Nightwing (6 page)

“All right. Dr. Raven.” Willie spun around on one foot. “I don’t know what you think—”

There was no one beside the bed, yet there was
something
beside the bed. A silvery shimmer in the air that swept her with vertigo. Her head spun and the room with it, which was far more frightening than having a man in her bedroom. It had been so long since that had happened—

The shimmer moved and so did Willie, without thinking or screaming. She didn’t run, she flew—clutching the towel around her—out of her bedroom, along the hall and down the stairs, until her still wet right foot shot out from under her on the uncarpeted steps.

She bounced down the last two and landed, hard, on her tailbone on the dining room floor. Needles of pain flashed up her spine and her right shin; she’d somehow managed to wrench the hell out of her ankle, which Callie gripped with her claws. The cat suddenly let go of her ankle and leapt into Willie’s lap, her fur bristling and her eyes huge.

“It’s not black lace,” Frank said, “but it’ll do.”

Willie swept the cat off, whipped her head around and saw Frank standing in the kitchen doorway, holding a covered wok with blue-checked hot pads.

“Knock it off, Chou, and help me up. I sprained my ankle.”

“I wondered why you were sitting on the floor in a towel.” Frank put the wok on the table and knelt beside her. “You didn’t answer when I knocked, so I let myself in.”

Thank God, Willie thought, holding on to Frank with one hand and her towel with the other as he eased her up, her weight on her left foot. Callie meowed and rubbed Frank’s bare, dark-haired ankles above his brown leather boat shoes.

Frank nodded at the cat. “Is this the surprise?”

“One of them. Her name’s Callie.” Willie sucked air between her teeth and gave up trying to put weight on her right foot. “I had Jim Eggleson over today. Can you tell?”

“I wondered why the place was shut up and cold as a mausoleum. How’d you sprain your ankle?’

“I slipped running down the stairs.”

“Dare I hope,” he said, his eyes gleaming with mischief, “that you were running to meet me at the door?”

“In your dreams. I’d just gotten out of the shower and I saw—”

Willie stopped herself. What had she seen? A man in the mirror, who wasn’t there when she turned around? The same man she’d seen on the porch last night, who wasn’t there when she blinked? How would that sound to Frank? Or better yet, to Whit, when Frank called him. Which he would as surely as Willie would be limping for the next couple of days.

“The time,” she said. “I saw me time and realized I hadn’t put the rice on. So I came running downstairs.”

“Sounds like you. Want me to help you upstairs so you can get dressed?”

“
No
.” Her sharp refusal drew a raised eyebrow from Frank. “I mean—I’ve got some clothes in the laundry room I haven’t put away yet.’

“Good. Get dressed and I’ll make the rice.”

On Frank’s arm, Willie hopped across the kitchen into the laundry room. Callie slithered in just before she shut the door, stepped into her pan and used it while Willie dug through the dryer and a basket of folded clothes. Sometimes it paid not to finish the laundry.

It took her ten minutes to put on underwear, gray sweat shorts and a blue pocket T-shirt, her ankle throbbing all the way up to her knee. Willie dropped the lid on the toilet, sat down to catch her breath and watched Callie fling sand all over the white-tiled floor. She didn’t want to think about what she’d seen—or hadn’t seen—in her bedroom, but snatches of the face in the mirror and the shimmer beside her bed kept flashing through her brain.

What had she seen,
really?
Her imaginary friend the pirate? A ghost? A trick of the light? Maybe what she’d subconsciously wanted to see—Raven in her bedroom. Willie couldn’t decide, but whatever it was, the memory made her shiver as she eased herself up, opened the door and hopped into the kitchen.

By the time they finished their moo goo gai pan and rice, Willie’s ankle was three times its normal size, pulsing with pain and beginning to bruise beneath the ice bag Frank had put on it.

“I think you oughta have an X ray, Will,” he said.

“Me, too. My purse and my keys are in the office.”

Frank drove. Willie propped her ankle on the doorframe to keep it elevated, her foot hanging out what would have been the window if the shell were on. She hopped through the emergency entrance of Stonebridge General, Frank’s arm around her waist, hers around his shoulders, at nine-twenty. Since Raven didn’t go on duty until eleven, Willie figured she was safe.

But it was Raven who raked aside the green curtain enclosing the cubicle the admitting nurse had put her in. Seeing him sent a jolt of surprise and pure sexual what-a-hunk awareness through Willie that made her ankle throb even more and her heart start to pound.

He had a stethoscope looped around his neck rather than a tie. The collar of his green oxford-cloth shirt was unbuttoned, giving her a pulse-thudding peek at lots of dark chest hair. He looked up from the clipboard with her chart on it, and smiled at her, an amused curve on his provocative, oh-so-sexy mouth.

“Hello again, Miss Evans.”

“What are you doing here?” Willie blurted out.

“I could ask you the same question, but it’s obvious.” He put the clipboard down on the gurney and removed the ice pack the nurse had put on her ankle. “We’re shorthanded so I came in early. How’d you do this?”

She’d already told the nurse, who had written it down, but she repeated the story she’d told Frank, looking pointedly away while Raven probed her swollen ankle. His fingertips were warm, his touch surprisingly gentle. And arousing. Willie tried to steel herself against it, but she was only human, a sucker for foot rubs, and Raven’s dark eyes were just as luminous in the harsh glare of the hospital lights as they’d been in the soft glow of the luminarias.

