Nemesis (Southern Comfort) (31 page)

Up until she started to scream.

Declan was pretty sure that his eardrums imploded from the force of th
e yell.

He turned and threw himself toward her in one smooth motion, his first instinct to hit the ground, landing them both in a clump of tangled vines that did little to stop her from flailing.

“Get it off, get it off, oh my God, get it off me!”

“What?” Declan bellowed, trying to avoid the fists and knees that were attempting to unman him and check her over at the same time.  “For God’s sake Sadie, will you just settle down?  Tell me what’s the matter!”

“Snake.  Snake.  Oh my God, it’s on my leg!”

An errant fist caught him squarely in the solar plexus.  For a little woman she packed a not insignificant punch.

“Ouch!” he complained, but somehow managed to get her arms pinned before doing a little reconnaissance.

“Where is it?” he wheezed, because all that wrestling around hurt,
damn it.  But for the life of him he couldn’t see any snakes near her.  “Did it bite you?”

The thought of that made him slightly frantic.

“No, I don’t think so, but… what do you mean where is it?  It’s right there!”  She sat up, and pointed to a vine.  “Oh.”

The look he gave her
was not precisely sympathetic.

“Well, it was!” she argued, snagging the vine and whipping it from her leg.  “It was orange and brown, and slithery.  I know the difference between a snake and a vine.”

For this, he’d probably bruised another rib.  “Are you hurt?” he asked anyway, the very soul of solicitude.

“I don’t think so, unless you want to count…  Ahhhhhhhhh!”

“Jesus, woman.”  Declan’s blasphemy went unnoted as Sadie scrambled out from under him and deeper into the underbrush.  And it was then that he saw the snake.  Sitting on a log about five feet away from them.  Coiled in a patch of sunlight, its head raised sleepily at the disturbance.

It was probably about eighteen inches long.

“It’s a corn snake,” Declan said to the woman who was cowering amongst the saw palmettos.  “A young one, given its size.  They hibernate, mostly, in the winter.  Probably just came out for a bit of sun.  Lots of people keep them as pets.”

“Are they crazy?”  Sadie stared at it, bug-eyed.

“No, but there’s a solid chance that you are.  That thing’s not gonna hurt you, Sadie.”

“Easy for you to say.  After all, you’re practically brethren.” 

If his ribs didn’t hurt so badly he might have laughed.  “I can’t believe you’re still such a baby.”

“I can’t believe you’re still such a jerk.”

Ribs or no, he had to chuckle.  And was tempted to grab the snake and really scare her with it.

“Don’t even think about it,” she snarled, reading him accurately once again.  Then
she mustered her dignity and hauled herself off her ass.

“Showtime’s over,” she decreed, brushing some pine straw from her borrowed shirt.  “Let’s keep this moving, shall we?”

Then she bent down to help him up, and the bark of the tree she’d been in front of exploded.

CHAPTER THIRTY

“WHAT
do you mean you can’t find anything wrong with him?”

Rogan watched from the hospital bed as Kim squared off against the doctor, amused and slightly turned on because she was such a hell of a woman.

All five feet of her, soft and round and pretty, going after an ER doc the size of a water buffalo with an ego to match.  The man looked offended and irritated and – dammit – slightly turned on himself, so Rogan shifted uncomfortably beneath the sheets and tried to look like less of a wuss.

Not all that easy to do in a hospital gown.

His bare butt scratched against the uncomfortable sheet beneath him, making him feel exposed and irritable because of it.

Was it really necessary to take off his clothes?

How about leaving a guy a little dignity?

Then his wandering mind was drawn back to the conversation, where the doc was pointing out the evidence on the x-ray.  They’d scanned him, stress-tested him, drawn blood and poked and prodded, and none of them seemed to have a better explanation for the random bursts of pain he’d experienced than he did.  Right now he was feeling remarkably good despite the irritation, and he tapped his fingers on the bed impatiently. 

No bruised or cracked ribs, despite the physical sensations that had suggested otherwise. His brain showed no signs of a tumor and his heart beat strong as a horse’s. 

“We won’t have the results of the blood work back for a little while yet,” the doctor was saying, while he tried not to be obvious about looking down Kim’s shirt.

She was in too big a hurry this morning to button it?

Cleavage like that shouldn’t go unprotected.

Maybe he’d buy her a nice supply of turtlenecks.  Some extra-large sweatshirts, perhaps one of those Mexican-looking ponchos.

Gaucho? he pondered.  No, he was pretty sure that was the name for the cowboys themselves.

Well, whatever those loose, flowing, blanket-like things were called, he’d order them up in bulk.

“But as you can see,” Doctor Wandering Eyeball continued, talking to Kim as if Rogan wasn’t even in the room, “there’s no source of trauma in evidence.  Other than his ankle, everything else appears to be quite normal.  You might want to consider that it’s psychosomatic.  Sometimes patients who’ve experienced a previous ongoing medical trauma have a tendency to develop hypochondria.”

What?  Whoa.  “I’m not a hypochondriac, Doctor Steinmetz.  I’m not making this up just because I like hanging around in hospitals.”  Quite the opposite, in fact.

The doctor seemed to recall that Rogan was there.  “It’s nothing to be ashamed about,” he said with soothing condescension, and Rogan wanted to pop him.  “I understand that you saw a psychologist after the accident that injured your ankle.  You may want to consider talking to one of the mental health professionals on staff.  Or if you’d be more comfortable, we could place a call to your therapist.  Sometimes these things just take time.”

Rogan’s normally easygoing temper frayed to the point of snapping.  “I saw a therapist because I was with my five-year-old cousin when he was abducted by a homicidal pedophile, and that brought down a truckload of guilt.  Not because I was traumatized by my injury.  And I’ve got that all worked out now, thank you.  The only reason I’m here is because my head hurt and I must have banged my ribs on something, and because the woman I love insisted I get checked out.  She’s pretty persuasive when she’s naked.”

