Then again, what she was seeing had nothing to do with the coming sun, or anything that was part of the real world.

  “No…” she moaned. “Oh, God… no—”

  Stumbling back, she squeezed her lids shut behind the double bars of her forearms—and though she knew there was no fighting against what had come and found her, she turned away from what she was being forced to see.

  For the second time.

  “It’s not Blade. It’s not him. It’s not…”

  As she repeated the denial over and over again, there was no forgetting what her superstitious Finnish grandfather had always told her, no denying the truth that had already come to her once: According to the ancient traditions, if you wanted to see your past, you went out into the gloaming, that sacred time between sunset and true darkness, and waited for the light to find you.

  And if it was your future that you were seeking, the moment right before the dawn was the time—

  “I am not seeking anything!” she called out. “I don’t care about the future—I don’t want the future!”

  She had already seen Blade surrounded by the illumination.

  He… was her future. And unless the universe had changed its mind, the symphath tormenter was somehow on the property again—

  Lydia started back for the house’s entry in a blind sprint.

  She did not get far.

  When the wind abruptly changed directions, the scent of fresh blood speared through the chaos and panic of her mind, and yanked her body to a halt. The illumination was still there, still blinding her—even though she was no longer facing the source—and she could sense the symphath’s presence, looming in her wake. The blood, though…

  “Gus?” she gasped as she wheeled back around.

  Lowering her arms, she blinked fiercely—and could not comprehend what was coming toward her across the frost on the ground.

  In the midst of the brilliance that threw no shadows and carried not one inch into the lunar-lit landscape, Blade’s body and red robes were an unmistakable black silhouette in the center of the halo. But unlike before, he was not alone.

  In his arms… he carried a lifeless body.

  “Gus!” she screamed as she started to run.

  The symphath was still a good distance off, a hundred yards at least. And the instant she called out and started racing toward him, toward the light, he stopped and stared at her.

  As she closed in, his face became clearer to her, his expression locked into a mask that gave nothing away. And then, without a word, he bent down and laid out the remains on the lawn.

  There was so much blood on Gus’s corpse that it glistened.

  Blade straightened, looked at her one last time—and then he seemed to bow to her. After that, he was gone. Into thin air.

  And he took the strange, holy light with him.

  “Gus,” she choked out as she skidded up to the body.

  Falling to her knees, her breath coming out in cloud bursts, she pulled Gus into her lap. With tears falling, she arched over him and wept for so much more than the death of a compassionate healer—

  The cough wasn’t much. And at first, she thought she was the one who’d made the sound. But when it happened again and she realized it wasn’t her, she straightened a little.

  Gus’s head had fallen back on her arm, and for a split second, the sight of his bruised and battered face was so horrific, she couldn’t think of what had gotten her attention.

  But then his mouth, slack and open, clicked. As if his tongue had moved.

  Lydia looked down at his bare, blood-slicked chest. By some miracle… the ribs expanded and contracted weakly.

  “You’re alive?” Disbelief warred with confusion. But then she snapped to attention, whipped her head up, and screamed, “Heeeeeeeelp! Help me! Heeelp—!”

  Whether it was from security monitoring, or her yelling, a guard came bolting out of the house, his hand locked on his communicator as he appeared to be barking orders into it.

  “He’s alive!” she hollered. “He’s alive…”

  * * *

  Lying in bed, Daniel heard the commotion out in the front of the house, and the scramble and voices were so loud, there was no mistaking that something was happening—and anyway, he’d been waiting for another dramatic interruption. After he’d left Lydia and C.P. up in that bedroom-oh-wait-maybe-it’s-an-ICU, he’d come down to find some sleep, but that hadn’t gone far. The sense that another shoe was about to drop had been like a prowler in the room with him.

  And here it is, he thought, as he shuffled to his feet and went for his cane.

  The magnitude of what was going on became apparent as soon as he opened the door: There was what sounded like a squadron of guards moving around out by the front entrance. But no alarms. No shooting.

  So it wasn’t an attack. Or at least… not one that had reached the interior of the house yet.

  In the foyer, the front door was open and four guards were standing in it, with guns drawn. As he came up to them, he expected an argument when went outside, but they just let him pass—and the lack of attention they paid to him was a loud-and-clear that he was too slow and infirm to be a concern. If they needed him out of the way, they’d move him. If they wanted him to stop, they’d hook his arm. If he got hurt? He was dying anyway.

  Now he knew what being an eighty-year-old was like.

  Heading under the overhang, he worked his way around the SUV and—

  Lydia and a guard were closing in at a fast pace, and they were sharing a load: A body was strung between their arms.

  Gus.

  But why were they rushing? Dead bodies had no timeline to worry about—

  “Excuse me,” someone said as they brushed him aside.

  He barely caught his balance before he was hit by another person hurrying by him. This time, it was a nurse in scrubs—Georgina, the redhead from upstairs.

  “In the house,” he heard someone order. “Right on the floor.”

  All he could do was get out of the way, and he met Lydia’s eyes as she shot by him, the medical types hovering around, molecules circling a gravely damaged nucleus. As he watched helplessly, he had a thought that the guard was clearly strong enough to carry the load on his own, but Lydia wasn’t letting go of Gus’s shoulders—and she stayed with him as they followed orders, putting him out flat on the black-and-white marble tile.

