Chapter Nine
Oberon had her rattled. He knew he did.
But suddenly she laughed, and the bright, carefree sound broke the sensual spell he had begun to weave over them both. “Did you really just say that to me? My lord, that line was bad.”
She wasn’t funny.
And he wasn’t suddenly grinning. He wouldn’t allow it. Angrily, he wiped the smile off his face.
Then he noticed something else. Despite her strong-sounding words, a hint of arousal lingered in her scent.
He knew it. He knew he had gotten to her yesterday before everything had exploded on them. The predator in him took note and decided to give chase.
Leaning over even farther, he planted both hands flat on the desk on either side of her, trapping her in the chair. Her hair smelled amazing, like apricots and Kathryn, and he rubbed his face in the silken strands and inhaled deeply.
“You wanted me,” he whispered. “It was only for a few moments, but I can tell your body remembers. Think of how good it can be to give in to your deepest instincts, Kathryn. There’s nobody here to judge. Nobody cares. We can do anything we want, and no one will be the wiser.”
He had never used her name before, and he could feel her almost imperceptible jolt as she heard her name on his lips.
“Stop it,” she whispered. “I never get involved with my patients.”
“That wasn’t what your mouth was saying yesterday when I was kissing you.” He angled his head so he could nip at her delectable neck with his teeth. Everything dominant in him wanted to pin her to the floor and cover her body with his. What would his spiky doctor think of that?
She pressed a fist against the bridge of his nose and pushed hard. Her voice was stronger when she spoke, hard and cold. “Back up, Oberon. Yesterday I promised I wouldn’t cross that line again, and I meant it.”
“Forget what happened yesterday,” he growled, brushing her hand away. “Today is a new beginning. I can tell you want me, and I know you can tell that I want you too. Give in to it. I can bring you more pleasure than you’ve ever known before.”
She coughed out a shaky laugh. “Those are some mighty ambitious words, King. I’ve had some amazing, considerate lovers. I doubt you can compare, especially since you have no empathy right now.”
“Empathy is overrated.” Sliding one hand underneath her jaw, he tilted her head back and held her against his shoulder. The long, exaggerated line of her slender throat aroused him more than he had expected. A hot spike of desire stabbed him.
“Oberon, I mean it—I’m telling you no,” she said. “Let me go.”
It would’ve been so easy to ignore her. It would’ve been so easy to push her body down on the desk and pin her from behind. But suddenly he realized that he no longer scented her arousal.
She smelled different now, like stress and anger, and her body felt strung tight as a bow.
He whispered in her ear, “I don’t want to let go.”
She whispered back, “Is that what you would have done, before?”
If she had reacted any other way… But she didn’t give aggression for aggression, not this time, and her riposte had unerring accuracy.
And the man he once had been would have picked up on her signals and stopped a long time ago.
The realization made him drop his hold on her, as if she had suddenly become scalding hot and he had developed the ability to feel heat again.
“I don’t force women,” he said between his teeth.
“No, of course you don’t.” Carefully she straightened her clothes. “You just needed to be reminded of who you really are.” Standing, she turned to face him. Her amber eyes were dilated, the lines of her face tight. “Let me be clear so we don’t have any misunderstandings. Forget about what you may think you perceive in my scent. I am never going to choose an inappropriate liaison with a patient. I would not betray your trust that way, and I wouldn’t betray myself either. So I would appreciate it if you would keep your distance when I’m not examining or treating you. Neither one of us needs that kind of distraction right now.”
She meant it, he realized. He stared at her in fascination. “Darling, if you think what could happen between us would be a mere distraction, your considerate lovers were not as excellent as you think they were.”
Her lips parted. He sensed the tiny sound of her indrawn breath as clearly as if he had felt it against his bare skin.
“We need to take a break for lunch,” she announced. She bolted out of the room before he could decide if he was going to argue further.
Fine. Lunch it was. Maybe by the time it was over he could get his unruly erection to subside. He strode out of the office as well and headed in the opposite direction. He might no longer feel the cold, but he could damn well use some fresh air anyway.
