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Jesus, she sounded nuts. Flat-out insane.
“You have to believe me,” she said with some urgency.
“Oh, I already know what the mountain has to offer.” The female glanced out toward where they had come from, where the summit was. “I know where my home is. That’s not the problem. It’s imagining being up here, being anywhere, without Daniel… that’s what is killing me.”
Xhex thought back to the night before, all those hours when she’d been sure that she was going tolose John, that maybe he’d already left her in all the ways that counted.
She was not a hugger, not by a long shot—and certainly not with people she didn’t know. But there was no way she wasn’t going to reach out.
With a heavy soul, she embraced the stranger in front of her.
“I’m so sorry,” Xhex said as she closed her eyes.
“Thank you,” the female—Lydia—said.
They were standing together, in commiseration, when something moved in the shadows once again. But Xhex just ignored it as the scent of a deer came over on the breeze.
Funny how helping someone else made you feel like things were going to be okay in your own life. Not that there was anything wrong in her own, at the moment. She really was fine—her mate had survived his injuries, and at the end of the night, what mattered outside of that?
Nothing. Nothing else fucking counted.
And maybe she had given this female and her tragedy a little direction.
It still didn’t feel like enough to justify all the carrying on, but as a mortal, who the hell was she to judge.
TWENTY-ONE
BACK AT THEPhalen estate, Gus walked into his boss’s bedroom—and was not surprised. Well, he was surprised he was in her private, sleepy-time space, sure. But the decor? He might as well have been in her cavernous front lobby or that dining room or any of the other halls or staircases in the place: Everything was black and white as a chessboard, and the furniture arranged with a decorator’s eye, no mistakes in scale or arrangement.
Nothing personal to any of it, either.
His eyes went to the bed. It was a king, with draping on the wall framing a huge headboard so that it looked like the ceiling was melting and pooling onto the floor.
Did she bring that blond guard here, he thought idly.Did she—
“So here’s where the magic happens,” C.P. said dryly.
As she went over to the bedside table and triggeredsomething, he wondered if she realized she still had his fleece on. Probably. She’d zipped it up.
And since when did he go back to being a fifteen-year-old and liking the look of a piece of his clothing on a girl?
He needed to get a grip—
“What the fuck,” he breathed.
The entire headboard dropped down to reveal a critical care setup, all of the monitoring equipment on swivel arms that could be extended out.
“And the supplies are here.” She went over to what he’d assumed was a bathroom door and opened things. “There’s room for more, too.”
Gus walked toward her and—“Fucking hell, Phalen. Why don’t you just move the whole lab up here?”
Squeezing by her, he entered a room that was big as the row house he’d been raised in. Not only were there portable X-rays and ultrasound machines, there was—
“Even an autoclave?” he muttered as he went deeper through the ER-worthy equipment.
“Anything you want. Anything I need. And there’s a surgical light that drops down from the ceiling out there.”
All of the machines and computers were first-rate and ready to go, and the nursing supplies were worthy of a teaching hospital’s larder, from the bandages to the IV bags.