  Hitching up his strength, Daniel doubled back into the house, but he had to pause on the threshold to catch his breath.

  It seemed fitting that he watched the assessment happen from the periphery, and as a stethoscope was pressed around the bloody chest, Daniel did his own review of the injuries. Gus had been beaten in the face and head, and there were two-pronged burn marks on the side of his neck, across his abdomen, and along his thighs.

  “He’s coding—I’m using the defibrillator.”

  The statement was calm, the doctor who was in charge moving quickly but with deliberation as he pulled over a small red box logo’d with a white heart and an electrical charge symbol.

  More duffle bags were brought to the resuscitation as the chest was cleaned quickly by C.P. Phalen’s nurse, and pads were stuck to the skin up high by the collarbone and down under the pec. Oddly, the discarded, bloodstained gauze bundles were what came into sharpest focus. They were like blooms fallen from some demonic bouquet, and depending on what square of marble they landed on, they were either offset by a loud white background or consumed by a black one.

  “Clear,” the doctor said firmly.

  All hands were raised, including Lydia’s, and there was a little whine as the charge was gathered—then the torso jumped as the electric shock was delivered.

  Daniel looked at Lydia. She had been forced to the sidelines, too, but she wasn’t going far. Sitting on her knees, her bloodstained hands were palms- up on her thighs, as if in prayer, and her mouth was parted as she breathed hard. In her pose, she reminded him of the saints in the Catholic tradition, suffering in their piety, sending up an entreaty for aid in their crisis—

  “You in or out?”

  As the question was presented, Daniel glanced to his left. The guard who’d come up to him was his own height, but had seventy-five pounds of muscle on him, easy. With a square jaw and confrontational stare, it was like he’d been ordered out of the Military Stud handbook.

  “I used to be you,” Daniel said numbly.

  “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “Enjoy your health while you have it.” Daniel moved himself forward. “And I’ll be going in, thanks.”

  As the door was shut behind him, he noted the whirring sound of the lock being engaged, and then the clapping sound of footfalls on the stairs made him look up. C.P. was racing her descent, her face as white as her sculptures, Gus’s fleece like a part of her as opposed to a piece of clothing as she clutched it to her silk dressing gown—

  Later, Daniel would wonder what made him do what he did. Maybe it was the impotence that was riding him, the urge of a former operative to come out of involuntary retirement and insert himself as a way to be relevant—but he liked to believe his actions were because he wanted to do good, and for sure that was part of it.

  Moving faster than he should have been able to, he rushed over and snagged the woman’s arm at the base of the steps, forcing her to stop.

  Phalen yanked so hard, she nearly took them both off their feet. “Let me go—”

  He leaned in and spoke with urgency. “You gotta change the lock coding system.”

  “What?”

  “To this place and the lab. Everything.” He squeezed her forearm because his voice was not as strong as he wanted and he didn’t know how else to communicate the importance of what he was saying. “Even if you have a system in place that cycles in new numerical sequences, you need to switch it immediately, and cancel all the pass cards—better yet, just lock us all down.”

  “What are you—”

  He lowered his tone. “Gus was interrogated. And there is no way he didn’t give things up. It’s not about willpower or allegiance or how strong his mind was. No civilian can withstand that kind of sensory assault, and he was worked on for hours.”

  C.P. opened her mouth. Closed it.

  “Trust me,” Daniel said softly as a tear escaped her eye. “Maybe your men are already working on it, but you need to assume that this property and the lab are no longer secure. I know that you are worried about Gus, I get it. But he’s under this roof now, too. You want to give him the best chance to survive? Make sure that nobody—or nothing—gets in here.”

  There was a long pause—or perhaps it was just a nanosecond.

  “Fucking hell,” C.P. whispered.

  Without another word, she changed her trajectory and went over to her guards, bypassing the medical event in the center of the space.

  Absently, Daniel noted the way the diaphanous skirt of her robe moved like mist around her bare ankles and feet.

  And then he wasn’t thinking about her.

  He was going to Lydia, easing himself down beside her on the cold, hard floor… and taking her hand.

  “Is he going to be okay,” she mumbled as Gus’s heart was hit with a second charge.

  While the man’s palms clapped on the marble, Daniel focused on the black-and-red burn mark on the side of that neck. Instead of answering her, he let his mind go, the wheels of intention starting to turn.

  He might not be physically strong. But as he regarded the battered body of his dear friend and doctor—and did the math on how long and how much Gus had suffered?

  There was a clear mission: Daniel was going to figure out how to get to the person who did this.

  And if he couldn’t deal with them, he was going to make sure someone else did.

  FOURTEEN

  CATHY STAYED WITH Gus through everything: The resuscitation on her foyer floor. The trip on the gurney down into the lab. The assessment in the main examination room, and the running of various drugs, the names of which were familiar to her, the precise mechanisms of their molecular makeup unknown to her. After that? The waiting. The endless waiting…

  To see if the efforts to support his heart rate, oxygenation, blood volume, and blood pressure worked.