If he hadn’t been so determined to keep from compromising the man he used to be, he might have done something they both would have regretted and given in to his baser instincts. But he had promised her—if she worked on healing him, he would do everything in his power to keep her safe while she did so.
Not even his own promises carried much meaning anymore. He only adhered to them out of a stubbornness born from that inexhaustible well of anger he carried deep inside. It was hard to come to grips with how much of his former self he had lost. The man he had been would have loathed what he had become.
And he couldn’t feel it. He couldn’t feel any of it.
Outside, he shapeshifted into his animal form and raced out of the city. It was another thing he could feel. He reveled in the lion’s effortless speed and strength, and in the wind blowing through his thick mane.
He ran for a long time along the nearby cliffs that bordered the city. When he was sure he had put enough distance between himself and the palace, he stopped and roared his fury at the open water. The impervious waves crashed and foamed at the broken rocks below.
Finally he returned. As he entered the palace, he shifted into the man again and made his way back to his office.
He half expected Kathryn to have gone missing, but she was in the room, slouching in an armchair near the fire, her booted heels propped on an embroidered footrest. An open bottle of brandy sat on the table near her elbow. She balanced a snifter on her flat stomach.
Pausing, he took note of a second snifter sitting beside the brandy bottle. It appeared she had brought him a peace offering from his own cellars.
Striding over to the empty armchair opposite hers, he sat. “I apologize for my earlier behavior.”
She gave him a sidelong grin. “You’re not really sorry.”
He gave that due thought. Carefully he said, “I am regretful that I am not sorry. Does that count?”
She laughed. “Fair enough.”
He studied her profile, then poured himself some brandy. “You’re unlike any court physician I’ve ever met. You’re not at all what I would have expected. When I came back to the palace, I honestly thought you would be long gone.”
“What would you expect me to be like?” She took a mouthful of her brandy with evident appreciation.
“I don’t know.” He settled back into the armchair with a sigh. “From your animal form, I would have guessed some sort of soldier… something that would satisfy the predator in you.”
She shook her head. “My predator is very satisfied. You see, you are my prey—or at least your affliction is. You think recovering from illness or injury isn’t a fight? Sometimes it’s the hardest, dirtiest fight of all, and a battlefield is a piece of cake in comparison. Battles are over in hours, or maybe days, if they’re really bad. Recovering from traumatic injury can go on for years. It can last a lifetime. I’ve seen an avian Wyr… I saw her struggle to find a way to live every day for a month. The whole time she never knew whether her animal form would have healed enough to allow her to fly again.”
“That must have been catastrophic.”
She nodded and swallowed another mouthful of brandy before continuing. “She had been so badly injured, for a while I thought I would have to amputate her wings, and avian Wyr typically don’t survive that kind of injury. I had forbidden her to shapeshift for the month. I was afraid she would give in to temptation and try to fly before she was ready, and then she would undo all the good we had tried to do for her. But her mate stayed by her side, day and night, and somehow with his help she stuck it out.”
When she fell silent, he waited. Finally, he asked, “Did she fly again?”
“Yes, as it happens, she did. But it could have very easily gone the other way, and then her fight would have been endless. Every day she would have been searching for a reason to get out of bed and find the goodness in life. And her mate couldn’t have lived without her.” She gave him a twisted smile. “Enough about that. Let’s get back to you, shall we? If you don’t mind, I’d like to scan you to check the needle’s position.”
“By all means.” He swallowed golden fire and relished the brandy sliding down his throat. “Come and get it.”
“You’re never going to make things easy, are you?” she muttered as she set her glass aside and pulled her footstool over him.
“Probably not, Kathryn.” He enjoyed saying her name. He watched as she settled on the stool beside him.
Holding up her hand, she wiggled her fingers at him. “All you’ll feel is a tingle of magic. Are we good?”
“All good.” Half closing his eyes, he watched as she laid her hand lightly on his chest. It would not take very much for her to change trajectories, reach up and stroke his face.
Her intelligent gaze narrowed, and he felt the tingle of her magic. Her Power was a subtle presence, but it ran very deep.
