“Are you all right?” she breathed, taking him and the monster he’d killed in, then looking back into the room she’d just been in.
He ignored her question and asked his own. “Are you?”
Andi didn’t think she knew the answer to that right now. “Yes…no…maybe?”
“Come with me,” he said, gesturing her forward with both hands. She took a step and then he picked her up and over the monster’s corpse, setting her down on the far side.
“Damian…you…” she tried again, reaching for his stomach where his beautiful abs had been slashed repeatedly.
“Don’t worry about me.” He caught one of her hands before she could touch him. “This is just my usual Saturday night,” he said, and pulled her down the hall, sweeping his coat up on the way.
They ran into the last ICU room and found Austin there—and Zach—covered in even more blood, but this time it was red.
“What happened?” Damian demanded the second they were inside.
“I’m sorry, I couldn’t stop it, and I couldn’t leave him. There are Hunters here,” Austin was saying, as she ran up to Zach’s bedside. He was torn up again, having given birth to the latest monstrosity. It looked like a war zone.
“How the fuck is he even alive?” she whispered, looking between the men. “Like, is he part zombie?” She dodged around Austin and dialed the blood pressure medications up. Jessica…was dead. She wasn’t her favorite coworker by any stretch, but that didn’t mean she deserved to die.
Maybe Damian could do something to save her? He knew magic or something, right?
“What are you doing?” Austin asked from his position beside Zach, where he was holding pressure on him again.
“Postponing the inevitable, I hope,” she said, folding up her panic and putting it into a mental box. She’d just cranked up all the medication that might help. “The blood bank’s on the third floor, I can go—”
“No, you can’t,” Damian said, grabbing her arm to stop her before looking at Austin. “How much longer?”
Austin glanced at his wrist. “Five minutes. Does he have that, with all those?” he asked, eyeing the pumps.
Andi looked up at the monitor and felt her nursely exterior sliding back into place. Somehow Zach’s numbers weren’t plummeting downward, not like they ought to be—if she’d lost as much blood as was on this floor now, she’d be dead for sure. So there was some other element she didn’t know at play here. “I don’t know, I’m not God, but maybe?”
“All right, good,” Austin said, then he stared at Damian. “She shouldn’t be here.”
“Fuck. You,” Andi told him and reached to take Zach’s pulse. She could see it on the monitor, but she needed to feel it—skin to skin—to actually believe he had one.
Damian grabbed her hand before she touched him. “Don’t. If that’s real silver, you’ll hurt him.” He held her hand up so that she could see her bracelet and rings. “Tell me everything,” he asked Austin, releasing her.
“He was fine until an orderly came in and started poking at him,” Austin said. “Waving something over him? Short guy? Bald? Had full sleeve tattoos.”
Andi cut him off. “But we don’t have orderlies on our floor.” One of the hazards of being an ICU nurse—better patient ratios, but less ancillary staff to help.
Austin’s jaw clenched, and he looked to Damian again. “Then it was Hunters for sure. I knew it. That guy set all this off. Goddammit, D, this is why I told you the hospital was a bad idea—”
“Fine, we’ll install some sort of blood bank at the castle for the next time someone has a portal open in them. Oh, wait, that’s never fucking happened before.” Damian’s voice was low and pissed off as Andi’s mind started to churn.
“I know, I know,” Austin said, his tone an apology. “But how the fuck, D—”
“What do portals look like?” Andi blurted out. Both of the men turned to look at her. “I think I saw it. This morning.” The thing that had glinted in Zach’s belly before being submerged in blood. Maybe she hadn’t imagined it—maybe it was real.
Damian grabbed her shoulders. “What did you see?”
She thought back quickly. “It was shiny like mirror glass—like a little piece of mylar.”
“An implanted portal mirror? Impossible,” Austin said.
“And yet, here we are,” Damian said to himself. Underneath the tatters of his T-shirt, his skin was healing—nearly whole—but she still wanted to touch it to make sure. He frowned in thought, then reached a hand out to her as if he’d read her mind, and she bit her lips. “Give me your bracelet, Andi.”
She inhaled to ask why but didn’t for once, as she took it off and handed it over. Its silver didn’t seem to hurt him as he bent it straight like a blade.
“Austin, get back,” Damian warned.
The other man stood his ground. “No. We’re just two minutes away now—”
“From that thing being stuck inside him again, and who knows when this all repeats itself,” Damian said, advancing on the bed.
“Maybe he’ll heal it out!”
“Who knows how long it’s been there? It’s coming out tonight. This is too much chaos to clean up a third time.” Damian pushed Austin aside, and Zach started freely bleeding again. Andi gasped and ran to the IV pumps to dial all of the medications higher, ignoring all the warning alarms. “If he dies, it’s better his death is on me than you,” Damian said, deciding.
“I can touch it if I put on gloves!” Austin said, running for the boxes on the walls. “I can do it!”
