Bound Guardian Angel (25 page)

That was going to leave a bruise. On his
stomach.

In a blink, Kieran leaped off him and shot
toward the door. Micah scrambled to all fours, coughing through the
pain in his diaphragm, and looked up as Stryker blocked the exit
like a concrete wall. Trevor staggered to his feet then gave chase.
Moving with the speed and grace of a leopard, Trevor caught
Kieran’s arm, kicked his feet out from under him, spun him around,
and locked him in a choke hold as he drove him to his knees
again.

Go, Trevor! Micah hadn’t known he had it in
him.

“Calm the fuck down, buddy,” Trev said.
“You’re not going anywhere right now.”

Kieran resisted, growling and spitting as he
tried to reach around and pull free of Trevor’s hold. But Trevor
had him, and he had him good and tight. His biceps and the muscles
in his forearms and shoulders flexed impressively as if he were
tapping into every last reserve of strength he possessed to keep
Kieran down.

Micah jumped to his feet and reached for the
hypodermic Dr. Snow had just picked up. “Give it to me!”

Pale-faced, she handed it over.

He spun back around. “Hold him still,” he
told Trevor.

“I’ve got him.” Trevor’s voice strained.
“Just hurry up. He’s stronger than he looks.”

“No shit.” He knew firsthand exactly how
strong Kieran was. What he didn’t know was whether it was the
cobalt withdrawal, that freakish black shit crawling over his skin,
or the unknown entity squatting in Kieran’s body making him that
strong. Two out of three? All of the above?

Micah drove the needle into Kieran’s neck
and plunged the contents into his body as Kieran’s red eyes lasered
fury at him.

“I’ll kill you!” Kieran strained but began
to relax almost immediately as the sedative went to work.

“Yeah? Well, you’ll have to get in line
behind everybody else.” Micah pulled the needle out and carefully
handed it back to the doctor.

Hopefully, this dose would top off the first
and knock Kieran out for good.

Within seconds, Kieran melted into a mass of
lax flesh in Trevor’s arms.

Thank God. Micah collapsed into a nearby
plastic chair and rubbed his bruised stomach.

“You okay?” Dr. Snow touched his
shoulder.

He combed his hair off his face. “I’ll be
fine.” He looked around the disheveled room. It appeared the drama
was over, but the cleanup would take a while. “What the hell
happened in here?”

One of the nurses poked her head into the
room as Trevor lifted Kieran and carried him toward the bed.

Dr. Snow motioned her to enter then turned
her attention back to Micah. “We were pulling him out of his
induced coma today. Everything was going well, and then he just
went crazy.”

“Obviously.” Micah scanned the mess of
broken equipment littering the floor. “Maybe you should transfer
him to the new facility, where they can keep him under observation
in one of the Plexiglas rooms.”

“Once we stabilize him, I’ll consider it,
but he’s obviously too strung out on cobalt withdrawal to move
right now.”

Kieran’s head lolled back over Trevor’s arm,
exposing his neck, to which Trevor sucked in an audible breath.

“You doing okay there, Trev?” Micah
said.

Trevor nodded hypnotically without looking
at him. “I’m good.”

Micah could almost see the little hearts
with cupid wings fluttering around Trevor’s head. Looked like the
Antichrist had an admirer. Micah only hoped Trevor knew what he was
getting into with Kieran. Falling for this guy couldn’t be good for
anyone’s health.

Dr. Snow addressed the nurse. “Keep him
heavily sedated and start pumping him full of fresh blood. And up
his dosage of buprenorphine.”

Micah had heard of bupe, as it was called on
the street. It was an opioid used to counteract human opioid
addiction. How about that for fighting fire with fire?

“You’re using bupe on him?” he said.

The doctor nodded. “Yes. We’ve found it’s as
effective in vampires against cobalt as it is in humans against
opioids.”

“But not as effective as Io’s all-natural
approach.”

“No, but much more palatable.”

From what Micah knew of Io’s anti-cobalt
tonic, which was used inside AKM for the most extreme overdoses, it
wasn’t the tastiest of concoctions, but it sure got the job done.
It had helped Miriam beat her own cobalt addiction in record time,
keeping her indiscretions out of the public eye. Something King
Bain was extremely grateful for. The last thing he needed was bad
press on the royal family.

