Lover Unleashed (31 page)

With no idea what he was walking into, he put in the pass code and stuck his head in through the reinforced door. No smoke, so nothing was on fire. No screaming. No scent of anything but the fresh bread his Marissa had baked earlier.

“V? You here?” No answer.

God, it was too fucking quiet.

Down the hall, he found V and Jane’s room empty and in a mess. The closet door was open and there were things gone from the hangers, but that was not what really got his attention.

He went over to the leathers and picked them up. Nice Catholic boy like him didn’t know much about BDSM, but it looked like he was going to be learning firsthand.

Taking out his cell phone, he hit V, but didn’t expect an answer. He guessed GPS was going to have to come in handy once again.

“Seems like old times.”

Manny focused on the computer screen as he spoke. Hard to say what was the most awkward part of sitting next to his former colleague. With so much to choose from, the silence between them was an Easter-egg hunt for three-year-olds, everything badly hidden, ready to be found and captured.

“Why do you want to review the digital files?” she asked.

“You’ll see when we get there.”

Jane had no problem locating the right program, and a moment later the live image of Payne’s room came up on the screen. Wait, the bed was empty . . . except for a duffel bag.

“Wrong one. Here it is,” Jane murmured.

And there she was. His Payne. Lying against the pillows, the tail end of her braid in her hands, her eyes locked on the bathroom as if maybe she were imagining him still in the shower.

Damn . . . she was beautiful.

“You think,” Jane said softly.

Okay, now would be a great time for his mouth to stop working independently.

He cleared his throat. “Can we go back about a half hour?”

“No problem.”

The image reversed, the little counter in the lower right-hand corner draining down in milliseconds.

As he saw himself checking her over in that towel, it was too frickin’ obvious that they were attracted to each other. Oh, God . . . that fucking hard-on so gave him another reason not to look at Jane.

“Wait . . .” He sat forward. “Slow down. Here it is.”

He watched himself back into the bath in a rush. . . .

“Holy . . . crap,” Jane breathed.

And there it was: Payne up on her knees at the bottom of the bed, her body long and lean and balanced perfectly as her eyes focused on the bathroom door.

“Is she glowing?”

“Yeah,” he murmured, “she is.”

“Hold on. . . .” Jane hit
forward
, running the images in proper order. “You’re testing her sensations here?”

“Nothing. She felt nothing. And yet—go back again . . . thanks.” He pointed at Payne’s legs. “Here, though, she clearly has muscle control.”

“This isn’t logical.” Jane played and replayed the file. “But she did it . . . oh, my God . . . she does it. It’s a miracle.”

Sure the fuck looked like one. Except . . . “What’s the impetus,” he muttered.

“Maybe it’s you.”

“No way. My operation clearly didn’t do the ticket or she would have been kneeling before tonight. Your own exams showed she remained paralyzed.”

“I’m not talking about your scalpel.”

Jane reversed the file back to the moment Payne rose up, and froze the frame. “It’s you.”

Manny stared at the image, and tried to see something other than the obvious: Sure as hell, it seemed that as Payne had looked at him, the glow in her had gotten brighter and she was able to move.

Jane forwarded the file frame by frame. As soon as he came out of the bathroom and she was lying back, the glow was gone . . . and she had no feeling.

“This makes no sense,” he muttered.

“Actually, I think it does. It’s her mother.”

“Who?”

“God where to start with that.” Jane indicated her own body. “I’m what I am because of the Scribe Virgin.”

“Who?” Manny shook his head. “I don’t understand any of this.”

Jane smiled a little bit. “You don’t have to. It’s happening. You just need to stay with Payne and . . . see how she changes.”

Manny resumed staring at the monitor. Well, shit, it seemed like that Goateed Hater had made the right call. Somehow, the motherfucker had known this was what would happen. Or maybe the guy had merely hoped. Either way, it looked like Manny was a kind of medicine for that extraordinary creature lying on that bed.

So damn right he was going to hang in.

