Love Is in the Air (7 page)

“You wish to know the all?” he asked.

For the first time, Sal heard Tyr’s true voice. It still had that deep baritone. However, the menacing undercurrent that sapped her will was gone.

This voice she could answer without effort. “Yes.”

He stepped forward so that there was only a centimeter between them. His breath beat hot against her skin, but for some reason she didn’t mind.

“Once your ears have heard it, you will wish you had not asked.”

CHAPTER 18

Tyr was probably right, but Sal felt resolved. The only way to live with these memories was to make some sense out of them. She had to understand how her friend had come to die in such a horrible manner. If Sal had been the one to die in that bloody basement, Sal imagined that right now, her best friend would be shaking heaven and earth to find out why.

Channeling Maria, Sal braced herself. “Let’s hear it.”

When his gaze passed over her face, his lips set into a line. Not a frown, but neither was it a smile. Finally, he came to some conclusion.

“I will not burden you so.”

That was it.

Maria wouldn’t put up with such a crappy answer, and neither would Sal.

“You know what? Fine.” She put her hand on the phone. “I’ll call the police, and you can explain your hard-on for blood to them.”

“Sit.”

Damn it. Her butt was in the chair before she even registered the change in his tone. It took complete and total concentration to resist his edict. Still, she took a bit of satisfaction that her hand still rested on the handle.

Regrouping, Sal very deliberately picked up the phone and dialed.

For once, it was he who was drawn forward. “Please…”

His tone sounded wounded. As if being vulnerable, even in this smallest way, physically hurt Tyr. That single, pained word affected her far more than any edict ever had.

Sal put the phone down as their eyes locked. Without words, the two came to an accord. She understood his reluctance to explain the complicated events of the night before, and Tyr found that she wasn’t going to take “no” for an answer.

“Your scrying box can speak with others, can it not?” Tyr asked.

That was the last thing that she had expected to come from his mouth. It took a second to follow his gaze to her laptop. Where in the hell did he come from that he didn’t know what a computer was?

“You mean Wi-Fi?”

“It can communicate with the box from your place of the dead?”

Tyr’s syntax felt so foreign that Sal struggled to understand the question. His leather boots creaked as he leaned over her.

“Do you mean the morgue?”

Off Tyr’s nod, she called up the website.

“Seek the newly departed.”

Within a few keystrokes, Sal brought up the day’s death statistics. She wasn’t sure what in the hell he would want with the information. The page didn’t reveal any personal information. It only gave an overview of the morgue’s general intake.

Seventeen admissions. Sal frowned. That was way higher than normal. The ICU had lost two criticals from yesterday’s pileup, but she had only one DOA during her entire shift. Granted, some deaths were pronounced on the scene by the ME and never made it to her ER, but this many? Another fourteen? That seemed exceptional.

He must have read her surprise. “See to the cause.”

“I can’t. That’s restricted information.”

There was that strident tone again. “See to it.”

Despite resisting, her fingers fulfilled his command. However, even his subliminal desire couldn’t overcome a password-protected website.

“I told you,” she said through clenched teeth. Just an instant’s slip in concentration, and he could affect her so.

Tyr didn’t seem daunted. “You have not asked.”

Sal hit the ‘Enter’ command again, and again an error message popped up.

“I don’t have the authority to access that information.”

There was almost a grin at the edge of those lips. “No.
Ask
him.”

“Him, who?”

He pointed to her laptop. “Him.”

Until now, Sal had taken a lot of Tyr’s strange demeanor on… not exactly faith. More like desperation. She was confused about so much that it was easy to overlook the impossibility of it all. But Tyr telling her that her mood would affect how her laptop performed showed some obvious mental instability. Tyr might have saved her life and held the key to Maria’s death, but calling the cops on him was sounding better and better.

“Look, this is a machine,” she tried to explain. Tyr cocked his head, seeming not to understand her words. “It obeys a set of rules. It can’t interact like that.”

Sal flinched as his hand suddenly moved over her hand, but it held no knife. Instead his palm was open, hovering a few millimeters above her flesh. Slowly, ever so slowly, he floated his palm over her fingers, then wrist, then forearm. Blood rushed to her skin, flushing like a sunburn.

