Destiny's Child (Kitsune series Book 3) (6 page)

Sometime later the mental haze thinned enough for me to notice that the IV drip was gone.  A woman sat in a chair near my bed.  Her hand covered mine.  My bed’s side-rail was down and her head lay on the bed, face turned toward me.  Long, golden hair hung past her shoulders. 
Cassie. 
There were dark circles under closed, puffy eyes.  She’d been crying, here at my bed a long while I suspected.  I was touched, and annoyed. 

How am I supposed to resent you as a rival for Shaun when you’re so nice to me?

I managed a cough.  It hurt like hell.  I groaned, closing my eyes. 

Cassie stirred.

Dealing with this was more than I was up for just yet, so I made an inarticulate sound in place of conversation and let myself drop off again.

The next time I surfaced I felt much improved, except for a raging hunger.  My stomach growled at me.  Daylight brightened the window curtains.  Hours had passed.  And Cassie was still there, playing mom; the mom I hadn’t known of until last month.  I pulled my hand out from under hers, trying to work up enough spit to say something.  My lips felt cracked and dry as I moistened them with my tongue.  I managed a vague, inarticulate sound, trying to get her attention because she
so
needed to go home and get some real rest.

Cassie snapped awake, talking before her eyes pried themselves open, “Hush, love.  You’re safe.  Everything’s all right.  Momma’s here.”

“Mohhhm,” incredibly thirsty, I croaked the word.

“That’s right,” she said.  “Momma’s here.”

Taliesina
churred
in my mind, a happy sound of inquiry. 
Mommy!

“I’m not going to let anyone hurt you ever again,” Cassie promised.

I tried to squeeze out another word or two, but couldn’t.  I flopped my head and stared at the nightstand.  A pitcher and cup rested there.  I wanted a drink.  Bad.

“Oh!”  Cassie reached over and filled a cup, bringing it to my face.  “Ice chips.  They want you to start on these and not go straight to liquids just yet.”  She dropped some of the ice in my mouth. 

I sucked the cold hardness, savoring the relief. 

“It would have been better, if you had to be hurt, to have been in human form.  You could have healed yourself by turning into a fox.  Still can, if you’ve the strength.”

Now she tells me how it works.

Virgil entered the room, only to be impaled on Cassie’s words.  “You’d better not have a job for me.  I’m not going anywhere until Grace is ready to leave this place.”

“Necessity never waits on convenience.”  Virgil approached the bed.  He shifted his gaze to me but kept the conversation going with Cassie.  “But this is your job.  Apparently there are a number of ex-ISIS members that have been kicked loose from the system for one reason or another.  Grace will need protection while I get things sorted out.”

“Well, as long you’re here, tell me what these nuts wanted at Shaun’s,” she said.

Virgil touched the bed’s siderailing, standing opposite of Cassie.  He said, “Grace is tired.  She needs rest to heal.  We can take this discussion out into the hall.”  He switched his attention to me.  “I’m glad you made it, Grace.  I was worried…”

Long repressed snarkiness stirred within me.  “Yeah, for Cassie.  You kept calling me by her name.”

“It’s not like I had both of you there in your fox forms for comparison,” he said.  “Hey, I brought you a gift.”  He held up a tawny, stuffed bunny with an equally stuffed orange carrot.  He put the creature on the bed next to me, and grinned.  “In case you get hungry later, my little fox.”

“What do you mean by ‘my’?” Cassie demanded.

“Grace works for me now, part time anyway.”

“What?  When did hell freeze over?  No way am I allowing that.”  Her voice went low, threatening, as her narrowed eyes blazed.  “That operation against the Miko was a one-time thing.”

“Grace is a minor,” Virgil said.  “The Human Potential Institute has custody of her, and we have a contract with them for her services.”

Cassie’s hands choked the bed’s side-rail beside her.  I half expected the steel to bend and break at any second.  She said, “Among my people, Grace is considered a child for the first few hundred years, and under
my
clan sign, not HPI’s.”

First few hundred years?  How long am I gonna live?

Virgil used a black-gloved hand, specifically his pointer finger, to stab the air, emphasizing a point.  “But you’re not among your people.  The laws of the United States apply.”

A rapping at the door stopped a knock-down-drag-out in its tracks.  The door opened and Shaun entered, eyes shifting, absorbing the antagonism instantly.  His jaw knotted with anger, but his voice emerged as calm and gentle as his eyes.  “If you two are going to fight, do it outside.  Grace doesn’t need this.”

The hell I don’t!  Someone get me popcorn and a drink.  No, on second thought, what I need is to be left alone with Shaun so he can soothe me with his bedside manner.

“I’m going,” Virgil said.  “I just wanted Grace to know we’ve got guards on her door and in the surrounding rooms.  More of my own people are on the way.  Until they get here, were relying on local law enforcement. Also, I’ve notified your mother”—his eyes flicked to Cassie a moment—“your
other
mother, that you’re here.  Your school knows, too, so there won’t be a problem about missing classes for a while.  The only thing you need to concentrate on is getting better so I can work your tails off.”

At that last comment, Cassie shot him a look ready to kill.  He hurried out of the room with her a few steps behind.  I think I saw her reaching for her gun.

SIX

“A bed of coals, head stuffed with woes.

Your kisses are fire, wounding my soul.”

                      
                               —Bed of Coals

                           
                               Elektra Blue

Shaun came around the bed and sat where the siderail was down.  “So, you want to tell me what you were doing in my house when I’m not there, and the bad guys are?”

