True Colors (23 page)
“Her pulse is erratic,” Noah said.
Logan got the gloves in place and slid his hand over the back of hers, still tied to the chair, and squeezed to let her know he was there, that she was no longer alone in this hellhole. Guilt joined the rage boiling in his gut. It was because of him that she was tied to this chair, bleeding and unconscious.
“Logan.”
He blinked and focused on Noah, who was working on the knot at Alex’s left ankle. “Call for an ambulance,” Noah said. “I’ll get her untied.”
“No,” Logan said, and it came out guttural and choked. “I’ll untie her. You call the ambulance.”
He nudged his friend aside and knelt at Alex’s feet. She was so still, so pale, and his covered fingers fumbled with the knots in the thin cord. He could see the raw skin underneath, and he had to swallow back the surge of nausea that accompanied the rage. Son of a bitch, son of a bitch,
son of a bitch
.
son of a bitch
.
Noah returned—Logan hadn’t realized he’d stepped out of the unit—and swore under his breath as he knelt off to the side, near the toolbox.
“What is it?” Logan asked, not taking his eyes off his work.
“The bastard had plans,” Noah said softly.
The last cord dropped free, and Logan braced Alex’s body as she slumped forward. Her head lolled onto his shoulder, and he buried his face in her hair and breathed in the almond scent. The skin of her arms against his was cool and clammy. Oh, God, he thought. Shock.
“Hang on, sweetie. I’ve got you.”
“Damn it, be careful,” Noah snapped. “You’re getting all over her.”
Logan shifted her quickly away from contact with his bare arms, moving his hands to her shoulders. He still didn’t buy what Noah and AnnaCoreen had told him about empathy—no doubt, they’d exaggerated—but he wasn’t going to carelessly put Alex at risk, either.
He looked around for a way to shield her so he could carry her out. Seeing nothing he could use, he stripped off his T-shirt and draped it around her shoulders like a shawl that covered her bare arms. Noah stripped his off, too, and wrapped it around her legs, holding it in place while Logan lifted her into his arms.
“Make sure the EMTs are wearing gloves,” Noah said. “The more we can limit contact, the better. We don’t know what’s going on right now with her system.”
Logan nodded, and cradling her still, limp body against his chest, he carried her out of her concrete prison.
CHAPTER THIRTY
A
wareness returned as a floating sensation and the illusion of Logan, smelling of soap and spearmint gum, wrapped all around her. A sigh of absolute contentment coursed through her. This was nice.
wareness returned as a floating sensation and the illusion of Logan, smelling of soap and spearmint gum, wrapped all around her. A sigh of absolute contentment coursed through her. This was nice.
“Alex?”
She didn’t open her eyes, didn’t want to acknowledge she was dreaming and that Logan wasn’t there, that her subconscious conjured the safest thing in her head and took her there to escape her captor and his sadistic past. She concentrated instead on the strong heartbeat under her ear, the scent of Dial filling her head.
“Baby?”
Vertigo whirled for a moment, and she clutched at his strong, warm arm, tensing as a cool breeze sailed across her skin, as if a door had opened, letting in fresh air. Unfamiliar sounds invaded her senses. A man shouted something she didn’t catch, and she heard running feet and the spin of small rubberized wheels on pavement. A different voice, this one female, issued a command, but it also made no sense to her.
The floatiness ended abruptly, and she panicked as Logan’s arms let her go. “No!” She screamed it in her head, but nothing came out.
“She’s coming around,” Logan said from somewhere above her. He sounded too far away, and she opened her eyes to seek him out, to beg him to come back.
“What’s her name?” The woman again, and this time she was right in Alex’s face, blocking her from finding Logan, and shining a bright light into her eyes.
Alex moaned at the stabbing pain from the light and tried to push it away. It hurt too much, made the pain in her head expand and pulse.
“Alex,” Logan said, from even farther away. “Her name is Alex.”
“Alex,” the woman said, “can you hear me?”
She pushed again at the hand connected to that damn piercing light. “Stop.”
“Do you know where you are, Alex?” the woman asked.
