Seeing Eye Mate (26 page)

“That’s it,” he whispered. “The meeting was just a cover. He’s been fucking set up. Why the hell didn’t I see it sooner?” Caelan ground his hands around the steering wheel in frustration. While he’d been schmoozing his mate, his brother had been a target, plain and simple.

And Caelan had no idea who in holy hell Dane Christian was.

*

Eli’s head hurt so badly he could hardly lift it off the crappy papery pillow. Wouldn’t do him any good anyway since both his fucking arms were handcuffed to the bed. His goddamned nose itched!

He turned his head toward the door, wincing when a lightning bolt of pain sliced through it, turning his stomach at the same time. Ah Jesus.
Please don’t puke, please don’t puke.
Not again. His abdomen hurt from the number of times he’d done it already.

He wondered if he smelled as bad as he thought he did. Had to, because the tiny little plastic bowl the doc had held to his mouth more than once hadn’t contained half of what had come out of him.

And worse than anything else was the fact he couldn’t remember a fucking thing before waking up face-down on the pavement with that cocksucker’s knee grinding into the middle of his back. Thank God that EMT knew his job, or Eli would probably still be lying there eating gravel while Hayward spat shit at him.

It had taken him awhile to figure things out, but when he had, he’d nearly flipped the bed over in a rage. When he got out of here, Eli was going to smash the fuck out of Hayward’s nose for even thinking he could do something like this.

His head exploded in pain and he groaned. He tried to yank his hands up to his face. The metal gouged into his wrists before he made it further than about four inches up from the bedrail.

Eli dug his heels into the mattress and silently cursed everyone around. Where the fuck did they think he was going to go? He couldn’t even lift his own goddamned head. No way would he be able to stand, let alone walk.

The door opened and let in a stream of hallway light that pierced every millimeter of his skull with what seemed like a barrage of bullets.

“Hayward catches you here and my ass is grass, Caelan.”

“Nobody’s gonna
catch
me here, Stark, least of all Hayward,” Caelan gritted out. “He’s my goddamn brother, did he think I wouldn’t come?”

Ah, sanity returns, Eli thought. Caelan would get him out of this bullshit somehow.

“How’re you feeling, E?”

“Like I got hit by a Mack Truck.” Speaking even hurt. As a shifter, he would heal quicker than the average human, but until then, he hurt just the same.

“You look like it. Who did this to you?” Caelan asked quietly and stood directly over him, blocking out the light from the open door. His eyes widened as he caught sight of Eli’s shackles. “Son of a bitch,” he hissed.

Eli watched a battle pursue inside his twin. His wolf begged for release despite their high profile visibility. The cop outside the door was a shifter too. Hayward must have thought only another one of their kind could stop him if he somehow got loose. He’d have to turn into the fucking Hulk to do that. Even one of his ankles was cuffed to the rail. If laughing wouldn’t hurt so much, he’d be the first one doing it. Hayward must have convinced someone he was a flight risk.

He wasn’t going anywhere. Not until he got to the bottom of why he’d been set up and fingered for the murders.

“Like the new jewelry?” he joked, trying to lighten up the air in the room. His lips ached when he tried to smile. “Don’t know. Never saw a thing as far as I can recall. Got out of the car and wham. Next thing I know, I’m waking up on the ground chowing on the pavement.” Eli inhaled, swallowing back the nausea and fear that flooded his esophagus once again and smelled her. “Tieran’s here?”

“Hell, yeah. Someone’s bound and determined to get you out of the way to get to me, Bro. I’m not stupid. The next to go will be her, whether she believes it or not.”

Eli nodded. “Why wouldn’t she believe it?” He twisted slowly to try and see her around Caelan’s wide torso. When his twin cleared his throat he jerked his gaze back to him. “What’s going on, Cael?”

“How’s my patient?” The booming voice of Dr. Taylor broke the tension in the room. Eli didn’t like the almost disgusted, yet somehow embarrassed look on his brother’s face. “How’s the nausea?” The doctor swept past Caelan as if he weren’t there and descended on Eli with a penlight. Eli yanked his head to the side and immediately regretted the action. “Not any better, I see.”

