You bastard, Carrick. I'll kill you.
The gun, blazing in the dark room like a small orange-yellow burst of the sun.
A stunned moment of utter surprise, a jolt backward, then pain, exploding in his chest, seeping like fire through his veins. Vision blurring, balance gone, falling, falling ...
Dead. A brilliant, white-hot light enveloped him, as seductive in its warmth as his lying words to a woman had ever been. He drifted in the light, floating, wanting never to let it go, never to know the freezing chill of life again; the disappointment, gone; the frustration, gone. Only the light, the searing, promising light.
Damn it, Ian, fight with me. Don't let go.
The words had come at him from somewhere, cutting through the lethargy. He'd blinked, looked down, and there was his body, naked, stretched out on a sheet-covered table, surgeons with dirty hands peering around him like insects, poking, prodding. Blood was a bright red blur on his chest, dripping down the bedding, pooling on the filthy floor. The gunshot wound was a serrated, gaping black hole in the middle of all that redness.
Someone was pounding on his chest. He could see
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the hammering blows, see his body convulse, but where he was, there was no pain, nothing but a vague sense of anxiety.
As the uneasiness grew, the light flickered and dimmed. Some dark, secret fear slipped through his mind, wound cold and chilling through his blood. He wasn't ready. There was something left for him to do. Something . . .
He felt his life slipping away from him, shimmering just out of reach, and he was afraid to die.
Let me live. Let me live. He screamed the words, shaking with his need to say them, though nothing came from the dead body on the table.
Please, God, I promise ... He panicked. What could he promise to the God he'd disregarded for most of his life? What would give him another chance? He could think of nothing, nothing but his own desperate, worthless need. Please ... let me live.
With a thrusting, powerful crunch, he was back in his body. Pain vibrated through his chest, filled him to overflowing. Tears squeezed past his eyelashes and streaked down his face.
His heart is beating again. Thank God. Chris, hand me that scalpel. I'm going to find that damned bullet. After that, confusion; people touching, reaching, wrapping, grasping. Then nothing.
Nothing until the next morning when he woke up, steeped in pain, to a room filled with sunlight and dust. The vague sounds of coughing, of quiet shoes moving down an empty corridor. White beds. The soft scent of gas from the jets on the wall.
He tried to sit up. The first person he saw was a nurse, bent over his bed, peering down at him. Behind her, a cluster of men in white coats. The nurse touched him, a breezy, nothing little touch of her fat finger on his brow, but it had been enough.
Images hit him with the force of a blow. The nurse huddled in a dark corner, shooting morphine into her
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veins . . . her gasping breath as the drug moved through her blood ... the trembling smile of her release.
Ian pushed her away from him with a growl, told her to stay away from morphine if she was going to touch him.
The nurse gasped, stumbled backward, her eyes rounding with horror as she looked at Dr. Halstead and the other men in the room.
After that, a whirl of sound and color: Halstead's angry voice, wrenching the nurse's sleeve up, seeing the needle marks, the bruises on her pale arm.
Ian squeezed his eyes shut, trying to ignore the throbbing in the back of his head and the strange heat in his hands. He thought it was a fluke, a hallucination caused by his own medication.
But the visions came again and again with every accidental touch, blinding him, overwhelming him, until he'd sunk back into his sheets, shaking and terrified.
The news spread like wildfire. Dr. Carrick can read your mind .. . Dr. Carrick can see the past. It's a curse, a gift. Magic .. .
People had come from as far away as California and Florida, clutching scraps of fabric, old timepieces, tintypes of loved ones. They came by foot, on horseback, in wheelchairs, all hoping for a miracle from the infamous Dr. Carrick, pouring their fear like an insidious drug into his veins, killing him quietly with each question, cutting him to the bone every time he failed them.
Help me, help me, help me.
At first he tried to help the pathetic souls who sought him out, he tried and tried, and failed and failed. His "gift" was a malicious, hurtful joke; he could know people's secrets, but he couldn't help them, couldn't find their lost loved ones by touching bits of fabric or perform miraculous cures. He couldn't even practice medicine anymore?the heat in his hands, the headache behind his eyes, and the images, always the images,
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