“Logan?” She couldn’t see him, couldn’t hear him, and panic started to set in. Was this another flash into her kidnapper’s head? But, no, that didn’t track. She wasn’t Alex during those trips. She lifted her head and strained to see around the irritating woman asking her irritating questions. “Logan?”
Movement at her side distracted her, and a man, not Logan, wrapped something around her upper arm and started pumping it tight. She focused on him because she had no choice, because she already sensed the woman would be no help. He had kind eyes and a flop of curly blond hair on his forehead. “Where’s Logan?” she asked him.
“Alex,” the woman repeated, “I need to ask you a few questions. Just bear with me, okay?”
Alex gave one last, energetic push at the maddening penlight, managing to knock the woman back a step. And then, thank God, Logan was there. Without his shirt. Wow, what an impressive sight. All those defined muscles and that smooth, smooth skin.
She reached out and grabbed his arm so she wouldn’t lose him again and felt him tense, felt him pull away, and thought, That was weird. But then he was leaning over her and smiling, his eyes shiny and bright, and his hand resting on her hair. She could have drowned in those eyes.
“Hey,” he said, stroking her hair. “I missed you.”
“I missed you, too.” She expected him to kiss her then, to plant one on her that would wipe her brain clean and hit the “reset” button. When he didn’t, fear began to creep in on her. Something was wrong. With her? With him?
“BP’s one-seventeen over seventy-two. Pulse is sixty-five.”
Alex turned her head, remembering the guy with the blood pressure cuff. That’s when she realized she lay on a gurney and that the two harried people getting between her and Logan were paramedics. Alarm brought her to a sitting position. Thankfully, no one tried to force her to lie back down, though the woman did put a hand on her shoulder as if to brace her.
Alex shoved aside her first inclination—to ask, “What’s going on?”—and went with her second. “I’m fine. I must have passed out for a little bit, but I’m fine now.” She gave the woman, a redhead with a splash of freckles across her nose, what she hoped was a reassuring smile. “Thank you for checking me out, though.”
“Alex—” Logan began, only to be cut off when Charlie arrived at the side of the gurney, frantic and white-faced. When she saw Alex sitting up and talking, her shoulders dropped and she heaved a sigh of relief.
“Jesus, Alex, what the hell? I thought we were going to find you in little pieces.”
Alex managed an answering smile, even as it ran through her head that Charlie’s quip landed disturbingly close to where Alex had expected to be about now. She had no idea why her captor took off, but it hardly mattered now. Logan had found her. She was safe.
Except . . . she had a vague recollection of things not seeming so good not too long ago. And, God, she was tired. Fatigue clung to her brain like damp cotton candy, insidiously sticky and melting onto already foggy brain cells.
Determined to fight off the exhaustion, at least until she got free of the clinging do-good EMTs, she swung her legs over the side of the stretcher.
While the two paramedics and Logan protested, Alex pushed them back and hopped down. Her knees threatened to buckle, thanks to the surprising weakness in her legs, but she managed to stay upright by bracing a hand on the gurney’s black vinyl pad.
“I’m fine,” she said, and forced a smile even as a dizzying kaleidoscope of flashing red and yellow diamonds danced in front of her eyes.
“You need to get checked out at the ER,” the female paramedic said.
“Really, I’m fine,” Alex said. “Don’t I look fine?” She regretted the question as soon as she said it, because four pairs of eyes said, “You look like fifteen-day-old leftovers not fit for a starving dog.”
“I’m fine,” she repeated, just to make it clear.
Logan started to protest again, but Noah chose that moment to join them, and when he saw Alex, his brows shot up. “Oh, hey, how you doing?” He couldn’t hide his shock.
“I’m—”
“Fine,” Logan cut in. “She wants to go home instead of the ER.” Noah, his confident expression said, would be his reinforcements.
“You should definitely get checked,” Noah agreed. “You were unconscious ten minutes ago. And those bruises—” He broke off then, his brows arching even higher as he peered closely at her face. “Oh.” He cast a glance at Logan. “Must have been a trick of the light.”
Logan didn’t respond, the worried creases of his forehead seemingly permanent.