He knew what she was going to find, and he watched her closely, but her expression never flickered. She was really good at hiding reactions when she wanted.
Giving him a brisk pat, she sat back. “Okay, so it’s shifted closer again,” she said. “That’s not really a surprise. We knew it was going to happen at some point. Now we have to plan what we’re going to do next.”
He drank brandy. “If we do nothing, how long do you think I would have?”
“Boy, I don’t know.” She blew out a sigh. “Maybe another week?”
“That’s what I would guess too.” He set aside his glass. “What now, Doctor?”
Resting her elbows on her knees, she ran her fingers through her hair. “You’re not going to like it.”
He laughed. “Tell me something new.”
The glance she gave him was wry. “There are really only two choices, Oberon. Theoretically, I could give you daily treatments to work on wiggling that needle out the long, slow way, but it’s a really smart spell. It was built to act like a virus and mutate according to changes in its host. I think you made a brilliant choice when you focused on shapeshiftinginto your Wyr form. That’s why you’re still alive. But it has adapted now, and it has only one purpose—to shut you down.”
“It’s already shutting pieces of me down,” he muttered. “My emotions are all but gone, and it’s becoming a struggle to keep in touch with my higher reasoning.”
“Yes,” she said. She laced her fingers together. “And we don’t know how it might adapt to the daily treatments. It might get more aggressive. That path would be a long, slow struggle, and if you’re looking at the goal of full recovery, I think it’s a dangerous one. I don’t know what kind of long-term damage it might do to you.”
“And the second choice?” He watched her closely. Her facial expressions and thought processes were fascinating.
She met his gaze with a calm, clear look. “Surgery to remove the needle. Ideally, I would want you back in New York, so I could have the full support of my surgery team. There are techniques we could use to try a less invasive approach. I could go in to the site from under your arm, but again, given that we don’t know how the magic will react, we would have to be prepared to crack open your sternum and go in the hard way.”
“Let’s assume you would get it out,” he said. “What would be the recovery time?”
“Since you’ve now acquired the healing capabilities of a full Wyr, I’d say four weeks before you’d be battle ready again. With healing spells and a sensible approach to your recovery, you’ll be on your feet pretty quickly. As far as regaining the abilities you’ve lost…” Her shoulders lifted in a regretful shrug. “I don’t know what the recovery time for that would be.”
Obeying an impulse he didn’t stop to define, he leaned forward, took both her hands in his, and turned them over to examine them. They were slender, feminine, and strong, the fingernails kept neat and short. They would look beautiful adorned with rings and bracelets, but she didn’t wear any jewelry.
“I might never recover them,” he said. “I might never again be the man I used to be.”
Her fingers tightened on his. “No, you might not. But you might become a new man that you like and respect very much. The essential thing is, you would win back your freedom from Isabeau’s influence, and that’s what you said you wanted more than anything. And you’d be alive. Many people don’t get a second chance at life. If we achieve that, we will have achieved everything.”
His old paranoia tried to rear its ugly head. It whispered to him of treachery, but he quashed it ruthlessly, because Kathryn had spoken the truth when she’d said if she had wanted him dead, he would already be dead.
“It’s been two hundred years since I set foot on Earth,” he mused. “After seeing the strange things like your metallic blanket and your clothes, I’m curious to see what else there is to see.”
Her gaze lit with a smile. “It’s going to be overwhelming,” she told him. “There are horseless carriages and machines that fly in the sky and can take you from London to New York in a matter of hours with no obligation to a Djinn. And I’m pretty sure you’re going to love modern guns. You have so many reasons to fight and beat this thing.”
“It sounds wonderful, Kathryn.” Releasing his hold on her, he relaxed back in his chair. “But you are going to perform the surgery in Lyonesse.”
“What!” She stared at him incredulously. “You can’t be serious.”
The hard planes of his face settled into determined lines. “I’ve made up my mind. You’ll perform the surgery here before Annwyn and the others arrive.” She sputtered, clearly searching for a rebuttal, but he spoke again before she could. “Don’t tell me you didn’t think of this when I was in stasis, because I’m beginning to understand how you think, and I know you did.”