But he wasn’t fooling himself. This wasn’t going to be about love or even sex; it was about getting her up and moving so she could live her life again—no matter what it took. And he knew he wasn’t going to be allowed to stay with her at the end of it. They were going to discard him like an empty orange bottle from the pharmacy—and yeah, sure, she might get attached to him, but she was a virgin who didn’t know any better.

And she had a brother who was going to force her to make the right choices.

As for him? He wasn’t going to remember any of this, was he.

Gradually, he became aware of Jane’s stare on his profile. “What,” he said without taking his eyes off the screen.

“I’ve never seen you like this about a female.”

“I’ve never met anyone like her before.” He put up his palm to stop any conversating. “And you can save the don’t-go-there. I know what’s coming at the end of this.”

Hell, maybe those bastards were going to kill him and roll him into the river. Make it look like an accident.

“I wasn’t going to say that, actually.” Jane shifted in her seat. “And believe me . . . I know how you feel.”

He glanced over at her. “Yeah?”

“It’s how I was when I first met Vishous.” Her eyes watered, but she cleared her throat. “Back to you and Payne—”

“What’s going on, Jane. Talk to me.”

“Nothing’s going—”

“Bullshit—and right back at you. I’ve never seen you like this before. You look ruined.”

She drew in a great breath. “Marital problems. Plain and not so simple.”

Clearly, she didn’t want to go into it. “Okay. Well, I’m here for you . . . for as long as I’m allowed to be.”

He rubbed his face. It was a total waste of time to worry about how long this was going to last, how much time he had. But he couldn’t help it. Losing Payne was going to kill him even though he barely knew her.

Wait a minute. Jane had been human. And she was here. Maybe there was—

What. The. Fuck.

“Jane . . . ?” he said weakly as he looked at his old friend. “What . . .”

Words deserted him at that point. She was sitting in the same chair, in the same position, wearing the same clothes . . . except he could see the wall behind her . . . and the steel cabinets . . . and the door across the way. And not “see” as in on the far side of her shoulders. He was looking
through
her.

“Oh. Sorry.”

Right before his eyes, she went from translucent to . . . back to normal.

Manny jumped out of his chair and pinwheeled back until the examination table bit into his ass and stopped him.

“You need to talk to me,” he said hoarsely. “Jesus . . . Christ . . .”

As he grabbed for the cross that hung around his neck, Jane’s head dropped and one of her hands tucked some of her short hair behind her ear. “Oh, Manny . . . there’s a lot you don’t know.”

“So . . . tell me.” When she didn’t reply, the screaming in his head got way too loud. “You’d better fucking tell me, because I’m really done with feeling like a lunatic.”

There was a long silence. “I died, Manny, but not in that car wreck. That was staged.”

Manny’s lungs got tight. “How.”

“A gunshot. I was shot. I . . . died in Vishous’s arms.”

Okay, he so could not breathe over here. “Who did it?”

“His enemies.”

Manny rubbed his crucifix, and the Catholic in him suddenly believed in the saints as so much more than examples of good behavior.

“I’m not who you once knew, Manny. On so many levels.” There was such sadness in her voice. “I’m not even actually alive. That was why I didn’t come back to see you. It wasn’t about the vampire/human thing . . . it’s because I am not really here anymore.”

Manny blinked. Like a cow. A number of times.

Well . . . the good news in all this, he supposed, was that finding out his former trauma surgeon was a ghost? Barely a blip on his radar. His mind had been blown too many times to count, and like a joint that had been dislocated, it had total and complete freedom of movement.

Of course, its functionality was fucked.

But who was counting.

TWENTY-SIX

A
lone in downtown Caldwell, Vishous stalked the night by himself, traversing the underbelly stretch beneath the city’s bridges. He’d started out at his penthouse, but that hadn’t lasted more than ten minutes, and what an irony that all those glass windows had felt so confining. After launching himself into the air from the terrace, he’d coalesced down by the river. The other Brothers would be out in the alleys looking for
lessers
and finding them, but he didn’t want to be around the peanut gallery. He wanted to fight. Solo.

At least, that was what he told himself.

It dawned on him, however, after about an hour of aimless wandering, that he wasn’t really looking for some kind of hand-to-hand showdown. He wasn’t actually looking for anything.

