"It's all right." She slowly placed the phone back on the bed. "I'll go with you."
"We will see to it that Agent Hutchins is returned to his family," Robin said. "You have my word."
"I'll do whatever you want," she said. "But when this is over and Ray is safe, I'll see to it that you and the contessa go to jail for the rest of your lives."
He gave her an odd look. "You cannot imprison a prisoner, love."
Robin escorted her downstairs, where Will was waiting with the car. He refused to let her use the car phone to call her parents or anyone else. Although Chris had no intention of endangering Hutch's life by doing something stupid, she thought she might try to somehow tip off the bureau as to their situation. There were important protocols that were followed whenever agents were taken hostage, and while there were no guarantees, Chris knew their best chance of survival was with the bureau's hostage negotiators handling the contessa.
Robin never let her out of his sight, however, holding her hand as they walked into the airport and putting his arm around her when they checked in at the gate. It wasn't until he whisked her onto the private jet that she realized she wasn't going to be able to pass a message to another passenger.
There were no other passengers.
"I don't have a passport," she said, feeling a little desperate as he guided her down the aisle and to a pair of seats in the center of the jet. "They won't let me through customs without it."
"We don't need passports, love." As the jet taxied down the runway, he buckled her seat belt over her. "You look exhausted. You should try to sleep. We will need to move quickly once we reach Rome."
Once the jet was airborne, a man dressed in a flight attendant's uniform came back, and Robin left her and went to speak with him for a few moments.
She stared through the window, watching the lights of Atlanta shrink, thousands of embers dying in the darkness. She was really doing this, really leaving the country with a man who thought he was a vampire. Or something like a vampire.
What did he call himself? Vrykolakas. Darkyn. She had never heard of an RPG by either name, but new ones were always coming onto the market. She wondered what her department chief would have to say when she finally filed her report. That full grown adults could delude themselves into playing a real-life version of some game seemed farfetched to her, and she was now being made to play her own part in it.
When Robin came and sat down beside her, she asked, "Do you own this plane, or did you charter it?"
"I own this and two others."
If he had that much money, they probably didn't need passports, Chris thought, her heart sinking. "I need my purse and my badge, just in case we don't make it past customs."
He put his hand over hers. "We will, love."
Chris watched his fingers rest against the spaces between hers. She wanted to slap him; she wanted to hang onto him and never let go. Whoever he was—whatever he was—he made her feel too much. Somehow she had to get him out of her head and her heart before he took them over completely.
He can't make me do what he wants. Whatever he's using on other people, it doesn't work on me. If it did, I would do whatever he wants, just like them. But if Rob couldn't affect her, then why couldn't she move her hand out from under his?
The male attendant returned with a tray of drinks. Robin took the glass of dark red wine from the tray and tried to hand her the one filled with amber soda.
Chris shook her head. "I don't want anything, thank you."
"It is only ginger ale." When she still wouldn't take it from him, he drank a sip, grimacing a little. "You see? No poison."
Although she didn't want anything from him or his people, she was thirsty, and letting herself get dehydrated on top of everything else would be idiotic. Reluctantly she took the glass and drank. The cold soft drink felt good going down her dry throat, and gave her something to do besides avoiding his beautiful eyes. It wasn't until she'd finished the soda that she felt her eyelids grow heavy and her hands go numb.
She turned her head and saw him watching her.
He took the glass from her limp grip. "Sweet dreams, my lady."
Alex finished the last of the sutures and sponged the blood from what had been a gaping abdominal wound riddled with copper fragments. She waited to see the edges begin to pull together—too slowly, but better than not at all—before she draped the Kyn warrior's lower body.
"Before you take him into recovery, swap out that unit of blood for plasma," she told Geoffrey's stable master, whom she had drafted yesterday to assist her in surgery. "And I want him kept on plasma drip only for the next forty-eight hours."
The big man frowned. "My lady, he needs blood."
"Oh, he had blood. Someone"—she gave him a pointed look—"already gave him four units of it this morning without checking his chart or asking me."
"Twas to make him stronger for the surgery," he insisted.
"Well, it didn't, not with all the crap lodged in the wound. It just saturated his tissues, diluted the toxins, spread them around, made him weaker, and made my job a lot harder."
