would be at his apartment complex. He tried not to think of the implications. This girl needed to go somewhere, definitely not to his home. “I need a direction, an address, something.”

She uncovered her face and there were
dark wet tears in her eyes. Was that blood?
Fuck
. Why the hell would she be bleeding from her eyes? She choked as though crying. Damn women were always crying.

Adrian hadn’t cried in years. He hadn’t felt that kind of intensity
about anything, apart from a few insane moments in Iraq. How could people function when they feel so much? The only thing that got him going, beyond sex, was full-on combat, kill or be killed. The EMT calls got a bit wild once in a while, but not very often.

He reached over to the glove box to find the
Kleenex tissues and handed her one. “You’re bleeding.”

She dabbed at her eyes,
looked at the tissue and then back up at him. Lost, bewildered, scared, her huge dark eyes raked at him with the urgency of her plight. She choked out the words, “I don’t know where to go. I don’t know anything.”

The problem
hit, and he didn’t like the way it made his stomach turn. She wasn’t local. She didn’t live in San Antonio. Where the hell could he take her?

“You don’t have anywhere to go? No friends, no house, no hotel?”

She wouldn’t speak, held her lips tight, as if to stop herself from screaming, and shook her head again.

Damn. He knew he shouldn’t have put her in his truck. No upside to this deal at all.
Now he just wanted to be rid of her. But the woman was still in his lap, looking at him like he owed her something, like he was going to be the one who saved her from … whatever.

Isn’t that why you took this job, to save people?
Do your job, Adrian
.

“Look, I’ll get you cleaned up
, some clothes, a bus ticket, and that’s it. I can’t do anything more. Seriously.”

Huge
, wet, doe eyes held his gaze while she slowly nodded acceptance. She covered her face and curled up on his seat, shivering. He turned up the heat, even though it wasn’t cold in the truck. San Antonio spring nights were never really cold. Pulling into the covered parking in front of his apartment complex, he realized he had a new problem.

“Stay here a minute, I’m going to get you
a blanket. Just stay low, make sure no one sees you.”

He scooted h
is thigh out from under her and closed the truck door to peek in through his driver side window, ensuring she stayed down. She stared at him all the while. This was one strange chick. He found it hard to reconcile the Latin goddess who had almost died in his ambulance with this half-naked, crazy chick hiding in his truck. She had looked so beautiful, and fragile, whereas now she was this needy, pushy, intense girl who wanted to dump her whole damn life in the palms of his hands.