Heather laughed. “Look for a tall nun.”
There was some commotion Rod could hear in the background. Someone shouted, ‘Damn, he’s here. We gotta hide.’
“What?” Rod asked, but the phone was dead.
***
Omar was deeply asleep but the insistently buzzing phone on the nightstand beside the bed woke him eventually. He was annoyed enough to pick it to see who was calling him in the middle of the night.
He listened to the hospital administrator tell him they lost his wife.
“No, she’s not with me!” Omar shouted. “She was supposed to be sedated. She just had surgery. How could she disappear?”
Omar was now thoroughly awake and angry. He threw on his clothes and hauled ass out the door. He knew there wasn’t any exit other than the one in the lobby of the clinic, so he sped down in the elevator after listening in the stairwell to see if he could hear Michelle moving on the stairs.
When he arrived in the lobby, a man was on the night shift duty at the reception desk. Omar asked if a dark haired woman had left the building and the guy politely denied it.
Omar looked deeply into the man’s eyes, mesmerizing him, and repeated the question. He got the same negative reply. No way the man could be lying. Omar learned an interesting fact, though. There was a way to get into the main hospital from a bridge on the top floor.
Omar ran up the stairs to make sure Michelle wasn’t on her way down. He stopped to check her room the tenth floor.
The nurse came out from behind her desk and followed him down the hallway, speaking to him in rapid Spanish, which he couldn’t understand.
Omar stopped first at Leilanie’s room. She was deeply asleep in her bed, with three of his progeny safely tucked in her tummy. That was the good news. Michelle’s room was empty.
He checked across the hall in the room where he’d left Heather and Mike on the floor unconscious. It was a little shocking they were gone. He’d thought they would be passed out for the rest of the night. He reasoned that Michelle probably left with them.
He’d warned them all nicely, Omar decided, with a deep exasperated sigh. First warning: the stunt in the stairwell, making the banister melt. Then the second warning, just to show them not to mess with him, when he’d zonked Heather and Mike with a little lassitude spell.
No more mister-nice-guy, Omar thought, working up a good steaming rage. This was war. He had no doubt he would win, but these people were messing with his future. Their unmitigated audacity infuriated him.
Omar couldn’t help releasing some of his wrath. Just a trickle. The stupid young nurse had to have been asleep not to notice Michelle and two other people leaving the floor she was supposed to oversee.
The nurse saw Omar’s expression as he turned a fearsome frowning stare at her, and started backing away from him, shaking her head, repeating, “No, No, No...”
The fury came out as a fine red mist. It swirled around Omar and then sped like a mini tornado toward the nurse. She saw it coming, and horrified and scared, tried to run, but it homed in on her like a heat seeking missile, surrounding the woman.
She had been young and pretty moments ago. Now she was unconscious on the floor, her face and arms burned almost beyond recognition.
Omar stood there for a moment, staring at what he’d caused by letting out a small ooze of his emotions. He felt a little sorry for the woman, but not enough to prick his conscience badly. She’d recover in a few years and be almost good as new.
There was a coffee cup on her desk, so Omar poured it over her and dropped the cup on the floor next to her. Just a silly accident. She was burned by scalding coffee. Who would believe anyone had harmed the beautiful young woman?
He decided to check out the other exit from the clinic.
Omar was a little winded from running up the stairs when he finally found the laboratory on the twelfth floor. The bridge was supposed to be locked at night, but Omar found the door had been jammed to stay open.
He started across the bridge.
Chapter 28
Heather checked several phones in the lab before she found one with a live outside line. She wanted to let Rod and Vincent know they finally had Michelle and needed a fast getaway.
“I’m so used to just clicking Rod’s number on my cell phone, I can’t remember it,” Heather said, looking at the receiver blankly.
Mike recited it to her.
Heather smiled at him and punched in the numbers. “Must be useful, having such a great memory. You just have to see something once...”
Michelle, standing next to Heather in her nun sheet-costume, was frowning. “Something strange is happening. Abigail’s getting hot in my hand. She’s vibrating. And Lucifer’s growling.”
As Heather spoke to Rod on the phone, telling him where they were and to come get them, Michelle held out her hand. She saw the giant diamond oscillating in Michelle’s palm. It was sending out multi-colored bright spears of light in the darkness of the building. The overhead lights were all off in the laboratory this late at night and the gem seemed to glow in the dark.
Mike turned, looking down at the diamond, then at Michelle’s alarmed expression. As a pragmatist he’d never believed in magical or paranormal phenomena, but having physically experienced a jolting hum of energy percolate throughout his whole body just from holding Michelle’s hand, he was disposed to take her seriously.
They had been moving toward the front door to the lab, but now Mike turned and hurried to the back to look out the window.
“Damn, Omar’s coming across the bridge,” Mike shouted. He rushed back to the two women, who were glancing around in panic for a place to hide.
Michelle said, “I think the diamond just gave