Alex pulled down her mask. "He's pumped full of euphoriant now, so he won't need another tranq shot."
"But he will need more blood to heal."
"Plasma, nothing else." She saw his expression and reined in her temper. "Listen, pal. I have the M.D. after my name for a reason. You give him any more whole blood before this batch wears off? He'll go into thrall."
"Go alone into the dreamlands?" The stable master sounded horrified. "He would never wake again."
She smiled brightly. "Which is why we're keeping him on plasma."
Michael was waiting outside her makeshift surgery, but she walked past him to strip out of her gloves and gown at the disposal bin. She'd told him she would be working down in the hospital, but she'd spared him the details. He must have been busy with Richard and the other seigneurs upstairs, as this was the first time he had personally checked on her.
"Were you able to help him?" he asked, coming to stand beside her.
"I dug out about a pound of copper shrapnel that's been sitting in his belly and slowly poisoning him for a couple weeks." She untied the strings around her neck and dropped the blood-spattered mask they held on top of her crumpled gown. "His tox levels were through the roof, and my ninny of scrub nurse pumped him full of whole blood before the operation, but the pathogen started healing the edges of the wound as soon as I closed." She glanced at him. "That means yes, I was able to help him."
Michael looked as if he were still trying to process all the information she'd just thrown at him. "I know his family will be most grateful, chérie."
"I wouldn't count on it," she told him, brushing past him to go to the sink to wash. "His younger brother died on my table yesterday."
Alex knew she was taking out her temper on Michael, and she didn't care. He and everyone else upstairs were talking and playing billiards and generally partying while she was down here cutting and patching up the Brethren's victims. The only help she had were Kyn nurses, most of whom thought doctors still treated wounds with leeches and cow urine. She'd lost two patients already to copper poisoning, and when Gabriel and Nick brought in the next group, she was fairly certain that she was going to lose more.
Michael continued to hover. "What can I do?"
"Besides get out of my hair? Not a thing." She dried off her hands and stalked out of the prep room into the ward.
Braxtyn and Geoff had tried to make the refugees as comfortable as possible, but silk sheets and elegant canopied beds didn't change the fact that most were in very bad shape. Alex had cleaned and treated dozens of third-degree burns, some so severe that the body parts involved were little more than charcoal.
She had not performed any amputations yet, but unless she found some way to restore the circulation to charred, rotting appendages, those were coming, too.
Knowing Michael was shadowing her, Alex stopped at the first bed and pulled aside the lace curtain. Bandages hid the fact that woman sleeping inside looked as if someone had dipped the upper half of her body in sulfuric acid. And she was one of the lucky ones, Alex thought as she checked her dressings. She hadn't gotten shot with the Brethren's fun new ammunition, so all she needed was extensive reconstructive work.
Eyelids distorted by blisters and scar tissue opened to show slivers of beautiful blue-green eyes. "Good evening, my lady." Bandages muffled the patient's soft, French-accented voice.
At least this one will make it, Alex thought. "How are you feeling, Blanche?"
"Much improved." She glanced past Alex and tried to push herself up into a sitting position. "Seigneur Cyprien, it is an honor."
"It's not that big an honor; stay where you are." Alex pulled a tray over to the side of the bed and opened a packet of gauze. "I've got a couple more backs and bellies to clean out and stitch up, and then you and I are going to start spending some quality time together in surgery."
Blanche lifted one of her bandaged hands to touch the thick mask of gauze covering her entire head. "I am grateful for your ministrations, my lady, but my face cannot be fixed. It healed this way the day after the fire."
"I'll have you know that the Brethren beat my boyfriend's head with copper pipes for a couple of weeks," Alex told her, jerking a thumb at Michael. "He actually had no face until I gave him that one."
"It is true, Lady Blanche," Michael said. "My sygkenis can make you as you were before the attack."
"Yeah, I'm a miracle worker." Alex glared at him before she carefully snipped the dressings from Blanche's right hand and examined the scar tissue. "This looks very good. A few more dermal abrasions, a bit more cutting and patchwork, and you won't have to wear gloves unless your hands are cold."