Eli clenched his hands into fists. It was bad enough some nurse came in to check on him every fifteen minutes to make sure he was still alive. He didn’t need any more tests run. What he needed was a way out of here.

“Can you give him something for the pain, Doc?”

Yes, yes,
Eli silently begged, his eyes suddenly feeling very droopy. Several times since he’d arrived, he’d felt this way. One minute he was wide-awake, the next, he was ready to fall into an abyss.

“No can do, not with a concussion.”

“There’s got to be something,” he heard Caelan ask again.

“Hmm, I can give him something for the nausea, but that’s about it. He’ll need to be watched for the next twenty-four hours or so with this head injury, and since waking him up might be hard enough as it is, we don’t want to mask it with drugs that will make him sleepy.”

The noise faded into the background until a female voice intruded.

“Can he sign these, or should I have his brother?”

Sign what? “I’ll do it,” Eli mumbled, hoping he made some sort of sense. He lifted an eyelid and looked around, wondering for a minute where he was. How could he forget? Jesus his head must have taken a shot. “What are they?”

“Privacy papers.”

“Jesus, does he have to do them now? Why can’t I? You can clearly see he’s out of it,” Caelan ground out.

“Gi’ ‘em to me.” Christ his voice was slurred in his own head, he could only imagine what everyone else heard.

The fingers of his right hand met with plastic and he flicked it away. “Other,” he said wanting them to get this over with and go away so he could go to sleep.

“He’s left-handed,” Caelan said.

Eli thought he heard a gasp from the corner of the room but didn’t care. He held his eyes open, a true battle of the wills, and grasped for the pen. It might have been a little easier if he could move his arm at all. The nurse held the paper right where he needed to sign. He hoped to hell Caelan knew what it said because the words were jumping all over the page.

“You’re left-handed?” Tieran’s high-pitched, hopeful voice grated on his overtaxed brain. She may as well be screeching.

“So what, my own?”

“But you’re not,” she insisted.

Where the hell was his twin’s mate going with this? Wherever it was, perked him up.

“No,” Caelan answered. “We’re mirror-image twins.”

“He didn’t do it.” Tieran’s voice shook with excitement. “Oh my God, Caelan, he didn’t do it.”

Caelan grunted when his mate leapt into his arms in an obviously overjoyed state.

“I already knew that, my own. I’ve been trying to tell you all along. What made you decide?” He kissed her before setting her back on her feet.

Ah damn, Eli thought, watching the two of them through his drooping eyelids. He’d give anything to be doing that with Nikki-Raine right now. Wouldn’t this be the perfect time for her to find out about who he really was? Right when the police had arrested him for killing all those women.

“What’s she talking about, Cael?” Eli asked. Tieran acted like she thought he was the one doing it all along. The doctor and nurse quietly backed out of the room giving them the privacy he’d ironically just signed for.

He squinted in the gloomy interior and got his answer from the pasty white, albeit blurry pallor of her face. She had thought he was the killer. Everything fell into place then. Her reactions to him when they were close, the scar issue, the meeting with the elders. He ground his teeth together.

“The killer was right-handed,” she whispered.

Both his and Caelan’s gaze flew to her slowly unfocusing one. “What?” they both said together.

“He was right-handed.” She swallowed and he could tell she was being drawn back into a nightmare. “When he cut her throat, he used his right hand, like this.” She drew her hand threw the air in a cutting motion. “A lefty wouldn’t be able to do that, would he?”

“Not a true lefty, no. An ambidextrous one, maybe, but not Eli. He can’t even brush his teeth with his right hand. Jesus, that’s it, baby, that’s the key we need to get E out of this.” Caelan picked Tieran up and swung her around.

Tieran pushed away and hugged her arms tight. “And how will we tell Hayward how we know this evidence, Caelan?”

