Lover Unleashed

As the pads of her toenails went from pink to gray, she knew she had to come to terms with where she was. And was not there a fine analogy to her current physical position.

Broken. Useless. Deadweight.

The breakdown that finally ensued carried with it no tears or sobs. Instead, the snap was demarcated by a grim resolve.

“Payne!”

At the sound of Jane’s voice, she closed her eyes. This was not the savior she wanted. Her twin . . . she needed her twin to do right by her.

“Please get Vishous,” she said hoarsely. “Please.”

Jane’s voice got very close. “Let’s get you up off the floor.”

“Vishous.”

There was a click and she knew that the alarm she had not been able to reach had been sounded.

“Please,” she groaned. “Get Vishous.”

“Let’s get you—”

“Vishous.”

Silence. Until the door was thrown open.

“Help me, Ehlena,” she heard Jane say.

Payne was aware that her own mouth was moving, but she went deaf as the two females hefted her back upon the bed and resettled her legs, lining them up parallel to each other before covering them with white sheeting.

Whilst various and sundry cleaning endeavors occurred both upon the bed and the floor, she focused across the room at the white wall she had stared at for the eternity since she had been moved into this space.

“Payne?”

When she didn’t reply, Jane repeated, “Payne. Look at me.”

She shifted her eyes over and felt nothing as she stared into the worried face of her twin’s shellan. “I need my brother.”

“Of course I’ll get him. He’s in a meeting right now, but I’ll have him come down before he leaves for the night.” Long pause. “Can I ask you why you want him?”

The even, level words told her clearly that the good healer was no imbecile.

“Payne?”

Payne shut her eyes and heard herself say, “He made me a promise when this all started. And I need him to keep it.”

* * *

In spite of the fact that she was a ghost, Jane’s heart was still capable of stopping in her chest.

And as she eased down onto the edge of the hospital bed, there was nothing moving behind her sternum. “What promise was that,” she said to her patient.

“It is a matter betwixt the pair of us.”

The hell it was, Jane thought. Assuming that she was guessing right.

“Payne, there might be something else we can do.”

Although what that was, she hadn’t a clue. The X-rays were showing that the bones had been aligned properly, Manny’s skills having fixed them perfectly. That spinal cord, though—that was the wild card. She’d had a hope that some regeneration of nerves might be possible—she was still learning about the vampire body’s capabilities, many of which seemed like pure magic compared to what humans could do in terms of healing.

But no luck. Not in this case.

And it didn’t take an Einstein extrapolation to figure out what Payne was looking for.

“Be honest with me, shellan of my twin.” Payne’s crystal eyes locked on hers. “Be honest with yourself.”

If there was one thing that Jane hated about being a doctor, it was the judgment call. There were a lot of incidents when decisions were clear: Some guy presented at the ER with his hand in an ice cooler and a tourniquet around his arm? Reattach the appendage and run those nerves back where they needed to be. Woman in labor with a preemergent cord? C-section her. Compound fracture? Open it up and set it.

But not everything was that “simple.” On a regular basis, the gray fog of maybe-this, maybe-that rolled in, and she had to stare into the cloudy and the murky—

Oh, who was she kidding.

The clinical side of this equation had reached its correct sum. She just didn’t want to believe the answer.

“Payne, let me go get Mary—”

“I did not wish to speak with the counseling female two nights ago, and I shan’t speak unto her now. This is over for me, healer. And as much as it pains me to call upon my twin, please go and get him. You are a good female and you should not be the one.”

Jane looked at her hands. She had never once used them to kill. Ever. It was antithetical not just to her calling and her commitment to her profession, but her as a person.

And yet as she thought about her hellren and the time they’d spent together when she’d woken up with him, she knew she couldn’t let him come here and do what Payne wanted him to: He’d taken a small step back from the precipice he’d been about to jump off of, and there was nothing Jane wouldn’t do to keep him from that ledge.

“I can’t go get him,” she said. “I’m sorry. I just won’t put him in that position.”

The moan that rose from Payne’s throat was despair from the heart given wings and released. “Healer, this is my choice. My life. Not yours. You wish to be a true savior, then make it look accidental, or get me a weapon and I’ll do it. But leave me not in this state. I cannot bear it, and you have done no good for your patient if I continue thus.”

On some level, Jane had known this was coming. She had seen it clear as the pale shadows in the dark X- rays, the ones that told her everything should be working right—and if it wasn’t, the spinal cord had been irreparably injured.

She stared at those legs that lay under the sheet so still and thought of the Hippocratic oath she had taken years ago: “Do no harm” was the first commandment.

It was hard not to see Payne as having been harmed if she were left like this—especially because she hadn’t wanted the procedure in the first place. Jane had been the one urging the salvation, pushing it on the female for her own reasons—and V had been the same.

“I shall find a way,” Payne said. “Somehow, I shall find a way.”

Hard not to believe that.

And there was a greater chance of safe success if Jane helped in some manner—Payne was weak, and any weapon in her hand would be a disaster waiting to happen.

“I don’t know if I can do this.” The words left Jane’s mouth slowly. “You’re his sister. I don’t know if he’d ever forgive me.”

“He need never know.”

God, what a bind. If she were stuck in that bed, she would feel exactly as Payne did, and she would want someone to help her execute her final wish. But the burden of keeping something like that from V? How could she do that?

Except . . . the only thing worse would be his not coming back from that dark side of himself. And killing his sister? Well, that was an express train right into that part of his neighborhood, wasn’t it.

The hand of her patient found her own. “Help me, Jane. Help me. . . .”

As Vishous left the nightly meeting with the Brotherhood and headed for the training center’s clinic, he was feeling more like himself—and not in a bad way. The sex with his shellan had been mission critical for them both, a kind of reboot that hadn’t just been physical.

God, it had felt good to be back with his female. Yeah, sure, there were problems still waiting for him . . . and, well, shit, the closer he got to the clinic, the more the mantle of stress returned, hitting his shoulders like a pair of cars: He had seen his sister at the beginning of every evening and then again at dawn. For the first few days,