  Beep. Beep. Beep…

  The sound of the monitor counting cardiac compressions was the only sound in the room, assuming the soft whistling of the HVAC vent overhead didn’t count. Finally, after such flurries of activity, she and Gus were alone, even if just for a moment. The doctors and nurses would be back soon enough, and it was a toss-up whether she wanted them around or not. If they were in the room? He could get help in seconds if his heart stopped again. But like anybody was all that far?

  She glanced at the monitor by his head. Measured the fluid in the bag that was draining into his vein. Tried not to look at his face, because it was just too hard.

  The litany of injuries was extensive and gruesome: Broken nose, broken ribs, broken fingers. Burn marks that suggested he had been tased in the legs, torso, and the side of the neck. His back, calves, and under his forearms were the only places that hadn’t been touched, and that made her think he’d been tied to a chair, sitting up while he’d been tortured.

  Gus was interrogated. And there is no way he didn’t give things up.

  Squeezing her lids shut, she couldn’t block the image of his swollen eye sockets or the raw scrape at his temple or his bruised mouth. And when she started to panic, she tried to focus on something, anything else—

  The chair under her was hard.

  There. That was as much as she could do.

  Beneath her bony ass, the seat might as well have been made of granite, and in a pathetic attempt to regain a sense of order and control, she made a mental note to upgrade the furniture accessories in the four patient rooms.

  Except then she remembered all the reasons she wasn’t going to change a goddamn thing.

  How has it all come to this, she wondered as she reached out and took Gus’s bandaged hand.

  “This was not how we were going to end up, you and me.” She gently rubbed her thumb back and forth over the white wrap. “We were going to cure cancer. We were going to… change the world. We were going to…”

  Save my life, she thought.

  Considering where she was now—out of money, out of hope, out of time on so many levels—she had to marvel at the sheer arrogance she’d been sporting as she’d moved her underground operation to the property here in Walters, and started working with that vet at the Wolf Study Project. Back then, in what she now thought of as her previous life, she’d been a big swinging dick in the pharmaceutical world, making waves, aware that the Grim Reaper was hot on her trail, but determined to outrun him with Gus’s magic drug.

  Their Vita-12b.

  Twelve versions to get it right. Twelve and a half, actually.

  “But you’re alive.” She put her other hand on her stomach. “And so am I…”

  For now, she tacked on to herself. And given the cramping in her uterus, her own blood loss, and all the cancer cells in her body, she supposed that was a sliding scale with a steep slope into her grave.

  “You know something,” she whispered. “That wolven is right. I am in love with you.”

  Her eyes shot up to Gus’s battered face, but he remained unconscious, and she wondered where he was, where that beautiful mind of his had gone to. Was it still in the husk that had been so sorely abused? Or was the damage so great that he was gone, even as his body lived on?

  Tears came to her eyes, making the vision of him in the hospital bed go wavy.

  “Do you remember where we first met?” She wiped her cheeks and sniffled. “I do. I can recall exactly where we were.”

  As she spoke softly, she wanted to reach up and caress his face, but that seemed like an invasion of his privacy since she’d never touched him like that when he’d been awake. The closest they’d ever gotten to that kind of line-crossing had been that one time they’d been about to kiss, when she’d finally finished fighting her attraction and he’d looked at her as a woman.

  He’d stepped back, though. Stepped away. Stopped… everything.

  “You were speaking at that symposium on immunology at Stanford.” She smiled at the memory, and it felt good to go to a lighter place, back when they’d both been stronger. “All those clinicians and researchers in their ties and jackets, with their somber PowerPoints. And then you took the podium.”

  She had to wipe her eyes again, and as she drew in a shuddering breath, she smiled through the sadness. “God, I can just picture you taking that stage. You were wearing blue jeans and Converse high-tops. You had on a Led Zeppelin t-shirt, with that blimp on it. Those tight-ass bastards were twitching in their seats, whispering under their breath—and you just stood there in those lights, with a half smile on your face because you knew you were smarter than all of them. You didn’t care what they thought of you or how much they disapproved of you for all the wrong reasons. You had the mic—and you blew them away. Right out of the water. Your ideas were groundbreaking, your research in its infancy, your career about to begin. I knew then and there… I had to work with you. I knew you were the one.”

  Lowering her eyes, she shook her head. “And then you came here. I never expected to be afraid of a living soul, but you rattled me. You, with your concert t-shirts of bands I’d never heard of and your cans of Coke. Everyone looked up to you in the lab. Worshipped you, really. I worshipped you—and I tried distracting myself. I did.”

  Glancing down at her stomach, she thought of the blond guard she’d slept with for a couple of months. Who’d then been killed. The pregnancy had been an impossibility, something that never should have happened after chemo had cooked her ovaries.

  Something she had never been able to tell the man about before he’d been murdered on her lawn.

  Gus had told her about the baby. The screening tests for her trial of Vita-12b had revealed everything, and almost instantly, she’d been determined to keep it—even though that meant she couldn’t be patient one for their drug. She’d told herself that a child would be her legacy, and she’d decided to leave the baby to Lydia to raise as soon as the cancer got too far advanced.