Page 65 of Protecting His Vampire Mate

Tobias stood there with the cooler, looking completely at ease, even though we were committing a theft that would be awfully hard to explain if anyone caught us.

“Thanks for standing guard,” I told him. “Um, we can leave now.”

“There’s one more thing we need to do,” Tobias replied, turning to meet my gaze. “Do you trust me?”

“Yes.” I said it without hesitation, because it was true. I wasn’t entirely sure I trusted myself any longer, but I knew that I trusted him.

“Good.”

With that, Tobias turned and stalked off, down the hall. Feeling mounting confusion and alarm, I followed him. He turned a corner and stopped at a bank of elevators. There was a directory posted to the wall between them and Tobias scanned it for a moment before hitting the button to summon an elevator going up.

The hospital wasn’t like the massive Medical Centers I was used to in Seattle. It was much smaller, and I felt even more out of place and exposed, like anyone might come along and realize we were intruders. But a small group of nurses passed by, right beside us. Judging from the cups of stale-smelling coffee they clutched in their hands, they were clearly coming from the tiny cafeteria nearby. They didn’t pay us any attention at all.

The elevator doors chimed open, and Tobias led the way inside. He hit the button for the second floor. Still, he didn’t speak.

He was starting to freak me out a little, actually.

“Where are we going?” I asked, following him out of the elevator when the doors opened again.

When he looked at me, his face was all wrong. It was tight and set into hard lines, like he was still angry.

“I’m showing you something that you need to see.”

“O-kay,” I replied, my confusion rapidly turning to fear. Because the look on his face was all wrong. Like he was filled with an intensity of purpose that bordered on anger. And I couldn’t be entirely certain that it wasn’t directed at me.

I didn’t like it one bit.

Tobias led us to the ICU—the intensive care unit. There was a nurse’s station there, with heavy double doors that stopped anyone from going further into the unit. An older, exhausted-looking female nurse with her graying hair pulled back into a severe bun looked up at us as we approached.

Which meant that Tobias’s spell was no longer working on us.

I shot him a nervous look.

“We don’t allow visitors,” she informed us, the steel in her voice impossible to mistake. “And you two aren’t wearing visitor badges. How did you get past security?”

Tobias caught her gaze and held it. Then he cast the same spell he’d used on the morgue attendant, speaking the strange words in a tone that was halfway between cajoling and forceful.

The effect on the nurse was so immediate and abrupt that I actually flinched away from her. All the tension drained away from her face and her eyes glazed over. Her lips parted slightly and she stared at Tobias without seeming to actually see him.

Watching the easy way he messed with someone else’s mind turned my stomach. “You promised not to do this unless you had no other choice,” I whispered.

Tobias ignored me. His gaze was still locked on the nurse at the desk. “We’re not visitors. We’re here to help.”

“You’re here to help,” the nurse whispered, nodding. She looked horribly like a marionette on a string. “Right. Yes.”

“You’re going to take us to whichever patient you know, deep down, won’t make it.”

The nurse nodded, then stood up, moving almost mechanically, like she was in a deep trance. Which, I supposed, she was. She used her badge on the keycard reader next to the door and the heavy double doors opened with a soft hiss, revealing a half dozen rooms with glass walls in a U formation. Only half of the beds were occupied.

The overhead fluorescent lights were too harsh and the floor smelled of dried blood, cleaning chemicals, and the faint sickly sweet odor of death. I heard several monitors from the surrounding rooms beeping, the noises blending together into a single discordant sound.

The nurse led us to one of the rooms on the right.

Through the glass window, I saw that the bed was occupied. The patient had so many tubes, wires, and monitors connected to them that it was impossible to make out the age or gender.

“Tell us about this patient, in plain language. Explain to us why they won’t recover.”

“Her name is Annie Reynolds. She’s twenty-nine years old. She came in six days ago, complaining of severe stomach pain,” the nurse explained, a note of faraway sadness entering her words even though her voice still sounded all wrong to my ears, mechanical and almost dreamy like she was deep in a trance state.

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