“Do…do what?” Andi twisted back, clearly missing some vital piece. But then, in a moment of horrible clarity, she understood, because Damian was holding her bracelet up like a scalpel and bringing it inexorably down to Zach’s abdomen. “Oh my God, you’re going to hurt him, aren’t you?” Andi whirled back to the remaining IV pumps—one of them was fentanyl—and she cranked it up. “Do you even know what you’re doing?”
“Yes. Do you?” Austin challenged her—no, he was challenging Damian—and his voice was low and full of menace that hadn’t been there just before. Something about the man had changed. He was bigger—how?—and his clothes were tighter, and his wristwatch’s band snapped. It didn’t make sense to her, but then nothing for the last three hours really had, had it? She bit her lips to keep her panic to herself, and focused on Damian instead.
“Let me do it,” she demanded, stopping his hand with her own.
Damian looked at her darkly. “It’s not safe.”
“None of tonight has been safe!” Her hand clenched around his. He would have to pry her off to continue. “And medical procedures aren’t safe. That’s why generally you get people’s permission before doing them!”
“We don’t have time,” Damian growled.
“He was my patient last night, and he’s still my patient now. You will have to hurt me before I let you hurt him,” she hissed.
“You don’t know what you’re getting into,” Damian protested.
She was using all of her strength against him and she hadn’t even made him budge. It wasn’t fair—it would have to be words or nothing. “But I do. This is my job, remember? I’ve had way more experience at this kind of thing than you. So let me help.”
He was an immovable mountain determined to not let her pass, and his eyes were glazed over. Even though he was looking right at her, she knew he couldn’t see her—he was looking too hard into his past.
“Just trust me, Damian,” she whispered.
His attention snapped to the here and now. She thought she saw a stricken look on his face, but then it was gone as if it had never been there.
“Just this once,” she promised.
His golden gaze poured over her, and then it was like he was seeing her again—here, in the flesh, beside him—and he swallowed. “Okay,” he said, relenting. He passed the bracelet over. “Do you remember where it was?”
“I really fucking hope so,” Andi muttered, pulling all of her silver rings off to throw them to the ground.
Together they worked on Zach. She cut the delicate tissues keeping loops of bowel in place with her bracelet’s edge, attempting to avoid arteries and organ damage. Damian gently pulled the looping organ out of him, putting it in a messy pile beside Zach’s hips as they gutted him like a Halloween pumpkin. Austin breathed down their necks the entire time.
Where had she seen that glimmer earlier? Was it even there? What if it’d been some sleepless trick of her imagination? What if Zach died right now—because of her? After seeing Jessica die, she couldn’t fucking take that. And how the shit-fuck-hell were they going to get all of these pieces back inside the man? Just because she wasn’t a butcher didn’t mean she was a surgeon. And none of this shit was sterile and…and…and…
“You’ve got this. It’s okay,” Damian told her.
She didn’t dare look over at him.
“Keep going.” He put his hand on hers, and she found the strength to go on.
“Moon’s nigh,” Austin growled. “Step away before—”
“I’m not losing him,” Damian said. Oh God, how many times had she heard doctors say that right before they did lose someone?
“But you lost Michael,” Austin went on, and it was like he was speaking around too many teeth.
Andi tugged up one more layer. She’d torn a small artery, so the basin of Zach’s abdomen was filling up with a slow bleed, but… “Oh my God,” she whispered, as something small and silver glimmered inside of him like a fish.
“Found it.” Damian’s hand darted into Zach and lifted a small-shining-something the size of a half-dollar before ripping it into shreds—right before Austin’s fallen wristwatch began alarming. Damian’s expression stayed intense as he took two quick steps away from the bed—even though Zach looked like half of an all-you-can-eat cannibal buffet. What the fuck?
“Moon’s full,” he told her before she could ask like that was an explanation. “Either it works or it doesn’t.”
That made absolutely no sense to her. “We can’t just leave him like that!” She ran for the bed, and Damian caught her, picking her up and turning her around so that her back was to the bed.
“Don’t look!” he commanded sharply as she tried to turn her head.
Andi obeyed him but only barely, especially when worrisomely disgusting sounds began behind her. “Why?” she asked in a hiss.
Damian brought his forehead to hers to trap it, his golden eyes shining bright. “Do you ever stop with the questions, princess?”
She shook her head, rocking it against his. “No. Never.” And then she winced as it sounded like bones began to break, accompanied by a wet slurping that had no place in a hospital. He closed his eyes as if in prayer, and then when the sounds stopped he rose up to look, and it was like she saw a mighty weight lifted from his shoulders in real time, as he happily sighed.
“Okay,” Damian breathed, before giving her a triumphant grin. “It’s over. Don’t scream.”
