Dark Embers (22 page)

One glance at their faces clearly showed him that they were as astonished with his lapse as he was.

“Phoebe, it’s good to have you here.” Quinn extended a hand to her. “Thank you, again, for your help last night.”

She shook her head. “Unfortunately, I wasn’t much help. But I hope to soon change that.” She nodded toward Quinn’s white lab coat. “So, you work in the lab as well as the clinic?”

“I do.” He proceeded to the end of the hall and keyed in a code on the alarm system before pushing open the door. “All of the cases have eventually gone through the clinic, which is how I got involved. When Dylan asked me to head up the research team here months ago, I was desperate enough to say yes.”

“So the information he gave me came from you?” she asked.

“It did.”

“It’s very thorough.”

He inclined his head. “Thank you.”

“I do have a few questions, though.” She reached into her purse, pulled out her ubiquitous legal pad and cheap pen. And then she was off and running, hitting Quinn with a series of questions so complicated that Dylan gave up trying to follow the conversation after the second one.

“Do you have any idea what they’re talking about?” Logan asked with a grin.

“Not a clue.” But he didn’t like how close Phoebe was standing to Quinn, the intense level of attention she was giving him when she had barely had a glance to spare for him.

A part of him wanted to do nothing more than grab her and kiss her in full view of everyone. To cover her with his scent and mark her, brand her, so that Quinn and Logan and every other male in the entire clan knew that she was his.

But she isn’t mine
, he reminded himself forcibly. She wasn’t his mate—couldn’t be. And no matter how badly he wanted her, he owed his people more than to give in to his own selfish cravings.

Besides, it wasn’t like she and Quinn were making eyes at each other. They were discussing the disease he had brought her here to cure, going over symptoms and causes and mutations in the victims’ bloodstreams. The dragon didn’t care, though, when Quinn pointed something out to her and his hand brushed against her arm. It cared only that a male had dared to touch what it wanted for itself.

A low growl worked its way up Dylan’s throat, and he would have lunged across the lab if Logan hadn’t positioned himself in front of him. For a moment, he was so far gone he almost went through one of his best men in an effort to get at the throat of another one.

“Dylan, chill,” Logan said, noticing his odd behavior. “Unless you want the whole damn world to know how you feel about her.”

It was the right button to push, more effective than a bucket of ice-cold water dumped on his head could ever be. He left the lab and headed back down the hallway, knowing that his sentry would follow him.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he muttered as they stepped back into the parking lot.

“Of course not.” Logan inserted his tongue firmly in his cheek. “You always look like you want to kill one of your best men.”

“Shut up.” He climbed into his SUV, gestured for Logan to join him. “Have you seen Gabe this morning?”

“No. None of us have.”

“Shit.”

“He’s probably just holed up in his lair, licking his wounds. He’s had a fucking raw deal since this whole thing began.”

“I’m aware of that.” Dylan pressed the accelerator nearly to the floor. “I want to find him.”

“Do you really think that’s wise?”

“What do you suggest, Logan? That I let a dragon, half rabid with pain, run amok through New Mexico? If he’s even still here; he could be halfway to Scotland by now. If I don’t do something, someone else is going to die, and I think I’ve got enough to deal with right now, don’t you?”

Logan looked out the side window. “I’m sorry about Lana, Dylan. I know you loved her, too.”

Loved her? His niece’s absence was like a great, gaping wound—one that was slowly seeping blood as infection set in, poisoning him.

“I’m going to find out what the hell is causing this disease, Logan. And then I’m going to wipe it from the face of the fucking earth.”

By the time eleven o’clock rolled around, Phoebe was starving, exhausted and convinced that there was more at play with the disease than Quinn or any of the other healers suspected. She’d spent the last fourteen hours poring over everything about the disease that she could get her hands on, and looking at samples under microscopes, comparing healthy cells to infected ones.

And had reached one conclusion: she had never seen anything like it. And that, more than anything else, made her incredibly suspicious.

For the third time in as many minutes, she went over the results of the last blood draw she’d done on Lana before the poor girl had died the night before. Then compared them to the analysis done on Dylan’s sister’s blood, as well as those of two other patients who had died from the mystery disease.

They hadn’t changed. Damn it.

She tried to tell herself she was reading it wrong, that it was just the deviations in Dylan’s clan members’ blood from the blood she was used to looking at that was causing all the confusion. But that was a bunch of bullshit and she knew better.

Still, looking at samples of healthy blood under the microscope had given her quite a thrill. She didn’t know what Dylan and his clan were, but the scientist in her was dying to find out. The fact that they were human wasn’t in question, but that wasn’t all they were. What she wouldn’t give to have a supercomputer at her disposal. She’d love to see the results after it mapped Dylan’s DNA.

But she wasn’t here to unravel Dylan’s secrets, she told herself, forcibly drawing her attention back to the results in front of her. Maybe if she cleared her mind and started from the beginning she’d be able to figure out what she was missing.

I have to be missing something.

Leaning back in her chair, she propped her feet on the desk and closed her eyes. Concentrated on blanking out everything, including the research that had just been burning a hole through her retinas.

When her mind was finally clear—or as clear as it was going to get with the image of Dylan hovering over her—she started from the beginning.
Autoimmune disease that affects the nervous system. Causes acute and unstoppable bleeding. Brings about paralysis. Strange mutations in the blood, almost as if it’s breaking its victims down from the cellular level to—

“Are you sure she’s okay? She’s not moving.”

“She’s asleep.”

“Why didn’t you call me? I would have come and gotten her before she fell asleep in the middle of the damn lab!”