I rolled my eyes back in my head and forced a cough that actually didn’t need much coaxing. 
Cough
.  “Fading fast … don’t think I have the strength…”  C
ough, cough.  “
…to take being yelled at.”

“Grace,” he sounded unimpressed with my acting, “you should respect my privacy—I insist on it—but the reason I’m mad is that we almost lost you.  Cassie loves you beyond anything reasonable.  She’d survive anything else—but your death.”

Speaking of love…
  “Cassie’s staying with you.  Do you and she …  are you two…?”  I couldn’t finish the question.  I couldn’t even look at him while asking this much.  I felt my face flushing.

“We’ve been friends a long time.  She came into my life soon after I lost my parents—more of a cool big sister than anything else.”

Relief flooded me.  I could accept Cassie as my birth mother a whole lot easier than as a rival for Shaun.

“Why do you ask?  Want someone to distract her a little?  Must be tough, all that intensity and passion trained on you twenty-four seven.  If it were my place, I’d say she’s a tad obsessive-compulsive where you’re concerned.  Not that that’s a big revelation to you, huh?”  Casually, Shaun warmed my hand in his.

A delightful thrill shot through my body.  I had a mental vision of Shaun, gloriously naked, in bed of me—and of guards storming in to arrest him for having sex with a very willing minor.  I shook off the daydream with a sigh.  “So, uh, are guards really necessary?  ISIS probably won’t show up here when they know everyone and their dog is watching for them.”

“Virgil’s counting on them being exactly that stupid, especially if I’m around too.  He’s using us to draw them out of hiding.  I don’t like it, but I see the necessity of ending this by getting to them quickly.  And this way, it’s a battlefield of our choosing.”

“What about other patients getting in the line of fire?”

“Not in this wing.  It’s been closed for a few weeks now for remodeling.”

I could see I had little choice, so I put on a brave face.  “I’m getting combat pay for this right?”

“I’d insist on it.  I’ll be taking shifts to make sure you’re a
ll right.”

Wonderful.
  It made getting shot and blown across a room well worth it.  “Sorry to put you to so much trouble,”
but not much.

A deep voice cut between Shaun and me.  “I can take care of Grace just fine.”

Startled, I jerked my hand out from under Shaun’s, as if I’d been caught in a cookie jar.  My gaze slid to the door where Fenn was framed.  His usually brown eyes had warmed to amber, flecked with gold.  The expression on his face was seriously annoyed.  The rest of him was mega hot.  He wore black denim jeans, boots, tee shirt, and for contrast, an ice-blue windbreaker that couldn’t be that effective now that we were at the tail end of November.  Then again, he was half human and half kachina.  For all I knew, cold to him might be a full-blown blizzard.

While my heart wanted Shaun, I wasn’t immune to Fenn’s broody, bad-boy charm. 

In the shadows of my mind, my inner fox yapped agreement.

Fenn stalked into the room, stopping in front of Shaun.  The air shivered as if a subliminal growl had ghosted by.  Staring down at Shaun, Fenn vibrated with potential violence.  His voice came out with a file’s raspy edge, “You can go check out the rest of the floor.  Grace will be alright with me.”

I wasn’t so sure, but said nothing, putting off the moment when Fenn would turn his attention to me.

Shaun stood and breezed past Fenn, heading for the door.  “Sure.  Grace, holler if you need anything.  I won’t be far, and neither will Cassie.”

“’Kay.”

Fenn waited until Shaun was gone, then turned his amber eyes on me.  The stern irritation bled from his face, leaving anxious concern.  He sighed.  “Tell me you’re alright.”

“Getting there.”  My voice was harsh and broken.  I pointed at the ice chips on the nightstand.  “Can you get me those?”

“Oh, sure.” 

He moved around the bed and started feeding them to me.  With my throat better lubricated, I tried to explain, “I didn’t mean to stand you up.  I just got pulled into something.”

“At
his
house.”

“I was visiting his sister, actually.”

“Ghost girl?”

“Yeah, it’s the anniversary of her death, and she didn’t want to face it alone.  I was going to call you and explain when—”

“Your gift for finding trouble kicked in.”

“Yeah.  Please don’t be mad at me.”

“I am, but not for missing our breakfast date, though I waited for two hours at that stupid restaurant for you, totally starving since I didn’t want to order before you got there.  I’m pissed because the second you saw trouble coming, you should have called me.”

“I can’t carry a cell phone.  They get fried by all the
crossing over
I do.”

“There’s a house phone at Shaun’s place, right?”

My near perfect memory created an image in my head of Shaun’s office, before it got—good grammar disengaging—blowed the hell up.  There had been a phone there, but I’d had no chance to use it.  I decided to change the subject slightly.  “How about if I make sure to call you next time?”

“Not good enough.  Now you owe me breakfast
and
dinner, and
I’m
picking the restaurants.”

My turn to sigh.  “Fine, but no fish tacos, or bison burgers.”

He stood there, leaning on the siderail that was still up, his back to the hospital windows.  He stared like he was engraving my face in his memory, a precaution against the storms of Fate that inevitably found me.  He said, “From the moment I saw you, I knew we were tied together, for good and ill.”

I shielded my face with one hand.  “I must look like a train wreck.”

He pulled my hand away and lifted my chin.  “Considering all you’ve been through, I’m amazed you care.”  He smiled.  His hand tightened on mine.  “Since you’ve started taking that martial arts stuff from Shaun, I’ve developed an interest in the Far East.  You know, the Japanese believe that some people are meant for each other, that an unseen red thread ties them together, that they will find each other in time—when the Goddess of Love gets around to lending a helping hand.”