Forged in Ash (21 page)

“I’m okay,” she said when hands settled on her shoulders.

“Well, she’s not throwing off sparks anymore,” Zane said.

Kait turned her attention to Cosky’s knee. This time her stomach did try to climb her throat. “Oh, Cosky, no. I’m so sorry.”

“Don’t be,” he said gruffly. “It helped.”

“
It helped.
”

How in the world could he claim that? The twisted look on his face from earlier flashed through her mind. No wonder he’d been in pain. His knee was in the same shape as her hands—swollen, covered in livid blisters. She’d been burning the skin off him.

“I don’t understand what happened,” she said, and her throat closed up. She swallowed hard and simply shook her head.

“This isn’t normal?” Rawls asked.

Silently, she shook her head again. He squeezed her shoulder and gently took hold of her right wrist, raising her hand. Squeezing a generous dollop of white cream out of a tube onto her palm, he carefully spread it over her entire hand and then wrapped it from fingers to wrist in white gauze. He taped the bandage at her wrist and repeated the procedure on her left hand.

Once he’d tended to Kait’s burns, he shuffled over to Cosky’s leg.

“How bad is it?” Kait asked thickly, nausea rolling around in
her belly again as she focused on his blistered knee. It was the color of tomato soup now, a deep, angry red.

Rawls squeezed a puddle of cream from the tube onto Cosky’s knee, recapped it, and dropped it into his black bag before gingerly smoothing the white substance over Cosky’s fried skin. “It’s hard to tell beneath the swelling, but…” His voice trailed off and he shook his head.

“What?” Kait asked on a tight breath. Her chin dropped and tears stung.

What a disaster. She should never have tried to help him. She’d just made things worse. Much worse. Now he had third-degree burns along with his other injuries.

“I’m not sure yet.”

The evasiveness in Rawls’s voice brought Kait’s head up. Had she caused even more damage than she’d realized?

Cosky scanned her face and his eyes softened.

“The blisters are superficial,” he told her, his gentle tone more comforting than his words. “The real story is what’s going on beneath the blisters.” He glanced at Rawls, his gaze challenging. “Isn’t it?”

Zane walked over to Cosky’s side and stared. “What are you talking about?”

“The cartilage,” Cosky said when Rawls didn’t respond. “It’s aligned again.”

Zane’s breath hissed out. He squatted, staring hard at Cosky’s cream-smeared skin. “That’s impossible.”

“Is it?”

Rawls’s quiet question had all three men turning to stare at Kait.

Kait sucked in a breath, a sense of unreality hitting her. Her head
went light and dizzy, only this time the sensation didn’t go away. A wave of exhaustion washed over her.

“Yes, it is. It doesn’t happen that fast. It takes weeks…even months,” she whispered.

Rawls shrugged and squatted beside Cosky’s leg with a roll of gauze. He passed the roll through the space between Cosky’s knee and the pavement as he wrapped the joint. “We’ll know more after the X-rays. The blisters could be screwing with our perception.”

Cosky didn’t look convinced.

“I can give you some Demerol.”

“Don’t bother.” Cosky’s eyebrows pinched together and he shifted his gaze to Kait’s gauze-wrapped hands. “It’s numb…” he said slowly. “Like cotton wool.”

He was repeating what she’d said about her hands. She shook her head, too exhausted to try to figure out what that meant.

“The ambulance is here.” Mac’s voice joined them. “What happened to her?”

The sound of tires on pavement filled Kait’s ears, and the ground seemed to roll beneath her.

“We’ll fill you in later,” Zane said.

“Fine.” Mac didn’t sound like he cared. He stepped closer to Zane and dropped his voice. “Across the parking lot. The dark-blue hatchback. Do you see him?”

Zane shifted. “Yeah. So?”

Mac dropped his voice even more. “I recognize the motherfucker. He was on my ass for a while. But just when I thought I had a tail, he pulled a Casper. What about you, have you seen him around?”

His voice had dropped again. Or maybe it wasn’t his voice. Maybe the buzzing in her ears was just drowning him out.

So tired she couldn’t keep her eyes open a second longer, Kait let herself fall back to the pavement. She’d rest for a moment.

“Kait!” Cosky’s roar echoed down a tunnel, from an immense distance.

She tried to answer him, but exhaustion rolled over her like a tsunami, dragging her down into a sea of nothingness.