Andi slowly turned around, like a contestant on a game show nervous to see what she’d won. Both men were gone, and in their place were two motherfuckingly huge wolves now panting behind her. Each of them was the size of a couch, wide shouldered but lean and long from nose to tail-tip. One of them had the same rust colored fur as Austin’s hair in mottled splotches across its body as it shook its shaggy head, and the other was an almost scatter-camouflage combination of white, black, and gray.
Damian walked over to them like he knew them because—she realized—he did. “I’m glad to see you back in one piece,” he addressed the one that had to be Zach. “I don’t know what the fuck you did to yourself, though. We’ll figure it out later—when you can talk.” He then went over to the sink and started washing his hands.
They were werewolves.
Her hands. Were covered. In werewolf blood.
Andi pressed them away from her, holding them out at arm’s length. Zach’s wolf whined while Austin’s gnashed its teeth at Damian, before giving her a baleful look.
“Yeah, I know,” Damian answered in response, like he understood them, drying his hands off before pulling out his phone. “Max is already on his way.”
Andi didn’t care who the fuck Max was right now; she couldn’t take much more strange tonight. “So…Austin…and Zach are werewolves?” Her voice went high as she said it aloud because it was so dang crazy, and yet here they were, carnivores the size of pro-linebackers, and she was close enough to see their claws and fangs. She skittered around the edge of the room to where the sink was, and then Austin growled. She quickly stepped to hide behind Damian.
“Well, I can hardly deny it when she’s standing right here, gentlemen,” Damian said. “Plus, she’s saved your life twice now, Zach. That’s a blood debt. If you ask me, you both owe her.”
Andi tried to wash her hands super thoroughly without turning her back on the two massive killing machines, and it was hard—especially when the gray one shuffled around Damian to look at her more clearly. Its eyes were blue and piercing under an intelligent brow.
“Zach, Andi. Andi, Zach,” Damian said.
What were you supposed to do when you were introduced to a werewolf? Andi thought of curtsying and then stopped from manically laughing at herself but only barely.
“Hi puppy,” she squeaked instead.
Damian laughed. “Wait until I tell Grim that.”
Andi tentatively reached her hand out, and Damian’s mood changed. “What do you think you’re doing?” he snapped. She yanked her hand back and held it to her chest like it was wounded.
“Petting a werewolf? Maybe? Should I have asked for permission first? I don’t know.”
“You don’t pet werewolves,” Damian said, every word punctuated with disbelief.
“Why not?”
He blinked at her. “Because…they’re…they’re monsters.”
Zach went down on all fours like the world’s largest stuffed wolf and let his tongue loll out as if to debate that fact.
“So?” she asked, biting her lips and creeping up on Zach slowly. His ears were as big as her hands, and they looked so soft.
“They’re also men, the vast majority of the time. Just because they’re fuzzy now, don’t let it fool you.”
Andi crossed her arms. “So, it was entirely okay for me to have my hands in Zach’s guts when he was a man a few minutes ago, but right now, I can’t pet him?”
Austin gnashed his teeth at her as if to emphasize this point, whereas Zach sat back, and…beat his tail. Which was intentionally doglike, if you asked her. His brother looked utterly disgusted with him. Damian yanked the room’s curtains shut and sat on the visitor couch, closing his eyes. Which meant he wouldn’t see if she pet Zach. She leaned out and Damian spoke up again, without looking. “Don’t.”
“Don’t what?” she asked, not moving.
“Don’t think that I don’t know what you’re doing,” he answered her.
“But…” she protested.
Damian’s golden eyes opened and took all of her in. “I need to think, and I’m tired of words.”
All he wanted was a moment to himself. Just one moment, to clear his head and think things through—and somehow stay angry. At her. Because everything about her made him weak. He was angry that she’d seen him for what he was and hadn’t run, angry that he wanted to let her in, angry that all of his attempts to frighten her away tonight hadn’t done a fucking thing—not even when she’d almost died from a lurker. She should be cowering somewhere, mind broken, utterly panicked, begging him to take her home—not trying to pet his werewolf best friend like he was some goddamned Fido.
But she couldn’t even give him that—because of course she couldn’t, when had she ever done anything easily?—and he opened his eyes up and saw her standing there looking bereft.
There, he had what he wanted. Right?
Zach cocked an eyebrow at him meaningfully.
Goddammit.
Damian moved over on the couch. “Come here, Andi.”
Her eyes narrowed. “Do you think you can just order me around all the time?”
“NOW,” he barked.
She didn’t move a muscle. She really wasn’t going to listen to him. He was tempted to lunge over the wolves and pick her up to get her away from them and then do whatever the fuck he wanted to her, but instead, he collapsed dramatically backward and clutched at his rib cage.
“Damian?” Her voice rose in an arc of worry as she rushed to his side.
