Embrace the Mystery (The Blood Rose #3)(4)
Author: Caris Roane

Lorelei sighed. “I do.”

“Then you take one side of this big Guardsman and I’ll take the other.”

When Batya slid her arms beneath Quinlan, he moaned heavily. She sensed that a number of his bones were broken and that left alone, he’d die.

She sent a calming vibration through his mind and somehow that did the trick. He dropped into a much-needed coma.

When Lorelei worked her arms beneath Quinlan as well, and she opened her levitating power, some of it zinged against Batya.

I’ve never felt anything like that. Who the hell are you?

Lorelei’s lips quirked. An ex-pat, like you. That’s all.

Like hell. But Batya smiled.

“On three.” She counted down and together, two Grochaire ex-pats, levitated a near-dead mastyr vampire, weighing in at a heavily muscled two-forty and not an ounce less, and carried him through the blown-apart gallery to the infirmary off the back hallway.

The healing room held a large bed so that family members could often sleep beside their loved ones, or just be near them when they passed.

Mostly realm-folk survived whatever trauma or disease came at them, one of the perks of being long-lived.

Yet Batya had noticed that sometimes the spirit of her fellow realm inhabitants gave out when a human spirit didn’t. That was one of the mysteries of her world.

As she and Lorelei worked to get the blood-feeding-tube down Quinlan’s throat, she doubted he’d succumb to a loss of will, or anything else like that. Only these levels of burns and physical destruction could take Mastyr Quinlan out.

For the next several hours, she and Lorelei took turns donating blood to the feeding-tube apparatus. Vampires were excellent self-healers and more than anything, blood would do the trick. So together, they donated and watched as minute upon minute his skin knitted together and his broken bones stretched out and re-formed properly.

She kept him out cold so that anytime his powerful conscious mind tried to rise back to the surface, she’d send a reassuring vibration, from her healing frequency, straight to the center of his brain. He seemed to know her and to acknowledge her presence, because he didn’t fight her, but each time settled back into his unconscious state to let his body do the work.

Lorelei brought her a tray of food of fresh fruit, an orange muffin, and a vanilla yogurt. Batya didn’t speak as she ate, but she did inspect the enthrallment shield she’d created. The preternatural wall held and wouldn’t budge unless she made a decision to release it. She could also open up small portions in order to let people come and go if necessary.

Though the wraith-pairs had left at dawn, an elven female, wearing protective sun-gear, stood guard across the street within a faint enthrallment shield so that the humans couldn’t see them. The ancient fae was having her gallery watched.

By nightfall, having been up for twenty-four hours, Lorelei needed some sleep.

Quinlan was well on his way to healing and she’d removed the blood-feeding tube. He’d be waking up in the next few hours at which time she’d give him a solid wrist-feed.

For now, however, with Quinlan’s skin mostly restored and sleeping as he was on his back, she stretched out on the bed, pulled a separate blanket over her and turned on her side to look at him. With all the lights in the room off, she altered her vision and saw him in a soft glow.

He had an incredible profile. His nose was slightly crooked like it had been broken in some way he couldn’t repair or maybe he’d been born that way, but she’d always thought it his sexiest feature. He had thick black brows, and his hair lay twisted and matted beneath him. She didn’t envy him that brush-job.

Her hair was similar so she knew exactly what he faced when he finally recovered.

She tucked her hand beneath her cheek and sighed. Not a bad night-and-day’s work, saving a mastyr vampire from an ancient fae and two uber-powerful Invictus wraith-pairs.

Was this the future then? An army of wraith-pairs that could defeat even a powerful mastyr vampire?

If this were true, then what would happen to the Nine Realms? How could Grochaire or any of the other North American realms stand?

Well, she couldn’t solve all the world’s problems, at least not tonight.

She smiled as she fell sound asleep.

* * * * * * * * *

Quinlan woke up slowly, his mind cluttered with images that he couldn’t quite make sense of, like huge vampires and wraiths, snowfields, and a deadly net flying through the air.

But beneath the revolving spin of scattered sights and sounds, rode a sense that he should be up and doing something. He just didn’t know what.

His eyes took their time opening and they hurt in a strange way, like he’d been staring at the sun, a very bad thing for a vampire.

He recalled seeing something gold and glowing, but what?

Some of his bones ached, especially his ribs, and he could feel them reforming, which meant he’d been hurt recently, but how? Why?

A weight across his upper thighs and another across his chest stung a little where his skin hadn’t completely healed.

So he must have been burned as well.

He reached down to remove the first weight and found a woman’s arm.

An arm.

He smiled. Though he wasn’t sure why, he liked the woman’s arm over his chest and he could live with the moderate pain it caused.

He sighed and his mind drifted back into oblivion once more.

Sometime later, he awoke again with a new weight pressed on his chest, something heavier this time and his nose tickled.

Opening his eyes, which didn’t sting nearly as much as earlier, he lifted a hand to rub the tip of his nose. He found several strands of coarse hair curled just so to make his skin itch.

Blond hair. Very thick and wavy.

He knew this hair. He was sure of it.

Ah, the woman again.

She lay on his chest, the cause of that heavy weight.

His ribs still hurt, but not that much, not enough to make him want to wake the woman up and tell her to move.

Instead, his lips curved once more. Oddly, he felt more relaxed than he had in a long time, in decades, maybe even centuries. His stomach didn’t even hurt.

Weird, that.

He wanted to explore why his stomach wasn’t all cramped up with blood-hunger, but he drifted off once more.

When he finally woke up for good, the first thing he realized was that he was in a fully aroused state and the woman lay partially on top of him.

He opened his eyes and found that no aches remained in or near the sockets, but his stomach warned him that he was low on fuel and not the kind that a meal could provide.

He needed blood.