Lover Unbound (Black Dagger Brotherhood 5)

On her way out of the chute, she put her head into the bay where Estevez was working on the nurse. "How's she doing?"

"Coming around." Estevez shook his head. "Her heart stabilized after we hit her with the paddles."

"She was fibrillating? Christ."

"Just like the telephone guy we had in yesterday. Like she'd been hit with a load of electricity."

"Did you call Mike?"

"Yeah, her husband's coming in."

"Good. Take care of our girl."

Estevez nodded and looked down at his colleague. "Always."

Jane caught up with the patient as the staff wheeled him down the chute and into the elevator that went to the surgical suite. One floor up she scrubbed in while the nurses got him onto her table. At her request, a cardio thoracic surgical kit and the heart/lung bypass machine had been set up, and the ultrasounds and X-rays taken downstairs were glowing on a computer screen.

With both hands latexed and held away from herself, she reviewed the chest scans again. Truth be told, both of them were subpar, very grainy and with that echo, but there was enough to orient herself. The bullet was lodged in the muscles of his back, and she was going to leave it there: The risks inherent in removing it were greater than letting it rest in peace, and in fact, most gunshot victims left the chute with their lead trophy wherever it ended up.

She frowned and leaned in closer to the screen. Interesting bullet. Round, not the typical oblong shape she was used to seeing inside her patients. Still, appeared to be made of garden-variety lead.

Jane approached the table where the patient had been hooked up to the anesthesia machines. His chest had been prepped, the regions around it draped in surgical cloth. The orange wash of Betadine made him look like he had a bad fake tan. "No bypass. I don't want to use up the time. Tell me we have blood for him on hand?"

One of the nurses spoke up from the left. "We do, although his blood didn't type."

Jane glanced across the patient. "It didn't?"

"The sample reading came back unidentifiable. But we have eight liters of O."

Jane frowned. "Okay, let's do this."

Using a laser scalpel, she made an incision down the patient's chest, then sawed through the sternum and used a rib spreader to pull open the heart's iron bars, exposing -

Jane lost her breath. "Holy..."

"Shit," someone finished.

"Suction." When there was a pause, she looked up at her assisting nurse. "Suction, Jacques. I don't care what it looks like, I can fix it - provided I get a clear shot at the damn thing."

There was a hissing sound as the blood was removed, and then she got a good gander at a physical anomaly she'd never seen before: a six-chambered heart in a human chest. That "echo" she'd seen on the ultrasounds was, in fact, an extra pair of chambers.

"Pictures!" she called out. "But make it quick, please."

As photographs were taken, she thought, Boy, the Cardiology Department is going to go nuts over this. She'd never seen anything like it before - although the hole torn in the right ventricle was totally familiar. She'd known a lot of them.

"Suture," she said.

Jacques slapped a pair of grips into her palm, the stainless-steel instrument carrying a curved needle with a black thread clipped onto the end. With her left hand, Jane reached in behind the heart, plugged the back end of the hole with her finger, and stitched the front impact site closed. Next move was to lift the heart out of its pericardial sac and do the same underneath.

Total elapsed time was under six minutes. Then she released the spreader, put the rib cage back where it was supposed to be and used stainless-steel wire to close the two halves of the sternum back together. Just as she was about to staple him from his diaphragm to his collarbone, the anesthesiologist spoke up and machines started to beep.

"BP is sixty over forty and falling."

Jane called out the heart-failure protocol and leaned down to the patient. "Don't even think about it," she snapped. "You die on me and I'm going to be really ticked off."

From out of nowhere, and against all medical rationale, the man's eyes blinked open and focused on her.

Jane jerked back. Good God... his irises held the colorless splendor of diamonds, shining so bright they reminded her of the winter moon on a cloudless night. And for the first time in her life, she was stunned into immobility. With their locked stares, it was as if they were linked body-to-body, twisted and intertwined, indivisible -

"He's V-fibbing again," the anesthesiologist barked.

Jane snapped back to attention.

"You stay with me," she ordered the patient. "You hear me? You stay with me."

She could have sworn the guy nodded at her before his lids shut. And she got back to work saving his life.

"You so need to lighten up about that potato-launcher incident," Butch said.

Phury rolled his eyes and eased back in the banquette. "You broke my window."

"Of course we did. V and I were aiming for it."

"Twice."

"Thus proving that he and I are outstanding marksmen."

"Next time can you please pick someone else's..." Phury frowned and lowered the martini from his lips. For no apparent reason, his instincts were suddenly alive, all lit up and ringing like a slot machine. He glanced around the VIP section, looking for some flavor of trouble. "Hey, cop, do you - "

"Something's not right," Butch said as he rubbed the center of his chest, then took his thick gold cross out from under his shirt. "What the hell is doing?"

"I don't know." Phury ran his stare through the crowd in the VIP section again. Man, it was as if a foul odor had sneaked into the room, coloring the air with something that made your nose want a new job description. And yet there was nothing wrong.

Phury took out his phone and dialed his twin. When Zsadist got on the line, the first thing the brother asked was whether Phury was okay.

"I'm fine, Z, but you're feeling it, too, huh?"

Across the table, Butch put his cell up to his ear. "Baby? You all right? You okay? Yeah, I don't know... Wrath wants to talk to me? Yeah, sure, put him on... Hey, big man. Yeah. Phury and me. Yeah. No. Rhage is with you? Good. Yeah, I'm calling Vishous next."

After the cop hung up, he punched a couple of keys and the phone went back to his ear. The cop's brows came down. "V? Call me. As soon as you get this."

He ended the call just as Phury got off with Z.

The two of them sat back. Phury fiddled with his drink. Butch played with his cross.

"Maybe he went to his penthouse to work on a female," Butch said.

"He told me he was going to do that first thing tonight."

"Okay. So maybe he's in the middle of a fight."

"Yeah. He'll call us right back."

Although all of the Brotherhood's phones had GPS chips in them, V's didn't work if the phone was on him, so calling back to the compound and putting a trace on his RAZR wasn't going to help much. V blamed that hand of his for throwing off the functionality, maintaining that whatever made his palm glow caused an electrical or magnetic disturbance. Sure as hell affected call quality. Whenever you called V there was fuzz on the line, even if he was on a landline.

Phury and Butch lasted about a minute and a half before they looked at each other and spoke at the same time.

"You mind if we just swing by - "

"Let's just go - "

They both stood up and headed for the club's emergency side door.

Outside in the alley, Phury looked up to the night sky. "You want me to dematerialize over to his place real quick?"

"Yeah. Do that."

"I need the address. Never been there before."

"Commodore. Top floor, southwest corner. I'll wait here."

For Phury it was the work of a moment to put himself on the windy terrace of a flashy penthouse some ten blocks closer to the river. He didn't even bother approaching the wall of glass. He could sense that his brother wasn't inside, and was back at Butch's side in a heartbeat.

"Nope."

"So he's hunting - " The cop froze, an odd, fixated expression hitting his face. His head whipped around to the right. "Lessers."

"How many?" Phury asked, opening his jacket. Ever since Butch had had his run-in with the Omega, he'd been able to sense slayers like you read about, the bastards coins to his metal detector.