“We are not touching, yet are we not interacting?” Tyr asked.

She pulled her arm away. “No.”

But his hand continued up her shoulder. “Do we share nothing? Is our essence not mingling?”

It was more than mingling, but Sal couldn’t let his musk-laden presence deter her. Her only interest was for the information within his mind. Tyr’s startling blue eyes and warm hands were not the issue.

“That’s different.”

“Is it?” When he pulled back, her shoulder felt cold—and so very alone. “Try again, for he does not wish me to do the asking.”

Sal hit the ‘Return’ button, mainly just to have something to do rather than think about his almost touch.

Suddenly a list of the fatalities, including their autopsy reports, scrolled down the screen. It couldn’t be. She hadn’t even bothered to type in a password.

Yet there they were. The dead of the city.

CHAPTER 19

Sal’s head snapped around, but Tyr didn’t seem at all surprised that the files had appeared. If anything, the harsh glint to his stare lessened.

“He wishes only appreciation.” He nodded toward her laptop.

Her fingers flew away from the keyboard. What Tyr proposed couldn’t be true, could it? When it came out of his mouth the concept sounded ludicrous, yet hadn’t she always had the vague sense that her computer didn’t like her? The more she needed a spreadsheet, the more likely he was to crash.

It
was to crash, she corrected herself. Her laptop was just a machine.

Still, when she laid her fingers onto the keys she did so more gently. With far more respect than usual, she tapped the key to examine the causes of death. Because no matter how skeptical Sal was of her laptop’s sentience, information only the ME should have access to stared at back at her.

“Look to those without wounds,” the man directed.

As she sorted through the cases, Sal said, “Why? Maria was…”

Sal couldn’t bring herself to talk about the bloody gashes. The mauling.

Bile rose to the back of her throat. Maybe it was better when she couldn’t remember these details.

“He has learned, as I did, that here, blood draws as much attention as in our land.”

“Your land?” she asked, eager to talk about anything that didn’t have to do with gore and pain.

Tyr pointed to the screen. “That is the most recent.”

Even though he didn’t use his commanding tone, Sal turned to her laptop. Her priority was finding out what killed Maria and stopping it from killing anyone else.

Her eyes passed over the autopsy notes as Tyr leaned over her. The edge of his leather coat brushed her cheek. It smelled of oil and sweat, which, surprisingly, didn’t turn her stomach. The fragrance was ripe in her nostrils as she focused on the causes of death.

Except that there were no conclusive causes of death. The ME reported a moderate anemia, which shouldn’t have been fatal, and mild encephalitis. Again, not severe enough to cause death.

“You’re saying that… that thing from last night did this?”

Tyr pointed to another file. “That was the first.”

She double-clicked on the link. While this one had no specific cause either, the anemia was much worse, but there wasn’t any swelling of the brain. Quickly, Sal correlated the rest of the deaths. As the anemia lessened, the encephalitis worsened. It was a classic regression curve, but how did that help them?

“I don’t understand.”

Tyr straightened. “He learns quickly. If I do not find the blood to fight him, these dead will seem but an ebb tide.”

The way his eyes hardened and teeth clenched, Tyr believed every word. Given the bodies piling up in the morgue, Sal was starting to as well.

Did she need to understand his need for blood to fulfill it? After seeing her blood change the color of steel, Sal didn’t need logical sense.

Slowly Sal pulled back her sleeve and offered Tyr her wrist, worrying if she had fallen prey to another of his edicts. Then she looked into those glacial blue eyes that waxed desperate. No, this offer of blood was of her own volition. With nearly twenty dead, her understanding of how this had all happened could wait.

“Go ahead, you can have your blood.”

But Tyr shook his head. “Yours is not in need.”

“Then whose?”

“That of a babe’s.”

CHAPTER 20

Sal blinked, not believing that she heard right. “A
baby’s
blood?”

Tyr spoke casually, as if explaining that he took his coffee black. “It must be free of its cord, but still in swaddling, yes.”

“No. No. No,” Sal was still busy shaking her head at his lunacy when laughter carried in from the nurse’s station.