The doctor looked startled, Kim looked shocked, and embarrassment flushed hot beneath his skin.

He shifted his glance, hoping he hadn’t offended Kim unforgivably, and was surprised to catch her smiling.

Then he realized the full significance of his outburst.

He’d gone and admitted, real publicly, what she meant to him.

He found himself smiling back.

But then the pain slammed into his ribs again, his vision going blurry and double, and despite the fact that the x-ray right in front of him said otherwise, he could have sworn the damn things were broken.

“He’s not faking that,” Kim complained to the doctor as she rushed over to Rogan’s side, running her hand across his brow, which had gone cool and clammy.

“I don’t know what to tell you,” the doc said.  “All the evidence we have suggests otherwise.”

Kim peered into his eyes as the pain slowly ebbed and dissipated.  After a moment or two he was pretty much back to normal.  Even he admitted it was weird. 

She frowned and straightened beside him.  Then the cell phone she was supposed to have turned off started to ring, and she shot a guilty glance at Steinmetz before checking the readout.  “It’s your dad,” she told Rogan, then pressed the phone to her ear.  “I’ll just step out in the hall to talk to him.”

Rogan watched her walk off, appreciating the view, mentally stamping
Mine
all over her retreating backside.  It wasn’t like him to be so possessive – and one didn’t exactly
possess
a woman like Kim anyway – but then he guessed he’d never been in love before.

When he caught Steinmetz doing his own ogling he crossed his arms, then found himself actually snarling.

The man shrugged his shoulders unrepentantly.

They gl
ared at each other for several moments, until Kim came back into the room, her brows drawn tightly together.

“What?”  He dropped his arms, pissing contest forgotten.   

“Doctor Steinmetz?” she said, but her eyes were locked with Rogan’s.  “If you wouldn’t mind, I’d like to speak with the patient alone for a moment.”

“Sure.”  Steinmetz offered her a smarmy smile.  Asshole. 

Then he sauntered out of the room, sucking most of the air with him.  Took a lot of oxygen to keep that ego inflated.

Rogan forgot him, and turned his gaze back to Kim. “What’s wrong?
What did Dad say? Was there a problem at the bar?”

“No, no.  Nothing like that.” 

She crossed the room, laid her hand on his arm.  Any time she touched him he went pliant as putty. One hundred and eighty-five pounds of dough.  “You remember that I was a nurse before the Bureau. That I worked in the psych ward?”

“Sure.” Rogan didn’t ask what that had to do with anything.  Kim always spoke with a point, so he waited for her to make it.

“Well, one time we had a woman in with severe, unexplained pain.  Pretty much all over her body.  She said everything felt like it had been crushed.  They’d run all the tests, could find nothing wrong with her physically and were working on the theory that it was psychological.  Anyway, long story short, it turned out she had an identical twin who’d been in a major car accident.  They’d both been adopted, had only just found out about each other, and the woman’s husband called the twin to try to get some background on the family medical history so that he could do something to help his wife.  That’s when he heard about the car crash, discovered his sister-in-law was wearing a body cast.  And realized his wife was experiencing her sister’s pain.”

Rogan blinked.

“And you’re telling me this because… shit.  Declan was in an accident?  Is that what the phone call was about?  What happened?” God, God.  He couldn’t think straight.  Couldn’t breathe. “Is he okay?”

Kim
calmed his rising concern with another stroke.  “I don’t know for sure that anything has happened.”  Then she explained the conversation she’d had with his dad.  Apparently Declan and Sadie’s disappearing act was perhaps not of their own volition.

Rogan leaned back against the pillow, closed his eyes. 
He wasn’t sure whether to be relieved that his brother hadn’t been mangled in a car accident or terrified over the possibility that he was in even worse trouble.

“I never would have put this together without talking to your dad,” Kim continued. “Or without having witn
essed something similar myself.  I know it’s not widely accepted in the scientific community,” she told him. “But I was there and I saw it.  If you do the research, you’ll find it’s been documented before.  A four-year-old girl burns her hand, and her twin develops an unaccountable matching blister.  Chest pains in one twin when the other has a heart attack.  Labor pains when the other gives birth.  There are too many examples to discount.”

He opened his eyes, searched her face.
“You’re serious about this.”

“If I hadn’t seen it for myself, I admit I’d have a hard time believing it.  The research I did back then suggests that this… phenomenon is most likely to occur when one twin is under some kind of
extreme duress.  And when your dad said what are the chances of something happening to both my boys at the same time, that’s what got me thinking.  The timing is curious, to say the least.”

Fear for Declan
again blocked the air from his lungs.  “So what you’re suggesting is that my brother has been… injured.”

“I don’t know that.”  Kim squeezed his hand.  “Maybe he and Sadie really did just go away
, and Kathleen is off base.  Maybe
I’m
off base, Declan is fine, and you’re experiencing phantom pain for a different reason.”

Her tone was neutral, but her eyes were worried.  It was clear she thought there was something to this woo-woo.

And if he allowed himself to stop thinking, to set logic aside and just go with gut feeling, he was terrified that she was right.

He and Dec were
basically two halves of one person.  A zygote that split at the last possible moment, making them two separate individuals.  Identical DNA. Undeniably joined.

At least they had been many years ago.

“Call Kathleen,” he said, suddenly feeling nauseous.  “She would have edited what she told Dad.  I want the unvarnished reality.”

“Okay.”  She stroked him again. 

“Let’s say you’re right. Do you think there’s any way to... use this?  To somehow help whatever’s going on with Declan?”