Except don’t, he thought to himself as he glanced at her alarm clock.
He’d told Sahvage, Syphon, Xcor, and Tohr to meet him an hour after sunset. So actually, he probably didn’t have—
“Balthazar…”
At the weird tone in her voice, his head snapped away from the glowing display next to her bed. “Erika? What’s wrong?”
When she didn’t respond, Balz flew from that bed, his feet not even touching the floor as he launched himself toward the bathroom. And as he pushed open the door, at first he couldn’t figure out what he was looking at. His female was standing at the sink, one leg braced on the counter, the inside of her calf and thigh facing him.
That was when he saw the bruising.
Her skin was marked with black splotches, the pattern running from the base of her foot all the way up to—
“What is this?” she asked weakly. “What’s wrong with me?”
And then she turned to him. Her entire body was mottled with discoloration, the skin like that of a corpse, gray and white and black.
“Help me…” she said as she collapsed.
CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN
Time was relative. Yes. It was.
And what that meant, in the emotive sense, was that something could take an eternity and also be of a duration shorter than the blink of an eye.
For example, when the love of your life, who you’d just decided to move in with, whose bed you’d been in all afternoon and into the evening, all of a sudden turned into a contusion, the diagnosis part of things was longer than the ice age, quicker than a gasp.
As Balz stood over the bed of his female, and watched as others tended her, he replayed each and every thing that had happened since he had caught Erika in his arms as she’d passed out. After he’d brought her back out here, his first call had been to Manny, and the guy had been right on it, firing up the mobile surgical unit that was downtown in the garage and rushing for Erika’s neighborhood. On the way, Manny had called in his fellow healer, Doc Jane, to dematerialize over to the townhouse STAT. And she had brought with her her medically trained mate, Vishous.
It was all such a blur, but too acute as well. While Jane performed an exam and took vitals, Balz had told V everything he knew. Which was next to nothing: Perfectly fine. Went to the bathroom. Bruises all over her.
Balz would never forget the way Doc Jane had looked up at her mate… and shook her head. Like she didn’t understand what was going on.
After that? V had taken his glove off. Balz had held his breath as the Brother stood over Erika’s body and put that glowing weapon so close to her mottled skin that a flush of blood rose to the surface, cutting through the horrible bruising. He’d swept that thing up and down a third time as the next arrival came up the townhouse’s stairs.
The Brother Butch. And as soon as Balz saw the male, he’d known… that they were not dealing with a medical emergency.
This was a metaphysical one. This was… about evil. Evil that had claimed his beloved.
Balz knew what Butch did out in the field, absorbing the essence of the Omega out of slayers who had been taken down. And it was with a feeling of absolute disbelief that Balz had said yes, yes of course, Butch could lie down next to Erika.
Proof positive that even bonded males could have a level head if the stakes were high enough.
And so Butch had lain down, chaste as could be, and taken Erika in his arms. By that time, it was clear that whatever process was occurring was speeding up. Her body was failing, her vitals slipping, her—
As reality snapped back into place, Balz transitioned from remembering things to experiencing them, his awareness shifting from the list of first-this, then-that, which he had been numbly detached from, to an achingly vivid this-is-really-happening.
It was the groan that did it.
The groan from the bed was agony. And it was not coming from Erika.
Butch, the former cop, jerked back from her and began to dry heave—and Doc Jane was on it, producing a wastepaper basket from somewhere and holding it off the edge of the bed so he could roll over and vomit into it.
As the retching echoed through the too-quiet room, Balz’s eyes traveled over his female. He’d pulled a sheet up to provide her with some dignity, and he’d appreciated that Doc Jane and the two males had been so respectful of her nakedness.
One of her arms was outside of the covers, and he recoiled at the deterioration of her skin.
“Manny’s bringing the oxygen concentrator,” Doc Jane said as Butch flopped over on his back. “And I’m going to run some saline into her.”