“She’s only been out for the last twenty minutes or so. I was letting her catch a nap, and then figured I’d wake her up and send her home.”

“She’s exhausted. You—”

“I’m not asleep.” Phoebe slowly lowered her feet to the floor, then rose to confront an annoyed Dylan and an amused Quinn. “I was thinking.”

“That was some pretty deep thinking. You didn’t respond when I called your name.” Dylan was watching her with suspicion and exasperation and something else that caused butterflies to tremble in her stomach. She ignored them.

“I do that sometimes. Blank out everything around me and start from scratch. It helps me pick up on something I missed.”

“It sure looks a lot like sleeping.”

“I
wasn’t
sleeping,” she reiterated, then reached for the bag in his hand. “Is that for me?”

“No. It’s for Quinn.”

She whipped off her gloves, then pulled a hamburger the size of her head out of the bag. Her stomach rumbled gratefully. “Tough luck. It’s mine now.”

She popped a couple fries in her mouth, then relented and offered the bag—and the remaining three burgers in it—to Quinn. He devoured the first one before she had even gotten hers unwrapped.

Silence reigned in the lab as the two of them ate and Phoebe tried to collect her thoughts. Dylan would want an update, and even though she’d only been in the lab for fourteen hours, she wanted to be able to tell him something. But she kept getting distracted by the looks he shot her—and his habit of picking the best French fries out of the sack on the table and feeding them to her. It was charming, though if anyone had asked her before, she would have said that just the idea of a man feeding her was annoying. She was no man’s pet, no man’s sweet little girl.

But this felt different, even with his crazy behavior from this morning. She didn’t feel as if he was patronizing her, just taking care of her. Cherishing her. Her feminist instincts wanted to protest, to demand that she tell him she could take care of herself. But the slide of his fingers over her lips as he fed her felt too good to deny.

When her empty stomach was finally satisfied—after an entire container of fries and most of the extra-large burger—she leaned back and stared at the ceiling. Then said, “We need to dig deeper.”

“What do you mean?” Quinn, who had polished off all three of the hamburgers, leaned forward with anxiety.

“This disease is tricky—it takes on properties of other diseases, but that doesn’t mean they’ve permeated the DNA.”

“You think it’s got different properties? Ones we can’t see?” Quinn started scrolling down the document he’d been looking at on his computer.

“I think it has to.” She started to explain her rationale, pleased when neither Quinn nor Dylan tried to shoot down her ideas without listening to them.

The next hour flew by as she sketched out what she was thinking. More than once, Quinn started to tell her it wasn’t possible, but each time he froze in midsentence, his mind racing over what he knew about the disease.

“Why didn’t I see this?” he muttered at one point, yanking binders off shelves and searching through copious pages of documentation for the results he was looking for.

“I didn’t at first, either. But something’s been nagging at me since Dylan first showed me your data a couple days ago. It’s just an idea, but if we can figure out how to untangle the outer layer and reveal the true disease underneath—”

“We’d have a chance of beating this thing!” Quinn’s voice was exuberant for the first time since she’d met him, and the smile on his face made him look a lot younger.

“Exactly what I was thinking.” She slapped the remnants of her strawberry milkshake down on the table. “So, where do you want to start?”

“Start? You two have been going at this for over fifteen hours. Don’t you want to take a break, start fresh tomorrow?” Dylan asked.

Phoebe laughed. “Are you kidding me? Breakthroughs like this only come along once in a blue moon. I can run for another twenty-four hours on the adrenaline alone. Right, Quinn?”

Quinn, who was already absorbed in a series of calculations, didn’t answer. So she answered for him in a deep, fake voice. “Right, Phoebe. We can’t let this go to waste.”

When he still didn’t respond, she shrugged philosophically. “See what I mean?” Then headed across the lab to the cold samples Quinn had stored from each of the victims.

“Hey.” Dylan caught her wrist. “Just because he’s obsessed doesn’t mean you have to be.”

“Sure it does. First off, I only have three weeks here, so I’ve got to get to it. And second, I’m not tired. This idea really has given me a second wind.”

When he opened his mouth to argue again, she surprised them both by wrapping her arms around his neck and pulling him down for a kiss. The second their lips met, fireworks exploded. But she was getting used to that, so instead of letting him completely take her over—body and mind—she stayed where she was a moment, relishing the taste and feel of him. Then pulled back with a grin.

“Now go! I have work to do.”

His hands around her waist, Dylan tightened his grip, unwilling to let her go far. “How long are you going to be here?”

“As long as it takes.”

He raised an imperious brow and she sighed, impatient with the delay. Her entire body was humming with the need to jump into the research. “Until tomorrow night. If I’m not home by this time tomorrow, come get me. I’ll let you talk me into leaving.”

The scowl he leveled at her told Phoebe just how unimpressed he was with her words. But in the end, he ducked his head and took another long kiss that had her body humming for more than knowledge.

When he finally let her go, he nodded grimly to the back of the lab. “There are some cots through there. When you get tired, take a couple hours break, okay?”

“Always the alpha, hmm?” she asked, amusement curling through her.

His gaze sharpened, turned darker though she would have sworn that was impossible. “Excuse me?”

“You know, alpha, like in a wolf pack. He’s top dog and wants everyone to know it. You act like that sometimes.” She snorted. “A lot of the time.”

When he pulled back, his eyes were back to normal. “Right. The alpha. That’s me.” He dropped a hard but painless kiss on her lips. “And don’t you forget it.”

She snorted again. “Like you’d let me.”

CHAPTER SIXTEEN