and her eyes were closed, thick sable lashes lying on her smooth skin. Upturned nose, full lips, Audrey Hepburn cheekbones. Her life was fading. James turned his palms up and stared down at them, and then he felt them begin to warm. Turning them downward again, he laid them over the exit wound in her chest, ignoring the blood and gore.
Her blood was flowing as his hands grew warmer, and he sensed very strongly the extremely rare Belladonna Antigen every vampire had possessed as a human. She was almost family.
The part of his family he had rejected. And yet, he could not turn away from her. Wouldn’t have, even if he could.
As his hands grew hot, he pressed them between the woman’s breasts. His palms immediately began to emit that familiar, yellow-gold luminescence. He shifted his body and tried to block the light from the spectators around him, and prayed that his sister would be able to hold their attention long enough.
James felt the professor’s chest grow hot, matching the energy of his palms. He saw the glow of his hands reflected there and knew the healing was beginning to take. He felt that sensation again, the one of his soul sort of reaching out from his body to connect to something more, something bigger, far beyond any individual sense of self. There was a greater whole and it was one, and he was part of it, in those moments.
His gaze shifted suddenly and without warning to Lucy Lanfair’s face, and at that same instant her eyes flew open. Brown eyes. Staring straight into his.
“I know you,” she whispered.
“Easy. Take it easy.”
“But I know you. I know you.”
And then her eyes shifted lower, to his hands on her chest, and she saw all the blood—and there was a lot of it. She started sucking in openmouthed, shallow breaths, and he knew she was on the edge of panic. “Oh God, Oh God, Oh God—”
“It’s okay,” he told her. “It’s okay. It’s not as bad as it looks.”
“What … what’s that light? What are you doing?”
The glow intensified, just as it always did at the end of a healing. It grew brighter and then died, just that fast. Like the flash of a firefly on a summer country night.
“Get the fuck off her, pal!”
A pair of hands gripped his shoulders, jerking him bodily up and away from her. He’d been unaware, for a few ticks of the clock, of what was happening around him. Other black coats had emerged—some from the studio, others from the dark-colored vans that were lining the street. An ambulance had backed up to the curb, and the medics sprang into action the second James was no longer blocking their way.
He was weak. He was always a little weak after a healing, and this made two in one night, only a bit more than an hour apart. He felt disoriented, too. Il-logically, he didn’t want anyone else near this woman, and he started to push his way back to her, but his sister touched his arm.
There’s nothing we can do now, she said, mentally. Too many witnesses, and we don’t want these suits to know who the hell we are, J.W. Not if they’re who I think they are.
But they’re taking her—
We’ll get her. We will. But later. This is too risky.
Even as they carried on the mental conversation, one of the medics looked up. “There’s not a mark on her. I don’t understand. Where the hell did all this blood come from?”
“Just get her into the ambulance,” one of the men in black ordered, and then he turned, scanning the crowd—in search, James knew, of him.
The man had a scar running from the outer corner of his left eye, across his cheek, reaching almost to the center of his chin, and eyes the color of wet cement.
“You,” he said loudly, pointing at James, who was some twenty feet away. “I want to talk to you.”
Brigit tugged his arm. “We have to go. Now.”
He knew she was right. But it was killing him to leave Lucy Lanfair. Even as his sister tugged him toward her waiting car, James was looking back, watching them lift the gurney on which the beautiful professor lay, strapped down now, into the back of the ambulance.
She was looking straight back at him. She didn’t reach out, and she didn’t speak, but she couldn’t seem to take her eyes off him, either.
And then they closed the doors, and Brigit gave him a shove.
“I said wait!” Scarface commanded. He was reaching into his coat now, and James had little doubt he was about to pull a gun.
They’d made it back to the car, and James reached for the passenger door just as Brigit started the motor with a roar. Her window was down, and she was looking back at the man. As James predicted, he was leveling a gun.
“Freeze! Don’t make me—”
Brigit lifted a hand, palm up, fingers loosely touching her thumb.
“Don’t kill him!” James shouted.
She flicked her fingers open as her gaze intensified, and a beam of light pulsed from her eyes toward the man. Something exploded, shaking the sidewalk, and even the street, so powerfully that several onlookers fell down. Dust and rubble rained down as people ran screaming for cover. At the same instant, Brigit was gunning the motor again, spinning the tires, shifting rapidly through the gears as she sped away.
James turned in his seat, wondering if the debris falling on the crowd included bits of Scarface. But no, it seemed to be a magazine stand that had stood a few yards from him.
“Don’t worry,” Brigit told him. “The vendor had left his post to gawk at the lady who was gunned down on the sidewalk. No casualties, though I think letting that scar-cheeked bastard live was a mistake.”
“You sound just like Rhiannon, who, I think, originated the phrase ‘Kill them all and let the gods sort them out.’”
“Funny you should mention her.”
He closed his eyes. “Tell me that’s not where we’re going.”
“Who the hell else is going to be able to tell us what’s going on, J.W.?”
“I keep telling you, I go by James now.”
“Yeah. You do keep telling me that. It’s irritating. I wish you’d stop.”
She took a corner so fast that he was mashed up against the door, and he knew there was no going back now.
He’d been sucked back in. Just as he’d always pretty much known he would be. His family were not the kind who let go easily.
The ambulance attendant was sticking a needle into her arm the second the doors swung shut, and Lucy gasped at the unexpected pinch of it. Then she looked up at the young man and said, “I really think I’m all right.”
“Just relax, Professor Lanfair. You’re in good hands.”
“How do you know my na … uh …” Ocean
