Blood Kiss (6 page)

Marissa knew exactly the narrative that was going through the female's mind: Wrath's unclaimed betrothed, now mated to the
Dhestroyer
, and most of all, Havers's estranged sister.

“Will you please let my brother know that I'm here?”

“I'm aware of your presence already,” Havers said from behind her. “I saw you on the security camera.”

Marissa closed her eyes for a brief second. And then she turned around to face him. “How is the patient doing?”

He bowed briefly. Which was a surprise. “Not well—please come this way.”

As she followed his white coat toward a pair of heavy closed doors, she was very aware of many eyes on them.

Family reunions were good fun. Especially in public.

After Havers swiped his card through a reader, the metal panels opened to reveal a medical space as sophisticated and intense as anything Shonda Rhimes ever thought up: patient rooms full of fancy medical equipment were clustered around a central administrative space staffed with nurses, computers and various other kinds of support, while three hallways led off in different directions to what she assumed were specialty treatment pods.

And her brother manned it all by himself.

If she hadn't known what he could be like, she would have been in awe of him.

“This is quite a facility,” she remarked as they walked along.

“It took a year to plan, longer to build.” He cleared his throat. “The King has been quite generous.”

Marissa shot a look at him. “Wrath?” As if there were another ruler? Duh. “I mean—”

“I provide essential services to the race.”

She was spared having to make any further conversation as he stopped next to a glassed-in unit that had drapes pulled into place all along its interior.

“You should prepare yourself.”

Marissa glared at her brother. “As if I haven't seen the result of violence before?”

The idea that he would want to protect her from anything at this point was offensive.

Havers inclined his head awkwardly. “But of course.”

With a sweep of his arm he opened the glass door, and then he moved the pale green curtains out of the way.

Marissa's heart dumped into her gut, and she had to steel herself against wobbling. So many tubes and machines ran in and out of the female that it was like something from a science-fiction movie, the vital mortality on the bed overtaken by mechanized functions.

“She's breathing on her own,” Havers intoned as he went over and looked at the reading on something. “We took the tracheotomy tube out about five hours ago.”

Marissa shook herself and forced her feet to move toward the bed. Havers had been right to warn her—although what did she expect? She had seen the injuries firsthand.

“Has she . . .” Marissa fixated on the female's battered face. The bruising had discolored the skin even more, great patches of purple and red marking swollen cheeks, eyes, jaw. “Has—ah, has any family stepped forward to claim her here?”

“No. And she hasn't been conscious enough to tell us her name.”

Marissa went to the head of the bed. The quiet beeping and whirring of the equipment seemed very loud, and her vision was way too clear as she looked at the IV bag with its constant dripping, and the way the female's brown hair was tangled on the white pillow, and the texture of the knitted blue blanket on top of the covers.

Bandages everywhere, she thought. And that was just on the exposed arms and shoulders.

The female's slender, pale hand lay flat beside her hip, and Marissa reached out and clasped the palm. Too cold, she thought. The skin was too cold, and not the right color—it was a grayish white, instead of a healthy golden brown.

“Are you coming around?”

Marissa frowned at her brother's comment—and then realized the female's eyes were flickering, the thickened lids batting up and down.

Leaning over, Marissa said, “You're okay. You're at my br—you're at the race's clinic. You're safe.”

A ragged moan made her wince. And then there was a series of mumbles.

“What?” Marissa asked. “What are you trying to tell me?”

The syllables were repeated with pauses in the same places, and Marissa tried to find the pattern, unlock the series of words, grasp the meaning.

“Say it again—”

All at once that beeping in the background accelerated into an alarm. And then Havers ripped open the drapes and the door and shouted out into the hall.

“What?” Marissa said, getting down closer. “What are you saying?”

Nurses came running, and a cart was rushed in. When someone tried to get between her and the patient, Marissa wanted to tell them to stop—but then the shift in the room sank in.

“I don't have a heartbeat,” Havers said as he pressed his stethoscope to the female's now-bare chest.

The connection between Marissa and the patient was broken, their palms unlocking—and yet the female's eyes stayed on Marissa's even as people and more machinery got in the way.

“Start chest compressions,” Havers said as a nurse hopped up on the bed. “Charge the cart.”

Marissa stepped back a little farther, and yet kept the eye contact. “I'm going to find him,” she found herself saying over the din. “I promise you. . . .”

“Everyone clear,” Havers commanded. When the staff backed away, he hit a button and the female's rib cage jerked up.

Marissa's heart thundered, as if it were trying to make up for the deficit on that bed.

“I'm going to find who did this to you!” she shouted. “Stay with us! Help us!”

