“Bet your queen won’t feel like that.”
“She’s your ruler, too—and I wouldn’t play that card if I were you.” s’Ex pointed his forefinger across the distance. “She’ll put him through a cleanse, and if he survives that—which is not a foregone conclusion—he’ll never be the same. You need to shut your fucking mouth on his love life, trust me. Oh, and AnsLai doesn’t know I’ve come. Let’s keep this our little secret, shall we.”
After the enforcer went out and disappeared into thin air, iAm strode over and closed the door. Then he proceeded directly to the bar at the far end of the open space and poured himself a bourbon.
Looked like Trez’s get-out-of-jail-free card had a hole in it: His sex addiction was not going to be the turnoff they’d been hoping it would.
Great.
And if s’Ex hadn’t shown up here and told him to keep all that fucking on the QT? God only knew what would have happened.
He hadn’t even heard about cleansing, but he could guess.
One thing was sure: He never thought in a million years he’d ever owe that coldhearted executioner a solid. Then again, it looked like Trez wasn’t the only one balking at the restrictions of the Territory.
The question was … now what. And he had about ten minutes to figure the shit out before the high priest got here.
FIFTEEN
“I never expected to see you again. They said you’d left town.”
As St. Francis’s Chief of Neurology leaned into the computer screen, the guy seemed to be talking to himself. And sure enough, as Manny Manello didn’t answer him, he didn’t seem to care.
Beth stepped in a little closer to take a look herself—although, come on, it wasn’t as if the multiple views of her brother’s brain up on that monitor meant anything to her. Hopefully, however, this guy in the white coat with the impressive credentials came at things from a different angle.
The dim anteroom they were all squeezed into was like something out of a Star Trek episode, high-tech equipment whirring and blinking, the massive MRI machine in the chamber beyond kept separate by a thick plate-glass window. And actually, the neurologist, sitting in front of that banked console, was kind of like Lieutenant Sulu as he faced off at the computer screens, the keyboards, a telephone or two, another laptop.
“How long did this most recent seizure last?” the neurologist asked absently.
“About fifteen minutes,” Beth answered as John glanced over at her.
“Any numbness or tingling?”
When John shook his head, Beth said, “No. Nothing.”
John had come out of the hollow doughnut about ten minutes ago and changed from his hospital johnny back into his relatively innocuous-looking jeans and Giants T-shirt. The IV that had pumped contrast into his body was out of his arm, a little white Band-Aid in the place of its needle, and his shitkickers were back on.
He’d left his weapons at home.
Xhex, however, was fully loaded as she stood next to him, a black Nike baseball cap pulled down low over her eyes. Payne was the other backup, the fighter dressed in black and wearing the same kind of loose coat John’s wife was.
Beth did a retug of her own Bos Sox hat. It had been a while since anyone had seen her in the human world, and she didn’t know anyone in particular at the hospital—but there was no reason to layer on more complication to this trip.
Oh, God, please let this be okay, she thought as that doctor scrolled through all the images again.
Right behind him, not that the man was aware of it, Doc Jane was also peering over his shoulder at the black-and-white pictures—in full ghost mode.
The more eyes, the better.
“What do you see?” Manny demanded.
To his credit, the neurologist didn’t spin back around until he was good and ready—and he addressed John when he finally faced the crowd.
“There’s nothing abnormal in there that I can see.”
Cue the collective sigh of relief. And the first thing John did was grab Xhex’s tight body and haul her in close, the world obviously disappearing for them both.
As Beth watched them, she knew she should be focused on the good news. Instead, all she could think of was how she was not only alone while she waited to hear whether her brother had some kind of embolism or tumor or heaven only knew what horror in his brain—but there was a big-ass metaphorical pink elephant between her and her husband that was not going to go away anytime soon.
Pink. As in baby-girl color.
Or maybe not. Maybe it was pale blue.
“All of the brain structure is normal…”
The doctor launched into a whole lot of physician-speak that luckily meant something to Manny, given the nodding. But the lovebirds ignored all that, and their self-absorption was actually a beautiful thing to see.