He was utterly empty, to the point where he was curious where the ambulation routine was coming from, because he sure as fuck wasn’t doing anything consciously.

Stopping and staring across the sluggish, stinking waters of the Hudson, he laughed cold and hard.

In all the course of his life, he’d accumulated a body of knowledge to rival the Library of frickin’ Congress. Some of it was useful, such as how to fight, how to make weapons, how to get information and how to keep it secret. And then there was some that was relatively useless on a day-to-day basis, like the molecular weight of carbon, Einstein’s theory of relativity, Plato’s political shit. There were also thoughts that he ruminated on once and never again, and their polar opposites, the ideas that he took out at regular intervals and played with like toys when he was bored. There were also things he never, ever let himself think of.

In and among those various cognitive outposts was a huge stretch of cerebellum that was nothing but a dump yard of bullshit that he didn’t believe in. And given that he was a cynic? It was miles and miles of rotting, metaphorical Hefty bags full of trash along the lines of . . . fathers were supposed to love their sons . . . and mothers were gifts beyond measure . . . and blah, blah, blah.

If there was a mental equivalent of the EPA, that part of his brain would have been cited, fined, and closed down.

But it was funny. Tonight’s little stroll in this underpass of Godand-awful by the river had him ruminating through that landfill and pulling something out of the pile:

Bonded males were nothing without their females.

So bizarre. He’d always known he’d loved Jane, but being the tight-ass that he was, he had stitched up his feelings without realizing a needle and thread were in his proverbial hand. Shit, even when she’d come back to him after she’d died, and he’d known for that brief moment what the term
overjoyed
not just meant, but felt like . . . he hadn’t truly let himself go.

Sure, his permafrost had slicked over on its top layer from the warmth she brought to him, but the inside, the deep inside, had stayed the same. Good God, they’d never even gotten properly mated. He’d just moved her into his room and loved every minute of having her there as they’d gone about their nights separately.

He’d fucking wasted those hours.

Criminally wasted them.

And now here they were, separated by rifts that, in spite of his intelligence, he had no clue how to cross.

Christ, when she’d been holding those leathers in her hands and waiting for him to talk, it was like someone had stapled his lips together—probably because he’d felt guilty about what he’d done at his place, and how fucked-up was that? His own hand hardly counted as cheating.

The trouble was, however, that even being drawn to the type of release he’d once had so much of had felt wrong. But that was because sex had always been a part of it.

Naturally, this made him think of Butch. The solution the guy had suggested was so obvious, V was surprised he hadn’t realistically considered it sooner himself—but then again, asking his best friend to beat the shit out of him wasn’t exactly a casual idea to have.

He wished he’d had that option a week ago. Maybe it would have helped things . . . Except that scene in the bedroom wasn’t his and Jane’s only issue, was it. She should have come to him first about the sitch with his sister. He should have been briefed and decided what to do with the two of them.

As anger rose like a stench inside of him, he feared what was on the other side of this emptiness. He wasn’t like other males, never had been, and not just because of the
Mommie Dearest
deity crap: Knowing his luck, he’d be the one bonded male on the face of the planet who got past these purposeless numbs at losing his
shellan
. . . and went somewhere oh, so much darker.

Insanity, for instance.

Wait, he wouldn’t be the first, would he. Murhder had gone mad. Absolutely and irrevocably.

Maybe they could start a club. And the handshake could involve daggers.

Emo-ass motherfuckers that they were—

With a snarl, V pivoted in the direction of the prevailing wind, and he would have offered up a prayer of thanks if he didn’t hate his mother so much: In and among the tendrils of fog, riding upon the vapors of gray and white humidity, the sweet smell of the enemy gave him purpose and a definition that his numb state had not just lacked, but seemed likely to reject.

His feet started to walk and then jog and then run. And the faster he went, the better he felt: To be a soulless killer was far, far, far better than to be a breathing void. He wanted to maim and murder; he wanted to tear with his fangs and claw with his hands; he wanted the blood of slayers on him and in him.