“How about we try an experiment, you and I?”
My hand wrapped around his heart, and it pulsed against my hand in a steady rhythm. Ba-bump ba-bump ba—
I squeezed, and for a moment his heart went still, then I loosened my grip and it beat again, more hurriedly than before.
“Do you know what your heart looks like, Doctor? Do you know how long it takes you to heal?” My voice cracked, going high-pitched and crazy.
I registered a click, and my brain told me the sound was familiar, but I was too far gone to think. I leaned close so my face was right near his, and his creepy little grin was nowhere to be found.
“I bet you don’t regenerate either. ”
“Ma’am,” a voice bellowed, muffled but alarmingly close. “Step back, and put your hands where I can see them. ”
Ignore it, the wolf cajoled. Finish him.
I squeezed, and he let out a bubbling moan, a thin foam of blood seeping from his lips.
“Ma’am, put your hands up, or I will shoot. ”
Shoot?
I looked up and was staring down the barrel of a rifle, the matte-black gun aimed right at my head.
Security, I thought, my chance to finish the job vanishing before my eyes. I took a good look at the man holding the gun, his blue-black Kevlar armor and the helmet he wore. Then I saw the eight other men in identical uniforms standing around the room, their guns leveled on me. One turned away from me, sending a signal into the hall with his fingers, but I saw the back of his armor.
Big yellow letters against the dark blue material.
FBI.
“What the fuck?” I asked, and the shock went right through me into The Doctor before I slumped off him, unconscious.
Chapter Thirty-Three
Heaven looked like a hospital room.
Or maybe that was a sure sign I was in hell.
I was dressed in a thin blue hospital gown, and my broken arm was propped over my stomach with a new, proper sling holding it in place. My good hand had returned to normal, no sign of hair or claws, just chipped nails in bad need of some polish.
The overhead lights were dimmed but still bright enough to make me uncomfortable.
Several tubes were connected to the crook of my elbow and the back of my hand, tethering me to a bank of whirring, beeping machines beside my bed.
The first sign I wasn’t dead was the headache I became almost instantly aware of. That coupled with the resurgence of nausea made me certain I hadn’t been introduced to Saint Peter and the pearly gates.
“Bloody hell,” I grumbled. My whole body felt like one giant bruise. It didn’t hold a candle to the pain of the previous week, but I wasn’t about to get up and run a marathon. Or hug anyone. I think a hug might have killed me.
One of the needles I’d been stuck with was feeding me blood, which wasn’t quite the same thing as feeding me blood, but it seemed to be helping. The aches and pains aside, my skin had some color back—as much as I was ever going to have anyway—and I couldn’t see the outlines of my bones anymore.
But, still, I
was in a hospital, and there was no way that was a good thing. I’d never been to a hospital as a patient before because the risk of my blood showing up as abnormal was too high.
The blue curtain surrounding my bed rattled on its metal hoops and was pushed partially aside. At the sight of a nurse I recoiled, growling, “Get away from me. ”
She stopped, color draining from her face until she was almost as pale as I was. “You’re awake. ”
“Sorry to put a damper on whatever psycho tests you wanted to run. ” I started to tug out my tubes, apparently finding the one attached to my heart rate monitor first. One of the machines screamed at me, and before I had a chance to get anything else pulled free, three more nurses and a doctor were around me, the curtain pushed all the way back.