Fuck. Eli closed his eyes. There was no use pretending she didn’t have a shitty past with the police believing her claims. He knew from those damn reports.

“Doesn’t matter,” Eli croaked. “Eventually the medical examiner will discover what you just said. It’s all the evidence we need.” He nodded slightly. “Everything will be fine.” Damn, he sure hoped he believed his own words.

Caelan looked more than a little grim but nodded just the same. He grabbed onto his mate like a lifeline and again, Eli longed to touch Nikki-Raine.
Not here, not when he was handcuffed to a fucking hospital bed and close to going to prison,
he commanded himself.

When Caelan spoke, it was with a voice that wavered. “You’re right, E. It’ll all come out. Give me some time and I’ll get you out of here.”

It was time to bring this charade to an end. He threw the cigarette down and ground it into the dried leaves of the forest floor. The lights were still on in Caelan’s wing. They were still up, meaning this was the perfect time to make it all work out just like he wanted it to. He grinned and rubbed his hands together. In a few more hours he’d be able to go to the elders and claim his spot. No one would refute his ability to do the job.

Tonight would be fun.

*

Tieran stared at the vast array of movies in front of her and contemplated which one to choose.

“Oh my God. You’ve been looking for five minutes. Choose one already.”

Irritable bastard. She was doing this to get his mind off his brother. They’d left Eli at the hospital earlier this afternoon, still handcuffed to the bed with a massive headache and an even more incredibly bad mood than Caelan’s.

What the hell had she done?

“You didn’t do anything, Tulla.”

“Well, not exactly, but I insinuated over and over that Eli was the one.”
And he wasn’t. Yet he still sat locked to a hospital bed, charged with several murders. No amount of begging and pleading with Detective Hayward had helped. In fact he’d laughed at her, an almost odd gleam in his eye when they’d sat down to discuss it with him. Something that had taken most of the morning to get the courage to do and it had turned out the same as Florida. She sighed.

Just sitting there in the cold, metal, beaten-to-hell chair had given her the willies. Then when the smirking had started…damn. She’d wanted to punch the egotistical bastard in the eye. Somehow sensing her distress, Caelan had put a hand on her forearm and soothed her by rubbing his thumb slowly over her skin.

Since there’d been no way around it, she’d told Hayward exactly what she was and what she’d seen. His gaze had never faltered as he watched her from beneath his lowered lashes. One by one she relayed the reasons Eli couldn’t have done what Hayward had accused him of. She was particularly careful in telling him about the right-handed killer and the fact Eli was left-handed.

Hayward didn’t giving a flying fuck. He’d laughed at her. “What am I supposed to do with a dream?” he’d said. His captain would roll on the floor if he went in there with this kind of “witness”. Then he’d looked at Caelan, a smile still stretched across his face and told him, “Take your little mate home, Prime, I’ve got better things to do. Like put your brother in jail.”

A split second later Caelan lunged from his chair and threw a punch at Hayward, narrowly clipping the man’s jaw as he flung himself out of the way. Two more officers tackled Caelan, belly down, to the floor, yanking his arms behind him and kneeing him in the small of his back.

Thank God he hadn’t been arrested. Hayward stood over them as Tieran knelt next to Caelan. When she’d looked up, Hayward was wiping away a trickle of blood from his lip with his tongue. A gleam had sparkled in his eye. Just the thought of it made Tieran shiver even now. Something about his expression had made her uneasy.

“Let him go, boys.” He’d chuckled. “Man’s just worried about his twin.” Then he’d turned and sat at his desk as though nothing had happened.

She’d had to help Caelan up and stop him from going after the detective a second time. The whole scene hadn’t surprised her one bit. She was used to ridicule. Caelan wasn’t.

Tieran let the tension drop from her shoulders and forced herself to stop thinking about it.

One of the DVDs caught her eye and she pulled it out of its spot on the shelf with a small laugh. Who’d a thunk it? She turned to Caelan and waved the box in the air, grinning.