“No pulse,” Havers announced. “Let's do it again. Clear!”

“No!” Marissa yelled as the female's eyes rolled back. “
No
 . . . !”

I
t was . . . a cocktail party?

As Paradise stepped into a gymnasium that seemed as big as a professional football arena, she was surprised to find uniformed
doggen
holding silver trays of
hors d'oeuvres
in their white-gloved hands, a bar set up on a table draped with damask, and classical music playing in the background.

Mozart's violin sonatas.

The ones her father listened to in front of the fire after Last Meal.

Over on the left, there was a sign-in station, and after some coalescing, all sixty of them formed a line in front of a female
doggen
with a happy smile and a laptop computer. Not wanting to look like she expected to be treated any differently, Paradise fell in somewhere in the middle and patiently waited to give her name, confirm her address, get her picture taken, and file off to the side to check her satchel and coat.

“Would you care for a
canapé
?” a
doggen
asked her.

“Oh, thank you, no, but I appreciate the kindness.”

The
doggen
bowed at the waist and approached the male who had been behind her in line. Glancing over her shoulder, she nodded to her fellow candidate—and recognized him from the festivals that the
glymera
had put on before the raids. Like all members of the aristocracy, they were distant cousins, although she was not close to him or his people.

His name was Anslam, if she remembered correctly.

After he nodded back, he popped a
canapé
into his mouth.

Pivoting around, Paradise checked out all the athletic
equipment that had been set up throughout the open space. Parallel bars, chin-up bars, mats for tumbling, a pummel horse, leg press . . . oh, good, they had an erg machine.

At least there was one thing she wasn't going to fail at.

Glancing over her shoulder, she found that many of the recruits were awkwardly fending off the
doggen
with the trays, looking as if they had never seen servants before. Peyton was hitting the munchies hard—not a surprise. And Axe, the latent serial killer, was standing at the edge of things, arms crossed over his chest, eyes surveying the landscape like maybe he was picking out victims.

Why half of him with the tats? she wondered. And the piercings?

Whatever.

And yeah, wow, looked like there was only one other female at the moment. And given the hard-as-nails expression on that lean face, and her broad shoulders, she was probably more suited to the program than a lot of the males in here.

Rubbing her damp palms on her thighs, Paradise shook off a feeling of disappointment: That male, Craeg, who'd come to the audience house for the application wasn't in the group.

But come on, that was probably a good thing. He'd been a total distraction the second he'd walked up to her desk—and she was going to need all her focus to get through this.

Assuming tonight was anything other than a
canapé
hour.

Where were the Brothers? she wondered.

A flash of movement at the corner of her eye turned her head. One of the males had hopped up on the pummel horse and was slowly spinning his lower body in circles as his massive arms held his weight aloft. The smacking of his palms hitting the padded leather formed
a beat that gradually got faster and faster as his speed increased.

“Not bad . . .” she murmured as his incredibly strong torso threw his legs out and around in a blur.

He never missed a beat. Not once. And the more he whirlwinded, the more she became convinced she should have spent eight years in the gym instead of weeks. If the rest of the applicants were like this guy? She was screwed.

Then again, she didn't seem like the only one who was intimidated. The entire class had stopped milling about and was staring at him, transfixed by the sheer excellence of the performance in the otherwise empty expanse of the gym.

Clank
.

The sound of a door closing made her glance over her shoulder—and she gasped before she could help herself.

There he was, the one she had waited for, the one she had hoped to see again.

Paradise patted at her ponytail, some estrogen-linked receptor going bat-shit, sixteen-year-old as the male walked over to the sign-in station.

Taller. He was so much taller than she remembered. Broader, too—his shoulders stretching a huge Syracuse sweatshirt to its seams. He was in blue jeans again, different ones that nonetheless had the same kinds of rips and tears the other pair he'd worn had. His shoes were scuffed and dirtied Nikes. No baseball cap this time.

Really nice dark hair.

He'd recently gotten the stuff cut, the sides so tight she could see his scalp underneath the fine dark shading around his ears and at his nape, the top short enough so that it stood up on its own. His face was . . . well, it probably wasn't a showstopper for anyone else, his nose a little too big, his jaw a little too sharp, his eyes too deeply set to be even remotely welcoming. But to her he was Clark Gable; he was Marlon Brando; he was the Rock; he was Channing Tatum.

It was like having beer goggles without the beer, she supposed, some chemistry in her transforming him into so much more than he appeared.

Breathing in deep, she tried to catch his scent—and then felt like a stalker.

Well, because she
was
a stalker.