Chapter Ten

C
OSKY GLARED AT
the privacy curtain, wincing as the high-pitched whine on the other side of the cloth rose higher and higher, adding fuel to his growing frustration. His neighbor barely stopped talking long enough to draw breath, before she was off again.

Swearing, Cosky shoved the ice packs off his knee and swung his legs to the side of the ER bed. Kait was somewhere in this damn place, unconscious, possibly fighting for her life. He glanced around the room for something to serve as a crutch. An EKG machine on a rolling cart fit the bill. He was just about to swing out of bed and make a hop for it, when his curtain separated and Rawls pushed his way through.

“Hold your horses, what do you think you’re doing?” Rawls snapped, launching forward and shoving Cosky back against the pillows. While Cosky struggled to sit up again, Rawls swung Cosky’s left leg onto the bed. He took much more care with the right leg and went to work covering the bandaged knee with the discarded ice pack.

“I was going to check on Kait,” Cosky snarled back, giving the curtain separating him from his irritating ER neighbor a fuming glance.

“She’s fine,” Rawls said, frowning down at Cosky’s knee. He adjusted one of the ice packs and stepped back.

“So she’s awake?” Cosky asked, his muscles loosening. She’d been out like a light since she’d fallen back to the pavement, not even waking up during their trip to the ER in the ambulance.

“No, but the docs say she’s just sleeping.”

Rawls stepped back from the bed, but he looked tense, and he was balanced lightly on his feet, like he was ready to leap on Cosky and pin him to the bed if need be.

The asshole.

“Sleeping?” Cosky’s voice gained volume and velocity. “That wasn’t sleep, damn it.”

He swung his legs to the side of the bed again. Ice packs went flying. “I want to see her.”

Rawls shook his head in disgust and threw up his hands. “Fine. We sure as hell wouldn’t want you to exhibit any common sense and stay off the leg until we know how extensive the damage is.”

“Are you gonna help me, or stand there like an ass?” Cosky asked, the impatience and worry thickening inside him until his lungs felt compressed beneath the pressure.

Damn it, he shouldn’t have pushed her. She’d tried to pull away, tried to stop, and he hadn’t let her. He’d forced her to channel that damn energy, as she called it, much longer than she should have, much longer than was apparently safe.

“You’ve got five minutes,” Rawls said, stepping up to the bed and presenting his shoulder. “I’m not shitting you, Cos. Five minutes, so you can see for yourself that she’s fine. Then back to bed. Got it?”

Cosky slid to the side of the bed, grabbed Rawls’s shoulder, and pulled himself up, using his left leg to stabilize himself. He slung his arm over his corpsman’s shoulders. With his lungs in a straightjacket,
he slowly hopped alongside Rawls out into the emergency room and down the length of curtained cubicles. They stopped in front of the last curtain and slowly swung around. As they pushed their way through the cloth, Cosky could suddenly smell her. Oranges or lemons. The sweet scent lingered beneath the sharper smells of disinfectant and blood. Something inside him eased, and his lungs started working again, drawing that sweet, clean scent in with deep, desperate gulps.

Her curtained-off area looked identical to his except the bed seemed bigger, maybe because she looked so small and fragile within it. His chest tightened at how innocent she looked lying there like that, her face softened in sleep. Her braid glowed like molten honey against the hospital white of the pillow. It snaked out from behind her head and down the length of her body, in a gilded rope of gold.

Cosky hopped closer and reached for the chair beside her bed, dragging it over to him. She didn’t stir at the dull scrape of metal against linoleum. Letting go of Rawls’s shoulder, he collapsed onto the cushion and used his good leg to drag himself, chair and all, next to the bed.

“You call this sleep?” he asked in a tight voice, watching her lie there as still as death, her dusky eyelashes dark shadows against her pink cheeks.

“Yeah, I do. So do the doctors.” Stepping up to the bed, Rawls scanned her face himself. Then, as though he couldn’t help himself, he pressed his fingers to the side of her neck. “Heart rate is normal. So is BP. She’s breathing fine. Pupils are reactive, and she’s responsive to stimuli.” He shook his head, dropped his hand, and took a step back, his face puzzled. “Granted, it’s unusual, but she appears to be in a deep sleep. They’re going to admit her to transitory care and wait for her to wake up.”

Unusual?

Yeah, well that pretty much described every single event of today.

