God! What the hell was that?
The invisible grip suddenly softened and my body relaxed as if a burden had lifted from my chest. But before I could breathe once more, the force turned naughty. It explored me, touched me like a lover's invisible fingers, caressing me, stirring foreign urges and feelings within me that I had never felt before. My body softened, grew moist and heated. I shivered. Then I smelled him. Blood.
My nostrils flared. I turned my head, tracking the scent, and saw him, the source. Bed Eight.
He was sitting alone on the stretcher all the way across the room, his blue eyes gazing intently at me. His long hair, darker than midnight, fell in soft waves to brush his shoulders. He had skin the color of ivory, luminescent and pure like the full moon against the ink-black sky, and a face that had the power to make his maker weep with joy or jealousy. An angel fallen from the sky. No, I thought, looking into predatory eyes as dark and endless as the night. Not fallen… kicked out.
The sight of him left me breathless. I watched as his nostrils flared, as he deliberately filled his lungs with air, and knew as surely as I had smelled his blood that he was taking in my scent, smelling my arousal. His lashes dipped down then fanned back up like the graceful sweep of a butterfly's wings. The power and heat that had come from his eyes intensified the caressing effects on me, penetrating through my outer self, pulling tautly at my core, calling up my own force to the fore in response. Our energies met and meshed. My nipples hardened to stone, my inner sheath quivered, and I wanted to go to him. Go to him and pull him to me.
The air crackled with such vibrancy that I was sure others had to have seen. But the nurses were busy with their needles and notes, and the doctors were busily minding their patients.
The pull between us tightened like a rope. Desperately I fought that pull the only way I knew, wave against wave, tide against tide. I intensified my force, marshaling up my last ounce, countering it. The air between us practically sparked. Still, it took every ounce of my control to just sit there and not go to him. Perspiration sheened my skin and my trembling grew harsher.
I'd never felt anything like this before in my life. Was he like me? Was he one of my kind, whatever that may be? Or was he an enemy?
One thing, though, I knew for certain. He was a bastard. My eyes narrowed in anger. How dare he try to use his powers on me.
I stalked over to where he sat on the stretcher, his legs dangling over the side, and stopped inches away from him. "Stop it!" I snarled.
His eyes widened. "It is not I who is doing it." His deep, melodic voice was as beautiful as the rest of him. Unfair.
"Don't lie to me!" I hissed.
"I would not dare."
"Just… just stop it!"
He gave a Gaelic shrug, a fluid ripple of shoulder and chest, a simple movement that was not simple at all, for it touched something inside me like a literal caress, causing me to shudder and drop down my gaze to take note of the bulge that had risen between his legs. His eyes closed and still I felt the pull, undiminished. Confused, I suddenly noticed the careful stiffness with which he held himself, the whiteness of his knuckles as he clenched the metal frame of the stretcher, the dampness of his brow. He seemed to be fighting the attraction as much as I.
"You feel it, too," I said, frowning.
"Yes." His blue eyes snapped open and speared mine with sudden intensity. "Where are your guards? I sense no one here other than you and I."
"Guards?"
He frowned. "Surely you are…" Carefully, slowly, he reached out one hand, stopping just short of touching me, and stroked above the bare skin of my forearm. His force, though invisible and without contact, was palpable just above skin. I felt his stroke as surely as if he had caressed me.
"You feel like a Queen," he murmured.
I stepped back, wondering if he was one of those madmen who frequently found their way to St. Vincent's dehydrated, famished, and highly delirious. And yet there was something very different about him.
"What are you talking about?" I demanded sharply.
A plump tech bustled up, a bright smile creasing her matronly face. It was Sally, the ward clerk who took the vital signs of all the new patients, helping lighten the nurses' loads. "My, my, aren't you the pretty boy," Sally murmured, glancing down at his data sheet. "David Michaels. Just what I needed to brighten my night."
He smiled, a lethal combination of teeth and dimples.
She smiled back. "I'll have his vitals for you in a sec, Lisa." In so saying, she reached out to take his pulse.
It registered then—what should have registered immediately had I not been so stunned by his beauty and my body's reaction to him. His heartbeat. His very, very slow heartbeat. Not more than thirty beats per minute. Far below the normal human rate of sixty and above. My own heart sped up from its usual sluggish fifty, hitting the sixty mark when Sally frowned and looked up.
He captured her gaze with his eyes and I then felt the gentle flow of his power. Shit. He really hadn't been using it before now. What then was this peculiar, strong attraction between us?
Sally's frown lines smoothed away like unrippled water. "A pulse of sixty and a blood pressure of one hundred and twenty over seventy." She jotted down the numbers on his sheet, not seeming to notice the blood pressure cuff that lay unused beside her. She hadn't touched it.
I swallowed. "Thank you, Sally."
"No problem. He's all yours." She winked and bustled off to the next patient.
After Sally left, I turned to David Michaels, or whatever his name really was, with a stern look on my face. "You took control of her mind just now, didn't you? She didn't even measure your blood pressure."
He leaned back on his pillow, his eyes closed, looking even paler than before, if that was possible, and laughed feebly. "Goddess, I can't believe that so simple a task exhausted me…"
"What are you?" I whispered and pulled the privacy curtains tight around us.
His dark lashes fluttered up. "Never mind who I am, who are you?" he asked, shifting forward. The movement caused him to wince and his hand moved to cover his belly.
"You're injured." With only a slight tremor, I lifted his shirt. It was an inch-long gash. One drop of red blood gleamed like scarlet against the pearl white of his skin, alluring, irresistible. At the sight of his blood, something clicked open in me that I hadn't known existed. As if in a dream, I watched my finger dip down and scoop up that templing crimson pearl onto my fingertip. Watched him shudder as I touched him. Watched him shudder again as I licked the blood off my fingertip and tasted him.
It was sweet, so sweet, though tainted by an odd metallic tang.
What was he, this creature before me? And what had injured him?
Gently, I covered his wound with my palm. The center of my hand tingled and strummed. My senses seeped deep down below his skin, revealing to me clearly the torn passage through his tissues.
"You were stabbed. With a stiletto. And I sense something more. There is a… poison within you."
"Poison." One corner of his lush mouth lifted in bitter wryness. "An accurate labeling. A blade dipped in liquid silver. Now that the liquid poison is within me, it will spread slowly. Already it weakens me greatly."
"Who stabbed you?"
"My Queen, Mona Sera."
"Of course, your Queen," I said, wondering once again if he was mad. "Is she visiting from a foreign country? And why did she stab you?"
"I was leaving her," he said simply, "and this was her parting gift. Usually a wound like this would heal within several hours, but she punished me by using a silver blade."
"Why is silver bad?"
"Because the inherent quality of silver runs afoul with our bodies, causing us to then heal like humans. Slowly."