* * *
Oberon wasn’t as bad as Dragos. He was much worse. At least Dragos had a grasp on many modern medical and scientific principles.
She glared at Oberon. He relaxed back in his chair, looking every inch the king that he was. She bit out, “Yes, of course I considered it—for all of three moments. For one thing, I never would have performed surgery without consent from your next of kin.”
“Do you always wait for permission to act?” He raised one eyebrow. “That must be quite a hindrance in your profession.”
“No, of course I don’t!” she shot back. “When there’s an emergency there’s no time, but there are ethics that govern my actions, and you were stable. Besides, you would barely let me scan you. I can’t imagine how you would have reacted if I had started to cut into you. Surgery wasn’t a viable option.”
“Well, it is now.” His expression settled into hard lines.
Gods, how she hated to see that look on one of her patients, because it usually meant they intended to act in a way that flew in the face of all her best advice.
Her lips tightened. “I won’t do it.”
He shot forward, and before she could leap away, his big hands closed on her biceps. She tensed, but he only grasped her firmly.
“Listen to me,” he said, his voice low and intense. “If I don’t make it, I want to die here, in my home—not in some hospital in a foreign country. And I want you to do it before Annwyn and the others arrive, because I don’t want to have to face their emotional reactions and pretend like I care. And I don’t want to hurt them any more than I already have, by changing so much over the years and by being gone for so long. I don’t want to die, but if I do… This is the best way I can go in peace.” The tension in his body radiated through his hands. “I understand you don’t want to do it this way, and you have your reasons. I’m asking you to do it anyway.”
“Goddammit,” she muttered. “Goddammit. Fine. We’ll do it your way. But you’re going to write out and sign an advance directive that states what you want done while you’re unconscious. You’re also going to write a letter to Annwyn and the others explaining yourself, so they will understand what happened, and why I did what I did.” She glared at him. “Those two things are nonnegotiable.”
He gave her a nasty smile. “Aren’t you going to ask for more money?”
“That too,” she snapped. “Standard rates for open-heart surgery apply.” Technically it wouldn’t be open-heart surgery as she shouldn’t have to cut into his heart, but she was damned if she was going to start splitting hairs right now.
He relaxed. “Good. Then we have a deal.”
Her eyes dampened, and she blinked the moisture away rapidly. She hated that he was adding more risk to what would already be a risky surgery. And she hated that his reasons had made her change her mind, especially since he would never let her back out now.
“I’ll do the surgery three days from now,” she told him, shrugging out of his hold.
His brows snapped together in a fierce frown. “Why wait so long?”
“We’re not going to be waiting,” she told him. “We’re going to do all those things a surgical team and hospital staff do when preparing for surgery. I need a well-lit operating theater with a table at the correct height, and the right utensils for the job, and it all has to be sterilized. And I need a variety of spells cast into high-quality gems—I prefer diamonds—so I have them readily at hand when I get to work. We’ve got a lot to do. I suggest you get me those diamonds now.”
He barked out a laugh. It did not sound amused. “I’ll get you those damn diamonds,” he said. “But first I’m going to show you where you’ll be operating.”
“Fine,” she snarled.
“Oh, cheer up,” he told her as he stood. “At least I didn’t pick your first choice of treatments. You can’t be regretting that.”
She stood when he did and moved to put some distance between them. “At the moment, I regret having ever set foot in Lyonesse, so don’t talk to me about regrets.”
“You’ll get over it,” he said unsympathetically. “You wouldn’t be where you are today if you didn’t thrive on challenge.”
He was right, but she didn’t have to give him the satisfaction of acknowledging it. She kept silent as he led the way out of his office and picked a path through the palace that led to another unfamiliar wing.
Passing by several closed doors, they reached an old stone archway with a wide set of worn stone steps that went downward. As they descended, Oberon lit the witchlight globes set at intervals along the walls.
