Lover Unbound(147)

Although the fact that she'd had sex during the night was not a figment of her imagination. Shit… or was it?

Manny bent down and put his hands on her shoulders. In a low voice he said, "We'll find you someone to see. We'll take care of this."

"I'm scared."

Manny took her hands, pulled her to her feet, and wrapped her up tight against him. "I'm here for you."

As she hugged him back hard, she said, "You would be a good man to love, Manello. You really would."

"I know."

She laughed a little, the choking sound getting lost in the crook of his neck. "So arrogant."

"Try accurate."

He pulled back and put his palm on her cheek, his deep brown eyes grave. "It's killing me to say this… but I don't want you in the ORs, Jane. Not where you're at in your head right now."

Her first instinct was to fight him, but then she exhaled. "What will we tell people?"

"Depends on how long it lasts. For now? You have the flu." He tucked a piece of hair behind her ear. "Here's the plan. You're going to talk to a friend of mine who's a psychiatrist. He's out in California, so no one will know, and I'm going to go call him now. I'm also scheduling you for a CAT scan. We'll have it done after hours across town at Imaging Associates. No one will know."

When Manello turned to go there was heartbreak in his eyes, and as she thought about the situation, the oddest memory passed through her head.

Three or four winters ago she'd left the hospital late one night, feeling unsettled. Something, some kind of gut instinct, told her to stay and sleep on the couch in her office, but she chalked it up to the fact that the weather was nasty. Thanks to a bitter, freezing rain that had fallen for hours, Caldwell was pretty much a skating rink. Why would anyone want to go out in weather like this?

The nagging sensation wouldn't stop, though. The whole way out to the parking garage, she'd fought against the voice in her head until finally, as she'd put her key in the ignition, she'd had a vision. The damn thing was so clear it was as if the event had already happened and this was her memory of it: She saw her hands gripping the steering wheel as a pair of headlights pierced her windshield straight-on. She felt the stinging pain of impact, the jarring spin as her car whipped around, the burning in her lungs as she screamed.

Creeped out but determined, she'd pulled slowly into the freezing rain. Talk about defensive driving. She regarded every other car as a potential wreck, and would have used the sidewalks instead of the roads if she could have.

Halfway home she'd stopped at a light, praying that no one hit her.

As if it had been preordained, however, a car had come up behind her, lost traction, and started in on the great slide. She'd gripped the steering wheel and looked up into the rearview window… and watched as the headlights came toward her.#p#分页标题#e#

The car had missed her entirely.

After she was sure no one was hurt, Jane had laughed to herself, taken a deep breath, and headed home. Along the way, she'd reflected on how the brain extrapolated from its environment and jumped to conclusions, how strong thoughts and fears could be mistaken for some kind of prescient ability, how news reports of bad roads could percolate and lead to—

The plumber's truck slammed into her head-on about three miles from her house. As she'd come around the corner to find those headlights in her lane, her only thought had been, well, shit, she'd been right after all. She'd ended up with a broken collarbone and a totaled car. The plumber and his truck had been fine, thank God, but she'd been out of the OR for weeks.

So… as she watched Manello leave her office, she knew what was going to happen, and the clarity of it all was along the lines of that vision of the accident: As immutable as the color of her eyes. As undeniable as the passage of time. As unstoppable as a plumber's truck skidding on black ice.

"My career is over," she whispered in a dead voice. "I'm done."



Vishous knelt by his bed, put a necklace of black pearls around his neck, and closed his eyes. As he reached out with his mind to the Other Side, he deliberately thought of Jane. The Scribe Virgin might as well know what the hell this was about from the get-go.

It took a while before he got a response from his mother, but then he was traveling through antimatter to the nontemporal realm, taking form in the white courtyard.

The Scribe Virgin was standing before her tree of birds, and one of them, a peach finchy kind of thing, was in her hand. As the hood of her black robe was down, V could see her ghostly face, and he was astonished at the adoration on it as she looked at the little creature in her glowing hand. Such love, he thought.