After his picture was taken, he turned to the crowd, his eyes sweeping over the assembled, no reaction showing on his face. Dimly, she was aware of the
doggen
who'd checked them all in packing up her things and departing—along with the tray-wielding servers who were probably going back for reloads.

But like she cared about any of that?

Look at me, she thought toward the male. Look at me. . . .

And then he did.

His eyes moved past her—but then doubled back, locking on. As a blast of electricity went through Paradise's whole body, she—

All at once, the gymnasium went pitch-black.

Pitch.

Frickin'.

Black.

•   •   •

Back at the Havers's underground clinic, if it hadn't been for the glass wall Marissa was leaning against, she would have fallen down.

Especially as she watched her brother pull the white sheet up and over the frozen features of the female.

Dearest Virgin Scribe, she had been unprepared for the silence of death . . . how, when Havers had called time, everyone and everything just stopped, the alarms silenced, the effort extinguished, the life over. She had also been unready for the withdrawing of the equipment that had tried to keep the female with them all: One by one, the tubes in her chest, her arms, and her stomach had been pulled free, and then the cardiac monitoring hookups and pads had been removed. The last thing
stripped down had been the compression sleeves on her thin calves.

Marissa had had to blink fast at the gentle hands of the nurses. They were as careful with her in death as they had been in life.

As the staff filed out, she wanted to thank the females in their white dresses and discreetly squeaky shoes. Clasp their hands. Hug them.

Instead, she stayed where she was, paralyzed by a sense that the death that had occurred was not hers to witness. Family should be here, she thought with dread. God, where was she going to find the family?

“I'm so sorry,” Havers said.

Marissa was about to ask him why he was apologizing to her—when she realized he was addressing his patient: her brother was bent over the bed, one of his hands resting on the motionless shoulder beneath the sheet, his brows drawn tightly beneath his tortoiseshell glasses.

When he straightened and stepped back, he popped up those glasses and seemed to wipe his eyes—although when he finally turned to her, he was fully composed.

“I shall ensure that her remains are attended to appropriately.”

“Which means what.”

“She will be cremated with a proper ritual.”

Marissa nodded once. “I want her ashes.”

As Havers nodded in turn, and arrangements were made for pickup the following evening, Marissa was very aware that she was running out of time. If she didn't get away from her brother, this room, that body, the clinic . . . she was going to break down in front of him.

And that was simply not an option.

“If you will excuse me,” she cut in. “I have some business to take care of back at Safe Place.”

“But of course.”

Marissa glanced at the female, noting absently that the sheet was staining red in a couple of places, no doubt from the removal of the tubes.

“Marissa, I . . .”

“What?” she said in a tired voice.

In the tense quiet that followed, she thought about all the time she'd spent being mad at him, hating him—but at the moment, she couldn't muster up any of those emotions. She just stood in front of her kin, waiting in a position of neither strength nor weakness.

The door opened and the curtain was pulled back. A nurse, one who had not been involved in the death, put her head in. “Doctor, we are prepped in four.”

Havers nodded. “Thank you.” When the nurse ducked back out, he said, “Will you excuse me? I have to—”

“Take care of your patients. By all means. It's what you do best, and you are very good at it.”

Marissa left the room, and after a split second of which-way, remembered to go left. It was easier to regain her composure out in the open and keep her mask in place as she walked back down to the reception area—and all eyes were on her as she departed, as if word had spread among the staff. Strange that she recognized no faces—it made her realize anew just how many had been killed in the raids, how long it had been since she had been around her brother's work.

How the two of them, in spite of blood ties, were essentially strangers.

Taking the elevator back up to the surface, she emerged in the cell-like pre-building and punched her way out into the forest.

Unlike the evening before, tonight the moon shone brightly, illuminating the forest . . . and the absolutely no road in. It dawned on her then that there truly were a multiple of entrances to the subterranean complex, some for deliveries, others for patients who were able to dematerialize, and then that one for ambulances.

All of it so logically set up, undoubtedly due to her brother's input and influence.

Why hadn't Wrath told her that he was helping Havers with all this?

Then again, it wasn't really her business, was it.

Had Butch known? she wondered.

I am so sorry.

As Marissa heard her brother's voice in her head, her anger came back tenfold, to the point that she had to rub a heartburn sensation away from her sternum.

“Water under the bridge,” she told herself. “Time to go back to work.”

And yet she couldn't seem to leave. In fact, the idea of heading to Safe Place made her want to bolt in the opposite direction: She couldn't tell the staff there about what had happened just now. The female's death was like a negation of everything they tried to do under that roof: intercept, protect, educate, empower.

Nope. She couldn't face going there right away.

The problem was . . . she had no idea where to go.