She swung around to find Richard searching for amusement in one of Paul’s jokes. She looked at her watch. Eleven forty-five. Shit, he was early. Before her fiancé could spot them, Sal dropped the blinds.

“We’ve got to get you out of here,” she announced.

“Assist in securing the blood, and you shall be free of me.”

Why did the thought of his departure fill her with trepidation? The memories of that bloody basement—and even of Tyr—felt too important to lose.

Tyr must have misread her hesitation. “Upon my honor, I will go.”

They could discuss that later. Right now, they needed to get him away before Richard stumbled in on them. “Follow me. Quietly.”

He opened a small vial and breathed a word over it. “Quiet.”

Sal cringed, already hating his edicts. Yet this wasn’t aimed at her.

Instead the click of his boot’s heel evaporated. She looked up in wonder.

Up until now, it had been easy to shrug off Tyr’s “tricks.” Charisma and pheromones were known, verifiable, and quantifiable human quantities. Both of which he had in copious amounts. Even the laptop’s strange behavior could be chalked up to a glitch.

This, though? To literally dampen sound with a vocal edict? She couldn’t dismiss that as some trick or hack.

With a flicker of a grin, Tyr took her hand. It felt strong. And foreign. And very wrong. She was engaged.

Sal tried to pull away, but his grip tightened. She went to protest when Tyr nodded toward her feet. Sal had been so distracted by his touch that she’d failed to notice that now the squeak of her tennis shoes had vanished.

“Do we need to not be seen?” he whispered as he opened another vial.

As they rounded the corner, Sal pushed the blood away from his lips. Already shaken by her interactive laptop and soundless tennis shoes, she really didn’t want to see what happened if he tried to make them invisible.

“We’re good.”

They slipped into the stairwell and headed up to the third floor. His urgency set their pace, but as they neared the landing, Sal’s hesitation slowed them. She had completed her task. Tyr was far from Richard.

Where they headed and what they intended to do once they got there became much more problematic.

It had been one thing to offer her blood for the cause, but a baby’s? And not even her own, but one sick in the hospital? A place the parents trusted to offer only healing, not pain.

Her certainty in Tyr’s plan faded the closer they got to the pediatric ward. Her rational mind wanted to dismiss his wild assertions and crazy claims as a drug-induced psychotic break, but then she remembered the angry growl echoing off the basement walls. The red glow to the hallway.

Those had been as real as Maria’s mauled body.

How did she reconcile the two extremes?

As they reached the third-floor landing, Tyr put his hand on the doorknob, but Sal placed her hand over it, keeping him from opening it. He tensed under her touch, but she didn’t let go.

“There’s got to be another way.” She’d meant to say it in a normal tone, but it came out only a whisper. His “quiet” command was still at work.

Tyr searched her face and, for once, didn’t seem disappointed. “In my land, he decimated an entire village before he fled to your shores.” He clasped his hand tighter under her touch and opened the door. “And he will do so here if we do not find a weapon worthy of his hide.”

Damn it
, she thought. He sounded so sure. Sal knew that sense of certainty as a doctor. There were times when symptoms and lab values didn’t add up, but she knew deep in her gut what course of action to take, even if it meant going against everyone’s, including her supervisor’s, advice. Tyr projected that confidence with his every breath.

And hell if her gut didn’t agree with him.

CHAPTER 21

Sal angled them toward the nursery, and then noted Tyr’s frown.

“I know that most are newborns in here, but some will be older.”

“Their ages are not of concern, but their health.”

She shook her head. “They’re fine. Otherwise, they’d be in the NICU.”

“Then let us find this NICU, then.”

As a nurse exited the nursery, Sal pulled him into the shadows. “You don’t understand. The neonatal ICU is for critically ill babies.”

Again, the curt nod. “Yes. The babe must be near the veil, else the blood will not be potent with the essence of death.”

Could this get any worse? She’d almost talked herself into getting a few milliliters of blood from a healthy newborn, but a sick baby? A baby hooked up to a thousand machines and poked so many times already that the child’s skin looked like polka dots? Could she really subject a child already so injured through even the tiniest of cuts? These babies were so fragile that the pain alone could put them into shock.