The nurse helped Trevor get Kieran settled
back into bed. Then Trevor gently pulled the sheet over him as if
he were tucking a fragile Fabergé egg into a velvet pillow. From
the awestruck expression on Trevor’s face, as well as the way he
pushed back Kieran’s shaggy, dark-brown hair then brushed the backs
of his fingers down his cheek, he clearly wasn’t going anywhere
soon.

Stryker helped clean up the room. Broken
equipment was hauled out as limping orderlies brought in new
monitors and an IV.

Dr. Snow lightly touched his arm. “There’s
something else I need to talk to you about.” She bobbed her head
toward the door as she stepped toward it.

Micah regarded Trevor. “Hey, Trev. You gonna
be okay in here while I talk to the doc?”

Trev looked up, his gaze glossy, as if he
were having a special moment with demon boy. “Yeah. Fine. I’m
fine.”

As Micah passed Stryker on the way out of
the room, he said, “Could you stick around for a few and help
Trevor keep an eye on that guy.”

Stryker gave him a single, tight nod. “I
don’t need to be anywhere right now. I’ll hang here for a
while.”

“Thanks.”

Micah followed Dr. Snow to the other side of
the circular nurse’s station. Everyone was busy putting the pieces
back together, picking up dropped supplies, and straightening
strewn paperwork, so no one paid them any attention.

“What’s wrong?” he asked.

“It’s about Savill.”

Savill was the young male Bishop had turned
into a dissection tutorial in his lab. Thankfully, they’d been able
to rescue the kid before he died. Hopefully, that hadn’t changed
since the last time Micah had checked in on him, because the
doctor’s expression was pretty grim.

Micah snapped to attention, his sore abdomen
and jaw forgotten. “Is he okay?”

Dr. Snow paused. “We found his parents.”

Based on her tone, this wasn’t a good thing.
“And . . .?”

She sighed and brushed back her hair.
“Micah, they’re human.”

That sound splatting in Micah’s ears was the
proverbial shit hitting the fan.

“Human? How is that possible?”

“They adopted Savill when he was just an
infant. They didn’t know.”

As if Savill’s situation wasn’t bad enough.
Surviving and coming through this ordeal alive had just become the
least of his worries, because with human parents, odds were damn
good that Savill had no idea he was a vampire. And since he was
still young—barely twenty years old, if that—he probably hadn’t yet
experienced any significant physical changes to raise concerns.

And yet Bishop had still been able to
identify him as a vampire. Poor kid probably had no idea why he’d
been taken or what was happening to him.

“What’s the status? Have the parents been
handled?” he said.

“Yes, a team from AMD was sent to fix the
situation.”

The Adjustment and Manipulation
Department—AMD—was responsible for handling such cases. All the
King’s Men had protocols in place to handle situations like this,
where efficiency, delicacy, and attention to detail were required.
Pictures were faked, false stories were concocted, and any and all
bases were covered. No doubt AMD had already supplied the CPD with
a file detailing Savill’s “abduction.” Or maybe they had told the
parents Savill had been killed in some tragic accident. Micah had
no idea how the AMD did its job. He just knew they did it and
covered the vampire race’s collective ass.

“What about Savill? Has he been told?”

Dr. Snow shook her head. “He’s still in an
induced coma, one I’m inclined to prolong under these new
circumstances.”

“I agree. Hearing he’s a vampire could blow
a fuse bigger than the incision down his abdomen.” He dragged his
palm down his face then stood akimbo, head bowed. “Jesus, this is a
mess.”

The doc let out a heavy sigh. “You don’t
know the half of it.”

He raised his head. “Why? What haven’t you
told me?”

She cursed and looked away, her expression
grim. “We’ve taken some blood.”

“And . . .?”

“There are some anomalies.”

“What kind of anomalies?” A sinking feeling
dipped into his gut.

Worry filled her eyes. “Micah, he’s not
half-human.”

“But I thought . . .” Micah
frowned past her shoulder to the prone form of the young male in
the room behind her. “Isn’t he a mixed-blood?”

“Yes, but he’s not a vampire-human mix.”

