Seventeen
Tara slammed into consciousness.
Her feet were a mad scramble as she threw herself back, her heartbeat pounding in her ears. Her back smacked against the head of the bed, and she crouched there trembling, her gaze darting about.
The room was spotless, the lines clean. The lights were a soothing pale pink, the walls and floor white and all around were colorful displays, a stream of beautiful scrolling shapes.
She’d frightened both the men here, their gazes shimmering, alarmed, as they met hers.
Her eyes widened. “Ki-Ki’san?”
“I am here.” He shook off his shock, at her side in an instant. Ki’san took her hand in his, assessing her with a glance. “She is shaking. Her heart rate far too fast.” He looked at the other man, a blond g’hir dressed in blue and busy frowning at one of the displays. “She should not have reacted to the second stim that way!”
“Thank you, doctor,” the blond g’hir growled. “I did note the aberrant reaction.”
Growled.
“Her blood pressure is too high,” Ki’san continued. “There are abnormally high levels of adrenaline, cortisol—”
Tara put her palm to her ear. They were speaking to each other in growls and snarls but in her head she could hear words.
“I can see the readings for myself. If you continue to obtrude in my patient’s care with your observations, I will either have you escorted out,” the other g’hir threw a glare at Ki’san, “or I will sedate you.”
“As her lifemate, I have every right to be here, to approve her care and even,” Ki’san bared his fangs, “to call in a replacement physician.”
“You can dismiss me once I have stabilized her,” the other snarled. “Right now you are getting in the way of my treating her.”
She yanked her hand out of Ki’san’s.
“Where am I?” Every nerve and muscle buzzed, her whole body quaked as she pushed to standing. “Brice was coming back with the doctor—”
“You are safe,” Ki’san soothed. “You are experiencing an adverse reaction to being woken from a healing hibernation.”
“Hibernation?” She shook her head. “What are you talking about? What is this place?”
“You are in the central medical facility, in the city of Be’lyn.” Ki’san’s brow creased. “What is the last thing you remember?”
“I was in my room at Heatherbell. Brice was in the hall.” She swallowed. “Death carried me away.”
“I carried you,” Ki’san rumbled. “I brought you home.”
“Home? You mean I’m on—I’m on your world?”
“Yes, you are safe now on Hir, with me.”
“But if you took me from the house—What about Brice?” Her fingers twisted in her hospital gown. “Is he here too?”
“I heard him calling for you. Shouting for the others but I could not allow him to see me, to allow him to stop me. I carried you through the passage, ran through the woods, to bring you to the rescue ship. I was nearly too late to save you.”
“No. I’m dying.” Her vision blurred. “This isn’t happening. It can’t be. None of this is real!”
“Some kind of hibernation psychosis?” the blond g’hir wondered, frowning.
“She is disoriented.” Ki’san glanced at the displays. “But her readings are stabilizing. Let me speak with her alone.”
“I should remain to—”
“I will summon you immediately if I note signs of distress,” Ki’san said sharply. “Leave us!”
“I can allow you a few minutes to calm her.” The blond g’hir’s mouth was tight. “But I will tap into the system remotely and I will be only a few steps away.”
“I know your reaction to being awoken was frightening,” Ki’san said as soon as the door slid shut. “But you have my vow, you are safe. Try to slow your breathing.”
“You’re not real! You can’t be!”
“I promise you,” his warm hands took her gently by the upper arms, “I am real.”
“You’re growling—snarling!—how can I understand you?”
“I have a linguistic implant that allowed me to understand your language. You too now have an implant that allows you to understand mine.”
“If that’s true, why can’t I read these?” Her glance darted around the room at the displays with their scrolling symbols. “You could read English.”
“That seems to be a problem the other human females have experienced as well with this implant. They can understand Hironian but not read it.”
“That’s not convincing me I’m not crazy. I couldn’t get into the secret passages. I couldn’t get the panels to open for me. I don’t think they exist either.”
“They are how I reached you, unseen, to bring you home.” Ki’san shook his head. “But I do not recall witnessing you opening either panel. The metal was rusted; it is possible what was easy for me to open was not so for you. Come, this will reassure you.” He drew her along with him. With a wave of his hand the wall itself seemed to go from opaque to transparent. “The city of Be’lyn.”
“A futuristic alien city?” Spires shone in the sun, vehicles zipped against the bright blue sky, weaving between buildings like super-charged bumblebees. “Yeah, this is really convincing me I’m not bonkers.”
“Here is something you must know to be true.” He took her hand and pressed it to his chest. She could feel his heart beating under her palm. “I am your lifemate. I am no spirit, no imagined creature.”
“But no one else ever saw you. No one else could see you! Not Hannah or William or—”
“The peacekeeper saw me.” He searched her gaze “Do you not recall? You told him he was mistaken, that he had seen something . . . a ‘gaht’?”
“Cat! My God, that’s right,” she breathed. “Sheriff Riliey did see you. He saw your eyes, glowing in the dark. And I said it was just my cat up in the bedroom. And the deputy dragged him out.” She blinked up at him. “That means . . .”
