Midnight Rising (Midnight Breed 4)

And now she was running off into the night, away from him.

With a headful of memories and knowledge that he damn well couldn't allow her to keep.

Rio got up from Dylan's computer desk and walked into the small bathroom. It was empty, as he knew it would be, the window yawning open onto the dark summer night outside.

He climbed out, boots hitting the fire escape for a split second before he leaped from the structure and landed on the asphalt below. Tipping his head back, he dragged the air into his lungs until he caught Dylan's scent.

Then he went after her.

Chapter Twenty-two

Dylan stood outside the windowed door of her mother's room on the hospital's tenth floor, trying to rally her courage to go inside. The cancer ward was so quiet up here at night, only the hushed chatter from the nurses on duty at their station and the occasional shuffle of a patient's slippered feet as they made a brief circuit around the wing, fingers clasped around the wheeled IV pole that rolled along beside them. Her mom had been one of those tenacious, but weary-eyed patients not so long ago.

Dylan hated to think there was more of that pain and struggle ahead of her mother now. The biopsy the doctors had ordered wouldn't be in for a couple of days, according to the nurse at the desk. They were hopeful that in the likelihood it did come back positive, they might have caught the relapse early enough to begin a new, more aggressive round of chemotherapy. Dylan was praying for a miracle, despite the heaviness in her chest as she steeled herself for bad news.

She hit the hand sanitizer dispenser mounted next to the door, squirted a blob of isopropyl gel into her palms and rubbed it in. As she pulled a pair of latex gloves from the box on the counter and put them on, everything she'd been through in the past several days - even the past few hours - fell away, forgotten. Her own problems just evaporated as she pushed open the door, because nothing mattered right now except the woman curled up on the bed, tethered to monitoring wires and intravenous lines.

God, her mother looked so tiny and frail lying there. She'd always been petite, smaller than Dylan by a good four inches, her hair a richer shade of red, even with the handful of grays that had crept in since the first battle with cancer. Now Sharon's hair was kept short, a spiky, spunky cut that made her look at least a decade younger than her true age of sixty-four. Dylan felt a pang of irrational, but jabbing anger for the fact that a renewed round of chemo was going to ravage that glorious crown of thick copper hair.

She walked softly toward the bed, trying not to make any noise. But Sharon wasn't sleeping. She rolled over as Dylan came close, her green eyes bright and warm.

"Oh...Dylan...hi, baby." Her voice was feathery, the only real physical giveaway in her that she was ill. She reached out and took Dylan's gloved hand in a tight hold.

"How was the trip, sweetheart? When did you get back?"

Shit. That's right - she'd supposedly extended her stay in Europe. It seemed like a year had passed in the few days she'd been with Rio.

"Um, I just came home a little while ago," Dylan answered, a partial lie.

She took a seat on the edge of the thin hospital room mattress, her hand still caught in her mother's clutching grasp.

"I got a little concerned when you changed your plans so abruptly. Your e-mail that you were staying a bit longer by yourself was so short and cryptic. Why didn't you call me?"

"I'm sorry," Dylan said. The lie she had to keep hurt even worse knowing that she'd made her mom worry. "I would have called you if I could have. Oh, Mom...I'm sorry you don't feel well."

"I feel all right. Better, now that you're here." Sharon's gaze was steady, level with a calm resolve. "But I'm dying, baby. You do understand that, don't you?"

"Don't say that." Dylan squeezed her mom's hand, then brought the cool fingers up to her lips and kissed them. "You'll get through this, just like you did before. You're going to be fine."

The silence - the tender indulgence - was a palpable force in the room. Her mother wasn't going to push the subject, but it was there, like a ghost lurking in the corner.

"Well, let's talk about you instead. I want to hear all about what you've been doing, where you've been...tell me about everything you've seen while you were gone."

Dylan glanced down, unable to hold her mother's eyes if she couldn't tell her the truth. And she couldn't tell her the truth. Most of it would be unbelievable anyway, especially the part where Dylan confessed that she feared she was developing feelings for a dangerous, secretive man. A vampire for crissake. It sounded crazy just to think the words.

"Tell me more about that demon's lair story you're working on, baby. Those pictures you sent me were really something. When is your story going to run?"

"There is no story, Mom." Dylan shook her head. She was sorry she ever mentioned it to her mother - or to anyone, for that matter. "Turns out that cave was just a cave," she said, hoping to convince her. "Nothing strange about it."

Sharon looked skeptical. "Really? But that tomb you found - and the incredible markings on the walls. What was all of that doing in there? It must have meant something."

"Just a tomb. Probably a very old, tribal burial chamber of some kind."

"And the picture you took of that man - "

"A vagrant, that's all," Dylan lied, hating every syllable that passed her lips. "The pictures made everything seem more important than it was. But there is no story, not even one suitable for a rag like Coleman Hogg's paper. In fact, he let me go."

"What? He didn't!"