Something in Dr. Snow’s tone made dread
shimmy down his spine. “Then what is he?”

“Micah, Savill is half lycan.”

Well, how about that? A vampire and a lycan
had gotten together and made a love child. There went the
neighborhood. This had to be the third time today hell had frozen
over.

“Are you sure?”

She gave a single nod. “I personally ran the
results myself. Three times. I’m positive.”

“Fuck me.” Micah rubbed his palms up and
down his face.

No one in the vampire community would want
to take in a young that was half lycan. It was too risky.

This was a double dose of shit news. Savill
needed someone to help him acclimate to his new world, but no one
would lift a finger to help a young, pre-trans lycan, even one that
was only a half-blood.

It wasn’t that vampires and lycans didn’t
get along. The two races got along fine, or as fine as they could.
They weren’t besties by a long shot, but for the most part, they
coexisted peacefully with one another, if not a bit tensely at
times, given their history. The problem was that when it came to
lycans, no vampire wanted to risk getting in the way of a mouthful
of juvenile lycan fangs, and who knew whether Savill would lean
toward vampire or lycan once he reached maturity? It was a toss-up.
There wasn’t a lot of precedent to provide an informed hypothesis
about how a vampire-lycan mix would mature, and lycan genes were
the only ones on earth strong enough to compete with those of a
vampire.

He could contact Memnon and Rameses for
help. They were the leaders of the lycans. But they would probably
disown Savill rather than take him in or offer assistance. After
all, in their eyes, Savill was a genetically inferior orphan. Hell,
they might even kill him. Lycans were a lot stricter on mixing
bloodlines than vampires, so it was a wonder Savill had been
conceived at all. Some lycan had risked an awful lot—including his
place in the lycan hierarchy—to mate with a vampire. Micah wasn’t
sure if that was incredibly courageous or insanely stupid.

Either way, he was in a tight spot. No way
would he hand Savill over to Memnon and Rameses if there was even a
chance they would kill him, but who could he convince in the
vampire community to take Savill in? And how would he convince them
when there was no way to know which genes would dominate Savill’s
blood once he matured?

He needed to do some research to see if
something like this had ever happened in the past and how it had
turned out.

“Goddamn it.” He glanced back inside
Savill’s room. “This is shit ugly news.”

Dr. Snow followed his gaze. “Tell me about
it. He’s going to need constant monitoring once he comes out of
this.”

If
he came out of it, because they
still didn’t know if Savill would survive the damage Bishop had
done to him.

“Any ideas how to handle that? Given what we
now know about his lineage?” Because no way could they release
Savill into someone’s care without providing full disclosure.

The doc shook her head. “Not yet, but he’s
going to need someone to take him in and teach him about his new
life. We can’t just toss him back out on the street. He’ll never
survive. He’s going to need a lot of care and counseling, Micah,
and I can tell by your reaction that you already know how hard
that’s going to be to find under these circumstances.”

“Damn near impossible.” Micah shook his
head, feeling about as helpless as a peanut.

The electronic ringtone of his mobile phone
snagged his attention. Damn, couldn’t he get just five minutes to
think?

He pulled the phone from his pocket.
Sev.

“I’ve got to take this,” he said to the
doctor. “But I’ll do some checking and get back to you about
Savill.”

She nodded and turned her attention back to
Kieran’s room as Micah started out of the trauma ward.

“Sev, hey. You at the Millennium
garage?”

“Yeah. Found your guy’s motorcycle,
too.”

“How do you know it’s his?” Micah pushed
through the double doors leading back into the outer hall.

“Because he left you a note.”

Micah came to an abrupt stop. “He what?”

“It’s actually a poem, but it’s definitely
for you.”

Something in Sev’s wary tone rankled Micah’s
nerves. This was going to leave a bad taste in his mouth, wasn’t
it?

“What’s it say?”

Sev awkwardly cleared his throat. “It
says”—Sev let out a heavy exhale—“why don’t I just send you a
picture?”

“Do that.”

He disconnected, and a moment later, his
phone vibrated with a text. He opened the attachment. The poem had
been handwritten in neat, block print.

Oh, mighty Micah

You aren’t as tough

As I’ve been led to believe.

You’re just a pussy

A great big wussy.