“It’s just…I…,” he said, mock-groaning as her hands fluttered, chasing his. Up close, she smelled amazing, and then her hands were on his chest and he wanted them elsewhere—wanted more of everything with her—and he forgot to keep up the act.
“You!” she shouted, shoving at him the second she realized.
“I did hurt there. For a second,” he lied, smirking.
God, she smelled so right. And an unwise part of him wanted to wrap her in his arms, to just breathe her in, and know that she was whole and okay. He snuck his arm around her waist, ready to hold onto her if she tried to move away.
“Just…stay away from the wolves, okay? They have more teeth than sense.”
She rocked away and stopped touching him, but she didn’t stand up. “I’m getting a strong current of pot-kettle-black here.”
He snorted. “Good, because I’d tell you the same thing about my dragon. We share the same body, but he isn’t me. And he’s not pettable, either.”
Why not? his dragon asked him.
Not-the-fuck-now, Damian replied, making sure that none of his internal exchange showed upon his face.
“If he’s not you, then who is he?” Andi asked, her brow furrowing.
Damian closed his eyes and groaned in pain for real this time. “It’s too complicated…”
And when he opened his eyes, she was frowning at him again. “Why won’t you ever answer anything?”
“Because, princess, just because,” he answered like that was enough, although from her expression it clearly wasn’t. She was so close beside him now and his body roared to move against hers. His arm was already looped behind her; it would be nothing to scoop her into his lap and hold her there—pressed against him. How come her presence—the very smell of her, even!—kept clouding his mind like some kind of drug, making him hyperaware of her proximity at all times, and aching for his next hit? No one had ever made him feel like that before—which was yet another reason to be angry.
Because this was not who he was. He was Damian Blackwood, in control of himself and his dragon—always, completely—at all times. If he lost control, people died.
But he reached out against all of his better judgment and stroked the blue streak in her hair off her cheek and back behind her ear. Her eyes were wide, and her lips were parted, and all of this was her fault somehow. Even if she wasn’t doing it on purpose, it was still happening. He had to get away from her—or closer, now, dear God, yes—there was no in-between.
Then he heard a sound coming to save him. Maximillian and his Forgetting Fire. Damian dropped his hand, back to business, and ignored the noises coming from the wolves that sounded suspiciously like laughter.
“About damn time,” Damian said, standing suddenly, leaving her hanging again. Andi fought not to sway. He’d wanted to kiss her, and she didn’t know what she wanted, but she hadn’t really wanted to stop him, and then a switch inside him flipped. How could he turn himself on and off like that? He was glowering now and Andi wondered if he even realized when he did it, or if being the definition of mercurial was just his natural state.
There was a crackling sound outside—increasing in volume—like either a giant was tramping through a forest, or the whole building was on fire. She kept expecting to hear a Code Red announced as the crackling sound got louder, passed them, presumably reached the end of the hall, then turned back before silencing right outside their door.
There was a rap on the glass. “Damian?”
“We need at least two spheres in here, but I’ll take four if you’ve got them,” Damian said, loud enough to be heard. The glass door slid open, and four marble sized things rolled in.
Damian picked up all of them and held out two in one palm toward the wolves. They each daintily took one into their mouths, and as they did so, Andi watched them completely disappear and she yelped in surprise. Damian ignored her. “You can come in now, Max.”
The door opened all the way, but there was no one there. Just the hallway.
“A…ghost?” she guessed aloud. She knew there was such a thing as werewolves now, so why the fuck not?
“No, spheres. A magical object that protects the outside world from seeing us.” Damian handed one over to her and she took it. She didn’t feel any different, but now she could see the wolves again, and the ghost turned out to be a very-pale skinned man, clad mostly in black leather, who had what looked like welders goggles on over a mohawk of ice blond hair that wasn’t spiked but rested to one side like Death’s horse’s mane. He held out a lantern that had all its windows covered—for now.
A second later, Damian joined them there, in their hidden world just under other people’s noses. Maximillian coughed and not-so-subtly swung his lantern in Andi’s direction. Damian shook his head. “Get the boys home and stay out of trouble. Hunters might be present.”
“Understood,” Maximillian said with a nod, then opened the door again. The wolves ran out under fluorescent lights, their claws clicking on the linoleum tile, even more improbable outside the room than they’d been inside it. Zach looked back at her and gave her a short ayoo as she waved helplessly at him. Without him here to distract her, everything was real again. And it was all going to really hit her—soon.
Damian turned. “This is your floor, right?”
After everything she’d seen tonight, she wasn’t sure anymore. “It was,” she answered.
He gave her a suggestive look. “Can I borrow some bath wipes?”
Andi blinked. Was he being serious? After all that?
“I mean, if you didn’t use them all up on your doctor friends,” he went on.
She inhaled, thought about hitting his arm hard, and then settled on saying, “You know there’s something wrong with you, right?”
“It’s called being incorrigible,” he said. “Come on, where’s your locker?”