The blue-green eyes glittered. "You are a godsend, my lady."
Alex forced a smile and went to work on replacing Blanche's dressings.
Michael followed her around for the next hour, watching her work and offering encouraging words to her patients. Alex finished rounds, left instructions with the ward nurses to watch the most critical patients, and went upstairs with Michael in tow.
He didn't bug her until they were in their suite. "I know you are upset, Alexandra, but I cannot fathom why. You are doing tremendous things to help our people. You cannot blame yourself for those too far gone to save."
"Who said that I did?" She breezed past him and went into the bathroom, where she turned on the shower and began to strip. As often as she bathed, she couldn't seem to get the smell of scorched, decomposing flesh out of her hair, and the stink of it was driving her crazy.
She was still scrubbing at her scalp when Michael, naked and frowning, stepped into the shower with her. "Chérie, talk to me."
"I'm really not in the mood to share," she said, ducking her head under the spray to rinse out the shampoo. "Why don't you go hang with Richard and drink wine and talk about the good old days, when all they did was burn you at the stake?" When she emerged and wiped her eyes clear, Michael was still there. "Christ. Will you get out of here, Seigneur?"
"I am not your seigneur," he told her. "I am your lover. I am here for you."
Rather than snipe at him some more, Alex turned her back on him, worked some instant conditioner through the thick, sodden mass of her curls, and rinsed that away. Still she could smell it, very faintly, and reached for the shampoo bottle again.
Michael took it away from her. "Your hair is clean. Tell me what has made you so angry."
"Other than the piles of scalded, twisted charcoal that used to be people down in the basement? Some of whom I'm going to have to chop arms and legs off of later on this week, if they don't compel my human nurses to kill them first? And the twenty new ones Gabriel and Nick are dragging across Europe, who should be here, like, any minute?" She watched her fist fly past his face into the tile wall, which imploded into a small crater lined with jagged ceramic shards. The skin over her knuckles split and then closed. "Nothing comes to mind."
Michael followed her out of the shower and wrapped a big dark blue towel around her.
"Come here."
She didn't want to be hugged or stroked or soothed, but to save the rest of the bathroom walls and his face, she let him hold her. Being close to him always made her regret the hair trigger of her temper, and how often she aimed it at him.
He doesn't deserve this, any more than the people downstairs merited being torched and tortured.
Against his chest she muttered, "Sorry."
Michael scooped her up and carried her out of the bathroom, lowering her onto the bed and stretching out beside her. He pillowed his head on one arm and began smoothing back the wet curls stuck to her face.
"The first time I rode into battle, I saw hundreds of my brothers fall and die in front of me," he said quietly. "Some lost heads, arms, legs; others were hacked into so many pieces they fell apart. As the tide of battle turned, we chased the Saracens fleeing into the hills. I did not realize until I heard screaming beneath my horse that some of those who had fallen were still alive. In our eagerness to pursue the enemy, we trampled our own wounded."
"If you're trying to make me feel better," Alex said as she rolled away from him, "you need to move on to another anecdote. Fast."
"I only wish you to know that I am not indifferent to what you are feeling." He pulled her back against him. "How it is to hear them cry out. The smell of their wounds. Knowing with a glance who will live and who will die. I have waded my way through a river of dead bodies, breathing in the stench of death, looking for a chest that moved, or eyes that blinked."
"You went back for them?"
He didn't answer her until she turned around and faced him. "Before each battle, the temple master made us all draw lots. Those who lost did not ride against the enemy that day, but waited in camp. When word came that the fighting had ended, those of us who had remained behind put on our vestments and rode to the battlefield. We dismounted and formed a line. We prayed together, and then drew our swords and walked the field."
It took her a second to work out what he was saying. "You killed the wounded."
That seemed to stir him out of his reverie. "We had no doctors or medicines with us in the Holy Land, Alexandra. We barely knew how to bind minor wounds, much less keep them clean and heal them. A quick and merciful death was better than one that took weeks of suffering in agony." He watched her face, his eyes so clear and blue that it hurt for her to look into them. "That is why the worst of the wounded will try to kill themselves, or ask another Kyn to dispatch them. It is not because you have failed them, chérie. It has always been our way."