She was too fascinated to get worried about the strangeness and isolation as they continued to descend deeper. Just being alone with Oberon in the ruined city was already filled with strangeness and isolation. They were merely changing the scenery.
Finally, when they had gone down at least sixty feet, they came to a set of ancient iron-bound doors.
The doors were latched, not locked. He opened one and pushed it wide to reveal a deeply shadowed interior. Then he stepped inside, and as she followed, he flicked out a magical spark.
This time when witchlights flared, the entire area blazed with light. At first it blinded her, and she threw up a hand to shield her eyes. Then as she adjusted, she stared around in awe.
They weren’t standing in a room. They were standing in a large cave—a crystal cave, and the crystals picked up the light from the witchlights and reflected back both light and magic until it seemed like they stood in the middle of the sun itself.
She walked slowly across the floor, soaking in the scene. At some point the floor had been leveled, and a large oblong slab sat in the middle of the expanse. It looked like it had been carved from a single creamy white stone. On the wall opposite the doors a trickle of water poured into a large, carved stone basin.
As she reached the slab, she laid a hand on the surface. The echo of long-ago magic vibrated through her senses.
She breathed, “What is this stone?”
“It’s a form of agate found exclusively here in Lyonesse.” Oberon walked to the opposite side of the slab and laid his hands along the top as well. His expression turned inward. “It absorbs magic better than most other gems. As you can see, the crystal walls and ceiling provide plenty of illumination. They can be spelled to hold light for as long as a full day… three times as long as normal witchlights. Here is your operating theater, Kathryn. Healing sessions and surgeries have been conducted here for many centuries. This stone will maintain any spell you need for it to, for as long as you need it.”
“It’s amazing,” she whispered.
She ran a finger along the edge, trying to pick up details from the echoes of the magic that had been cast into it. She could almost, but not quite, catch images, but the last magic had been cast too long ago for her to get more than fleeting impressions.
Overwhelmingly, however, she got the sense that the slab had been used for pain control and anesthesia, and she dared to relax a tiny bit. Those were her two major concerns about doing surgery on Oberon by herself.
With his cooperation, she was certain she could put him under, but she didn’t know if she could keep him unconscious if the magic she used or the magic the needle emitted disturbed him in any way. And his waking up in the middle of such an invasive surgery would be nightmarish for the both of them.
“What do you think about the height?” He watched her closely.
“Hmm?” She frowned down at the slab as she considered. “Oh—it’s a little tall for me, but not enough to be a problem. I can always get a flat piece of wood to stand on. I think this space will work amazingly well once it’s been disinfected from top to bottom.”
“Good.” He turned to leave, then paused. “How many diamonds do you want?”
“As many as you can lay your hands on,” she told him absently. “Say, fifty or sixty magic-quality gems.”
“You want sixty diamonds?” He snorted. “That should be no problem to find in an evacuated city.”
It took a moment for her to pull out of her preoccupation and realize he was being sarcastic. “Surely you’ve got some treasure stuck in secret closets somewhere,” she said. “And while I realize that gems are very portable, there’s still the chance that not everybody took everything with them. When people evacuate, they aren’t always thinking clearly, and they always act in the hope that they’ll be able to return home soon. I need fifty or sixty magic-quality gems—preferably diamonds, or even good-sized chunks of this type of agate, if it holds spells as well as you say.”
He rubbed the back of his neck. “Fine. When do you need it by?”
“As soon as you can get it. By tomorrow morning if you can.” She eyed him thoughtfully. “Do you know how to cast healing spells?”
“If you mean simple spells to heal injuries, yes.”
“Good. That will help. Do you also know how to make healing potions or how to set spells into gems?”
His eyes narrowed. She could tell he was catching on to her trajectory. “Yes.”
“Even better. When you find fifty or sixty gems, you can start casting healing spells into them. It typically takes about thirty-five to forty-five minutes to cast one healing spell into a gem, so as you can see, you’ve got your work cut out for you. Ticktock, King.”
“What will you be doing while I work on this?”
Spreading out her hands, she told him, “I’ll be doing everything else.”