SEALs of Summer 2: A Military Romance Superbundle (46 page)

Ysabeau opened her
front door. “Thanks, for coming, Deolina,” she spoke softly. “I’ve got to go the clinic for a few hours and don’t dare leave him alone. The fever’s gone, however, the nightmares are getting worse. He talks in his sleep.”

“Guilty men always do.” Deolina scowled.

Glancing over her shoulder toward the living room where the Guardian slept on her couch, she said, “The test results will be better today, and he won’t have anything to be guilty of.”

“That’s right. Keep the faith.” Deolina patted her shoulder. “But I’m tellin’ you, stay away from him. You don’t want this trouble.”

She grabbed her purse and keys. “As soon as I prove to him that the trial is working, he’ll go home.”

“That’s what you think,” Deolina mumbled.

Ysabeau was already out the door. “What?”

“Nothin’. Not one stinkin’ thing.”

“Okay…” She headed toward her car. “Call me if he wakes. Otherwise, I’ll be back in two hours. Tops.”

As she closed the door she thought she heard Deolina say, “Run, child! Don’t look back.”

She shook her head as she started the car. Sometimes it was a little unnerving having a black magic priestess for a godmother.

*

The phone rang
and Deolina hustled to answer it before the sleepin’ man woke. She did not want to deal with no Guardian once he opened those puffed-up eyes.

“If you’re callin’ for Ysabeau, she’s over at the clinic,” she whispered into the phone.

“Deo? Why aren’t
you
answering phones at the clinic?” Grann asked.

Deolina winced and let her eyes wander over to the lump in the other room. “The regular receptionist’s measles are gone. I don’t work there anymore.”

“Oh. So…did you get rid of the man?”

“Not exactly,” Deolina said.

“Meaning?”

“Yeah, um…” Deolina cringed. Above all else she did not want to make Grann mad. There was not enough black magic on the planet to protect her from an angry Gran. “The American is staying here. At Ysabeau’s house.”

“What!”

“A little mix-up. That’s all. Tico and the gang did what I paid ’em for, but things didn’t work out as planned.” She held the phone away from her, expecting the shouting to blow out her eardrum. There was no money in her savings account for one of them fancy hearing aids that let you hear people gossiping in the other room, although she wished she did have the money. It might be good to hear what folks said about you. Easier to know who to put a hex on—

“Deolina! You swore we could change the future!” Grann yelled.

Shit on a shingle, Grann was mad. “Oh, we did. In my vision I did not see a bloody devil snoring on the couch I gave Ysabeau for her college graduation present. Nope, that is definitely new.”

“Holy Saints.”

“Yeah, we’s in it good.”

“There’s more?” Grann asked.

“By ‘more’ do you mean that Ysabeau thinks he’s handsome and wants to keep him for a while? Maybe forever.” Deolina rubbed her scalp, visualizing how bad it was going to hurt when Grann snatched her bald-headed.

“Start talking, Deolina. What happened?”

Deolina took a breath. “Well, see, I saw danger comin’, like I told you, only I saw it weeks before I said I did.”

Grann made a sound that Deolina did not like. Not one bit. It was a rabid-Grann sound.

“I needed to be sure, see? The vision was so…strange and conflictin’.” Deolina remembered how horrified she’d been when the image first came to her. She foresaw a stranger—a too-good-lookin’ white man—wrappin’ his muscular arms around Ysabeau. That handsome devil looked for all the world as if he’d never let her go. It was one big horrifying nightmare. And the rest? No, she still didn’t want to think about that. Hellfire, it was scary.

“That’s why you took the job at the clinic.” Grann was saying, “The receptionist didn’t really have measles, did she?”

“Nah, I sort of, you know, convinced her she needed to let me have her job for a while. To protect Ysabeau. There was no other reason to be in that hellhole. No disrespectin’ Ysabeau, mind you, but there’s nothing but sick people at the clinic.”

Grann snorted. “You thought it’d be the Holiday Inn?”

“No, but it’s not easy seein’ the future. You try schedulin’ appointments for next Tuesday when the patient isn’t going to be breathin’ past Friday. But I knew the American would come to her. And he did. So? What’re we gonna do about him?”

“Await to see.”

“Eeya, you just gonna be waitin’? You weren’t two feet from the man like I was—his blood-red aura sparkin’ and cracklin’ like a flame in your face.”

Grann didn’t say a word.

Oh Lord, she hated when Grann was quiet. A thinking Grann usually meant nothing but trouble for Deolina. “That business card of his burned my hand.”

“You got his business card? That’s great news. I’ll do a reading with it. My tarot cards have been…conflicting too.”

“Nu-uh. Naturally I boiled that black-as-sin card in holy water, hyssop, and salt. Then I cut it up into forty pieces and flushed it down the turlet.”

Grann exhaled loudly into the phone. “Naturally. Nothing more to do now but keep an eye on the American. Watch him like a potoo watches a worm.”

“Easily done. The worm’s sleepin’ on Ysabeau’s couch,” Deolina said.

“Whose fault is that?”

“Don’t be blamin’ me! The fates shifted, that’s all.”

“Deolina, I’m not happy. Ysabeau is still mending from the last time evil landed on her doorstep. Promise me you won’t spook her. She doesn’t need to know what’s coming. Not if we can stop it.”