Whenever Michael had made such statements in the past, Alex had the feeling that nothing would ever knock down the invisible, impenetrable wall between the Kyn's medieval attitudes and her own modern point of view. Now she only felt tired of slamming headfirst into the wall.
She also had an obligation to tell him what she had discovered while working on the patients in the basement hospital.
"There's something you should know," she said. "About two-thirds of the patients I've seen were shot as well as burned. It's why most of their wounds haven't been healing."
"We have had reports that the Brethren hunters shot at those who fled the fires, but once the slugs are removed, they should heal."
"Not this time," she said. "The hunters used explosive rounds, a kind I've never seen before now. The rounds fragment inside the body, scattering splinter-size shrapnel inside the wound."
"That is new." He frowned. "A sliver of copper lodged in the heart can kill us as quickly as a slug. Perhaps the zealots are using these rounds to be more efficient."
She shook her head. "None of the survivors who were brought here were shot in the chest. They were hit in the back, the belly, the head, or the extremities. Now, maybe a couple of the Brethren have lousy aim, but the patients' wounds are too similar to be mistakes. I think the hunters were trying not to kill them."
Chapter Ten
"Not kill them?" Michael lifted his head and looked down at her. "If this is so, why shoot them at all?"
"To wound them in a way that wouldn't kill them immediately. To slow them down. Or to make sure they suffered before they died, but then why not just shoot them in the head and get it over with?" She had told him this much; she might as well get out the rest. "Based on what I'm seeing down there, I know the Brethren hunters weren't trying to shoot to kill. It could be that they're trying to capture the Kyn they shoot to bring them back alive."
"I must talk to Richard about this." He sat up. "He will wish to discuss the patients with you as well."
"I'll put it on my calendar," Alex said listlessly. "Would you mind if we go to sleep now? I don't think I can work up the energy for the usual kiss-and-make-up sexathon."
Michael left her there and returned with a syringe and a vial of plasma from her case. She watched him fill the syringe, and didn't complain or resist when he injected her.
He ran his thumb over the small hole the syringe left in her arm, which didn't close immediately. "How long has it been since your last needle?"
"I don't know. I got so busy downstairs I forgot." Alex watched him set aside the syringe. "I'm sorry I've been such a bitch. I'll try to do more of the seigneur's-lady stuff in between patients tomorrow."
Michael eased down next to her. "You do not have to do anything, chérie. We can rest, and tomorrow we can make arrangements to go home. You have but to say."
"I can't exactly walk out on my patients." She suspected he was trying to placate her. "You don't want to leave, either. It'll make you look bad in front of all the other seigneurs."
"I can ask Geoffrey to find human doctors who will help the patients. You have but to write up instructions on what they are to do." He gave her a crooked smile. "As for me, how do you put it? I will live."
Plasma didn't light up her insides the way whole blood did, but Alex felt relaxing warmth spreading through her. The never-ending nightmare downstairs, Michael's patience, and her own miserable guilt swamped her. Although becoming Kyn had taken nearly all of her humanity, she could still cry.
"Alexandra." He lifted her onto his lap and pressed her head against his chest. "Shhhh."
"I can't leave," she said through the tears. "Look at Blanche. Braxtyn told me how beautiful she was; from the way she described her she must have been like the Marilyn Monroe of the Kyn."
He nodded. "Knights would fight one another for the chance to win her favor and wear her colors on their sleeves."
"Blanche's face is gone. There's nothing left but scar tissue. There aren't any photos of her, so I don't know what she looked like."
"I will draw a sketch of her for you," Michael promised.
"Then there's Gideon, the warrior who pulled Blanche out of the flames. If he survives the copper poisoning from getting shot in the back, he's going to need a double amputation. He's so out of it he doesn't know. Blanche asks about him every night." She caught a sob and forced it back down her throat. "I was kind of hoping he'd die so I wouldn't have to tell her that he burned his hands off saving her."
He rubbed his cheek against her hair. "If I could take away your burdens, I would. I would take them all, chérie."
Sitting naked on Michael's lap and sobbing into his shoulder was all Alex could manage for a time. When she had gotten most of the immediate misery out of her system, she lifted her face and kissed him. Any other night he would have turned her around and jumped on top of her, but he remained uncharacteristically passive, giving her only what she wanted.