Relieved that whatever bruises she’d sustained from Butch’s past had already faded, Alex shot Charlie a help-me-out-here look. She
really
didn’t want to go to the ER and endure a bunch of questions she had no idea how to answer. Not to mention all those people touching her, intending to help. All those potential nightmares . . .
really
didn’t want to go to the ER and endure a bunch of questions she had no idea how to answer. Not to mention all those people touching her, intending to help. All those potential nightmares . . .
But Charlie wasn’t going to help. “You really do need to get checked out,” she said with an apologetic shrug. “Maybe Logan can pull some cop strings with his friends at the ER. You know, get you in and out fast.”
“The police are going to want to talk to you, too,” Logan said.
“But—”
“Alex,” Logan cut in, “You’ve been bleeding.”
She cast Charlie a questioning look, and her sister gestured sympathetically at her own nose.
Alex tested the skin above her top lip, felt the caked blood. “Oh.”
An expression of such intense concern crossed Charlie’s features that Alex laid a hand on her sister’s arm to reassure her. When Charlie stiffened, Alex realized what she’d done and snatched her hand back. A panicked “oh, shit” rang in her head.
But nothing happened. The world didn’t fall away, the earth didn’t tilt, and she didn’t spiral headfirst into Charlie’s latest trauma—finding out her sister had been kidnapped by a psychopath. She stayed firmly inside her own aching head.
Anxiety tightened Charlie’s jaw. “First stop: ER. Then we’re going to see AnnaCoreen.”
CHAPTER
THIRTY-ONE
THIRTY-ONE
I
t’s gone,” Alex said the instant AnnaCoreen opened her door.
t’s gone,” Alex said the instant AnnaCoreen opened her door.
Alex couldn’t help the relieved laugh that sputtered out of her. Thank the Lord and all his angels, her super-duper Doppler 3000 empathy was gone! So was her headache, for that matter, vanished as if it had never existed. Her head felt light and airy, amazing. And not because she’d gotten drugs at the ER. There, all she’d gotten was a clean bill of health after a nurse checked her vitals and poked her for blood and a doctor shined another of those damn penlights in her eyes. They confirmed what she already knew: She was fine. Better than fine.
The worst part at the ER had been telling Detective Don Walker—a man she knew well from years of shooting news photos at the scenes of crimes and accidents—what had happened with Butch McGee. But she’d managed to numb up every raw nerve inside her and tell Don everything she could without sounding like a total whackjob. Luckily, she’d had an incredible adrenaline high to see her through it all.
And now, here they all were on AnnaCoreen’s doorstep because worrywart Charlie insisted.
The poor psychic, wearing a pink satin and lace bathrobe and a sleepy expression, let her gaze travel first over Alex, then Charlie, then Noah, then Logan, then back to Alex.
“See? We woke her up,” Alex said, shooting Charlie an I-told-you-so glance that probably appeared crazed, considering how she hadn’t been able to stop smiling her ass off since they’d left the ER. She was free. Free!
“It is three in the morning,” AnnaCoreen said in a sleep-roughened voice and blinked a couple of times against the brightness of the porch light.
“We’re so sorry,” Charlie said. “But I didn’t know what else to do. Something odd is happening with Alex’s empathy.”
Alex laughed again and said, “It’s gone. Check it out.” She placed her palm flat against AnnaCoreen’s forearm, just below the lacy short sleeve of her bathrobe. She glanced from one woman to the other and back again and started to grin even more. “Nothing. Not one little thing. I had a nurse all over me at the ER, and a doctor, and nothing, nada, zip.”
Charlie exchanged a concerned look with AnnaCoreen. “Is that even possible?” Charlie asked.
The disorientation from a doorbell dragging her from a sound sleep began to clear from AnnaCoreen’s eyes, and she stepped back. “You’d better come in. I’ll get dressed.”
“Are you sure?” Alex asked, hesitating after Charlie had already stepped into the kitchen. “We could come back tomorrow or the next day. There’s no emergency here. I mean, look at me.”
As she smiled to prove it, she wondered if she’d showed too many teeth, because neither AnnaCoreen nor Charlie appeared amused or happy.
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