“Me spook her? You’re gonna spill the seeds faster than my neighbor’s tomatoes. That lady doesn’t know when to pick them off the vine.”

“What are you gibbering about?”

“As soon as Ysabeau finds out what we’s protectin’ her from she’s gonna run head first into the storm. Like she always does. And you’re about as worthless as tits on a boar when it comes to keepin’ secrets from that girl. You best stay away a while.”

Grann made a sound like someone had punched her in the stomach. “How can I protect her if I can’t go near her? I’m scared. Before this is over, someone will die.”

Grann didn’t know the half of it. But Deolina was determined to change that outcome, no matter what. “Ah, don’t worry about the American. Ysabeau plans to keep her pretty hands on him for a while and I’ll be the potoo watchin’ my worm.”

*

Ysabeau extracted a
drop of blood from a patient’s sample and placed it on the first slide. She was terrified to look. What if the changes she’d made to the serum hadn’t changed a thing? The Guardian was here, and she was out of time.

She swore softly and put the slide under the microscope.
The results will be better. They have to be.

Flipping through the pages and pages of notes she’d made during the serum trial, she wondered again why things weren’t working out as they should. She forced herself to look in the microscope. Biting her lip, she tasted her own blood. This one was bad. Reaching for the Test Findings Report, she put a check mark for the first sample under the column with the heading “no improvement.”

Fear tortured her heart as she prepared the next slide. And the next.
Sweet Mother!
Two hours later, her Test Findings Report had forty-nine check marks under “no improvement” and thirty “inconclusives.” She was a colossal failure.

In her mind’s eye, she could see the bodies of her soon-to-be-dead patients tossed into a burning mass grave while their loved ones watched. They would all blame her—the living and the dead.

Ysabeau slumped forward and put her head on her arms.

The vision of her youngest patient popped into her mind. Sweet Talitha. How would she tell Talitha’s parents the serum wasn’t working? Most of Ysabeau’s patients had lived a life, but Talitha was just getting started. What she’d experienced so far was closer to death than life.

She let out a guttural yell and threw the clipboard against the wall. The board cracked in two and clattered to the floor. Staring at it, she felt like she was the one who had hit the wall, her dreams broken into pieces.

The phone rang, and she crawled off her stool to answer it.

“Ysa, your American is waking up. What do you want me to do to him?” Deolina said.

Swiping her eyes, Ysabeau checked her watch. She’d been gone too long. “I’ll be there in a few minutes.”

“Girl, you sound kinda funny,” Deolina said. “You okay?”

She was never going to be okay. “I’ll be home soon.”

There was one blood sample left to test. Sample number eighty. Hurriedly, she put the drop on the slide and clicked her pen to end this horrible ordeal. She needed time to figure out what to say to her patients. How do you look a friend in the eye and tell them there’s nothing more you can do? How would she tell Talitha’s parents?

Rubbing her tears away, she rushed to do this final test and get home before Deolina did something unthinkable to the patient on her couch.

She studied the blood sample and jerked up. Blinking, she looked into the microscope again. She sat back in her chair and stared at the ceiling. Her breath came in short bursts. Slowly, she drew herself forward to look one last time.

Sample number eighty showed marked improvement. Marked! Patient number eighty might live!

Ysabeau scrambled out of her chair to pick up the clipboard and read her sample number-to-patient matrix. When she read the name she smiled and cried and laughed all at once.

Talitha Lione.

When she came to the clinic two months ago, Talitha was an emaciated little thing with sunken dark eyes. She could have been twelve years old, or seventy-five. Pulling on a string from the hem of her dress three times her size, she’d sat quietly while her parents had relayed her grim medical history. Doctors had pronounced Talitha to be drug-resistant and dying. They’d given her five months to live at best. Ysabeau doubted she’d make it to four months.

But now that was all going to change.

Ysabeau smiled and hugged the girl’s medical chart to her chest. Sweet, little Talitha Lione was getting better with the serum.

Now, she just had to figure out why.

Deolina met her at her front door. “He’s been moanin’ and thrashin’. You’d better give him some knock-out drugs. And quick!”

“I’ll give him pain meds after I talk to him and find out exactly why he’s here.”

“What? You’re gonna talk? To him?” Deolina’s voice pitched.

“Why shouldn’t I?”

“No reason. I ain’t spillin’ no tomato seeds.”

The man moaned, and Ysabeau ran a cloth under the cold water. “I’ll be fine. Go on home. Thanks for helping out.”

“Call if you need me. And, Ysabeau, for the love of all that is holy, don’t get too close to that man!”

Ysabeau pushed Deo out the door.

Bringing the cool cloth to the American, she wondered how she could heal a man and not touch him. She couldn’t listen to Deo. She had to make him better so he could save all of Ysabeau’s patients. Starting with sweet little Talitha.

‡

January 6, 2010. Six Days…

C
onsciousness slipped through
Luke’s fingers. It was a slow-motion fall into darkness, splintered with pain. The only saving grace? He wasn’t alone. The lullaby woman hovered over him, administering to his needs, keeping him safe. She had soft, cool hands that felt good on his skin. Part of him wanted her to bite his ass again so he could drift away without pain.