Unable to help himself, Cosky took hold of her bandaged left hand. It just lay there in his palm. Lifeless. There was no heat. No rampaging lust. Just guilt.

And respect—she put her life on the line to heal him. Hell—considering what an ass he’d been less than an hour before, that kind of generosity was unusual to say the least. And look what her good Samaritan act had netted her?

A night in the ER.

Because of him.

As if he needed another example of why he had to steer clear of female entanglements.

“So you’ve seen her,” Rawls said as he hauled Cosky to his feet. “Now it’s back to bed. That leg should be elevated.”

Cosky allowed Rawls to guide him from Kait’s bedside and back to his little section of the emergency room. But her pink, still face haunted him every step of the way. And he couldn’t help obsessing about this strange deep sleep of hers. What if she didn’t wake up in a couple of hours? What if she didn’t wake up at all?

“You’re borrowing trouble.” Rawls sent him a sympathetic look as Cosky levered himself up and dragged his legs onto the bed. “Look at what she did. Is it any wonder she’s exhausted? She expended a tremendous amount of energy. Maybe this deep sleep is simply part of the process, like refilling the well.” Turning toward the chair beside Cosky’s bed, he settled into it and glanced at Cosky’s bandaged leg again. “Any feeling yet?”

Cosky simply shook his head.

Rawls frowned. “What did the doc say?”

Cosky thumped his head against the thin pillow behind him and scowled. “Nothing. He hasn’t been in yet. They have a call into X-ray. The nurse said the doc may be in before X-ray shows up.”

When Rawls’s cell phone rang, Cosky breathed a sigh of relief; it was annoying as hell being out of the loop. Zane and Mac had headed out to comb the streets for her, while Rawls had accompanied him and Kait in the ambulance.

“Any luck?” Cosky asked as soon as Rawls lowered his phone.

“No. Mac called in”—Rawls glanced at the curtain and lowered his voice—“some of the guys. They’ll keep at it through the night.”

A few minutes later someone from radiology showed up with a wheelchair to take him down for X-rays. Lying there, with the icy metal of the table biting into his spine and the back of his skull, Cosky waited for the technician to ask about the bubbled and blistered skin of his knee, but she ignored the injury. No doubt a couple of third-degree burns and a shattered knee were small potatoes compared to the more traumatic injuries that wheeled in and out of her X-ray room.

The X-rays only took a few minutes and then he was helped back into the wheelchair. As they wheeled him away, he absently checked out his exposed knee.

At first he thought he was focusing on the wrong leg.

He blinked and looked again.

What the hell?

He jolted forward so hard he almost fell out of the wheelchair—would have if he hadn’t grabbed hold of the armrests.

“Easy there,” the tech said. A hand came down on his shoulder, easing him back against the backrest.

Cosky muttered something incomprehensible and just sat there in frozen disbelief.

After a moment of staring, he closed his eyes, counted to ten, and opened them again. The view hadn’t changed.

The blisters were gone, so was the swelling. Healthy pink skin greeted his incredulous gaze. He leaned forward, staring in astonishment. The knee itself looked better than it had since before that flameout in Seattle. Christ, the bruising was all but gone. Even the surgical scars were thinner, lighter, and less visible.

No wonder the technician had exhibited such unconcern—the injury looked months old.

Suddenly it occurred to him that he felt amazingly good considering he’d hit the pavement at full speed. He’d landed on his shoulders, which had been aching like hell…at first. Not so much now. He rotated his arm. In fact, not at all now. And then there were his elbows and the back of his arms, which had received an extreme exfoliation. They’d been burning like a son of a bitch.

He extended his arm and twisted it to get a look at the skinned elbow, which had plenty of dried blood, but no scabs. He probed his right elbow with his left fingers. Smooth skin glided beneath his fingertips.

The burning sting from his collision with the pavement was gone too. Shaking his head, he pushed up the sleeve of his hospital scrubs and checked out his shoulder. More dried blood and smooth skin.

Un-fucking-believable.

Still unable to trust the evidence of his own eyes, he settled back and waited.

Rawls scanned his face as the tech rolled him toward his hospital bed, and sat up with a frown. “What’s wrong?”

Cosky jerked his chin toward his exposed right knee and waited. He didn’t have to wait long. Rawls glanced at it, did a double take, and shot out of his chair so fast it toppled over.