“You are assured now?” His fangs gleamed in his smile. “That I do exist, my mate?”
“I thought I was crazy—that I imagined it all. But if I didn’t, then. . .” She yanked her hand out from under his, pain slashing through her chest. “I waited for you. I went to the forest looking for you. Your ship was gone, everything was gone. You—” Her eyes stung. “You left me. You left me and you didn’t even say goodbye.”
“Not by choice, never by choice.” His voice was rough. “You so badly needed rest; I did not want to wake you when I left to reinitialize the portable regenerator. If I had, if you had come with me—” His eyes shut briefly. “I returned to the Karnack to find the rescue team there, searching the wreckage. The commander ordered I be brought up to the warship immediately. I told them I could not leave, I fought them. It took four of them to restrain me, to bring to me to the shuttle. The commander ordered me held in quarters, and before I knew what was happening they had made the jump to Hir—” He caught her hands in his. “I was days fighting the council, using every resource I had to return for you. It was unbearable, knowing you were suffering, that I could not go to you. And I was nearly too late.”
“I wanted to believe you weren’t real,” Her throat was tight. “Because that was easier than thinking you didn’t want me.”
“Not want you?” His golden eyes widened. “I have woken every night shaking, keening from dreams in which I ran, seeking you in the mists.” He shook his head. “These days without your warmth, your scent by me, have been agony. I am ashamed I did not fully appreciate the suffering of a male without his mate. Nothing—not our lore, not my medical training—could have prepared me for it. I never want to know it again.”
“But. . . am I . . .?” She couldn’t bear to ask, could hardly breathe for hoping. “The doctors here—”
“You are well.” His eyes shone. “You are healed.”
“For how long? I mean, will I need more treatment?”
“Never again, for that illness. Your genetic aberration has been repaired.”
“You mean it was inherited?”
“It is unlikely that, given others have been diagnosed with the same illness, this genetic mutation was unique to you.”
“She had it too,” Tara murmured. “Rose. Hannah’s Aunt Madge said she was sickly, weak from consumption . . .”
His brow furrowed. “Consumption?”
“That’s what they used to call tuberculous—‘consumption’—because it would make the patient so ill and frail that it was if they were being consumed from inside. And Dr. Farren hypothesized that my illness might have been mistaken in the past for some cases of consumption.”
“But now you are well. This illness will not touch you again.”
“Are you sure?” Her glance drifted again to the displays even though she couldn’t read them. “They said there was no cure, no treatment.”
“It was you who suggested the cure. When you said a bone marrow transplant might slow its progression.”
She frowned. “You gave me a bone marrow transplant?”
“Nothing so primitive. We used the cells of two other healthy human females to track down the genetic flaw. Once we had isolated it, we altered your own cells to correct the damage.”
“How . . . how long do I have? How long will I live?”
“You are a healthy human female. With proper care, you may live a century or more.”
“A century?” She stared. “I wasn’t supposed to last the rest of the year.”
“What is it?” His gaze searched hers. “What is the matter?”
“I don’t know. I mean, I’m happy, I just—I learned not to plan farther out than a few days. I never knew when I’d be back in the hospital or too ill to leave the house. I know how to be sick. How to get ready to die.” She lifted her shoulder in a helpless shrug. “I don’t know how to live. I feel like I just escaped from drowning, but now I . . . don’t know what I’m supposed to do.”
“You need not decide now.” He cradled her hands in his. “You have much time to choose.”
“Time . . .” She smiled in wonderment. “We both have it now.”
“Yes.”
“Ki’san?” Her smile faded at his hesitation. “What aren’t you telling me?”
“There is . . . a complication.”
“What do you mean?”
“The search for the traitors, the ones who destroyed the Karnack, has not been concluded.”
“But what does that have to do with you? With us?”
He glanced toward the door. “Some on the council believe it was I who caused its destruction.”
“You nearly died in that crash! How can they even suspect you?”
“I had no right to hunt a lifemate on your world. They think that, in order to gain a mate of my own, I betrayed the warriors of that ship, that I crashed the vessel myself.”
“But what about the equipment in the infirmary? Some of it had been tampered with. You would have killed me with the implant if you hadn’t noticed in time.” She shook her head. “They couldn’t think you knew.”
“But that equipment I, as a healer, do possess the expertise to sabotage.”
“If they let you come back to Earth to get me the charges can’t be that serious.”
“To return to your world, to bring you home . . .” He swallowed. “I had no choice but to call upon my enclosure, to call them to stand with me against the council. They intervened, demanded I be permitted to return to your world to bring you home. The A’rahan clanfather threatened to bring the force of his allies in the high north against them.”
“Why am I getting the feeling that there’s a big price-tag on his help?”
“The cost is steep indeed.” His reluctant gaze turned to the door again. “Outside in that hall stand a half-dozen warriors of my blood waiting to escort us to the A’rahan enclosure to bring us before the clanfather. And we cannot refuse to go.”