They were the same eyes she’d glimpsed in the mirror, in the face of the man standing beside her bed. The man who looked enough like Raven to be his twin. The man who hadn’t been there when she’d turned around.

She was lying. Her pounding heart and trip-hammering pulse told Raven so. It stirred and excited him. He gave himself a moment to savor her excitement, the mad race of her blood, then quelled the urge and brushed his mind against hers.

She’d seen his Shade. In the mirror in her bedroom, but it was gone when she’d turned around. She’d seen the temporal disturbance it made; that’s what had frightened her and sent her running down the stairs.

“Ouch.” Willie flinched as Raven’s fingers tightened on her ankle.

“Sorry.” He took his hand away and smiled. “I don’t think it’s broken, but we’ll take an X ray and make sure.”

He already knew it was just a bad sprain, not a break, but he made it sound good. He picked up his clipboard and left the cubicle, drawing the curtain shut behind him. He saw two more patients while Willow Evans was in X ray, viewed the film when it came back from radiology and took it into the cubicle with him to show her the results on the wall-mounted viewer.

“As you can see, there’s no fracture, the bones are whole. You double-sprained the ankle, turned it both ways when you fell, which stretched and severely wrenched the ligaments.”

“A double whammy,” she said simply.

“Exactly. Keep it elevated and use contrast baths—cold, hot, then cold again.” He took a prescription pad and a ballpoint pen out of his white lab coat pocket and wrote instructions.

Then he cupped his hand gently over her ankle. While he told her about tendons and ligaments, he touched her mind, slipping past the conscious level to her autonomic nervous system.
All is well here.
He spoke to the nerves and ganglia that innervated her blood vessels, to the blood itself pooling around the injury.
Return to your proper path.

“Naturally, stay off it for a couple of days,” he added, though he knew she wouldn’t need to, that in the morning she’d be amazed at her quick recovery. “I can prescribe something for pain, if you’d like.”

“Thank you, no. I don’t do drugs, only regular-strength Tylenol.”

“If you change your mind, call me. Here or at home. You have my number.” Raven picked up the clipboard and signed off on her chart. “I’ll stop by tomorrow evening and have another look.”

“That isn’t necessary. I know my way here.”

“I’m a doctor, Miss Evans. You’re my patient.” He looked at her when he was finished writing. “Don’t take it personally.”

She flushed and glanced at her hands knotted in her lap. She’d chewed a hangnail on her thumb. A wafer-thin line of blood seeped along the cuticle. Raven’s mouth watered.

“Thank you, by the way,” she said, “for the roses.”

It galled her to say it; he could hear it in her voice, sense it in her thoughts. She didn’t want to owe him anything or be beholden to him. It amused him almost as much as her physical attraction to him repulsed him.

“Enjoy them, Miss Evans. I’ll see you tomorrow evening.”

He was gone, the curtain yanked shut behind him before Willie could open her mouth. She ground her teeth in frustration as a nurse pushed her in a wheelchair with a squeaky rubber tire down the hall to the waiting room. Frank looked up and put down the month-old issue of
Time
he was reading, and went to get the Jeep.

“Want me to stay over?” he asked as he helped her hop into the house, through the dining room French doors where there were no steps.

“No,” Willie said, and meant it. She’d never been afraid to stay alone at Beaches, and she wasn’t going to let whatever she’d seen in her bedroom—or
thought
she’d seen—frighten her. Not again. Once was enough. “Just help me do this contrast-bath thing.”

It took an hour, first with a bucket of cold water, then hot, then cold again. Frank made tea, nuked them each another plateful of moo goo gai pan, then washed the wok, loaded the dishwasher and turned it on.

While Willie changed into a pair of blue cotton pajamas, crinkled from lying in the dryer for two days, Frank went upstairs for her toothbrush, a quilt and three pillows. When Willie was settled on the couch, he doubled one pillow under her foot, tucked two behind her head, covered her and sat down on the coffee table.

“I kicked the thermostat up,” he said. “Don’t want you turning into a Popsicle overnight. Want the lamp on?”

“No. Just leave the light on over the stove in case I have to go to the bathroom.”

“Okay. See you in the morning.” He leaned over, kissed the top of her head and turned off the lamp on the table next to the couch. “I’ll make you breakfast.”

When the locks clicked behind him, Willie sighed and shut her eyes. Her ankle wasn’t throbbing anymore, just pulsing dully. Callie jumped on her stomach, startling her for a moment. Then she smiled, scratched the cat’s ears, yawned and let her eyes drift shut.

The dishwasher droned and the refrigerator gurgled. A loose shutter and the French doors rattled in a gust of wind. The porch swing squeaked. Common every night noises in an old house. Callie was a warm deadweight—half purring, half snoring—on top of her. The sea murmured faintly, fitfully, beyond the dunes. With her left hand cupped around the cat’s round, full stomach, Willie fell asleep—too tired to think anymore, too exhausted, she hoped, to dream.

Neither Willie nor Callie stirred when the man in knee boots and breeches, the brown leather vest and billowy-sleeved white shirt sat down on the coffee table to watch them sleep.

Chapter 6

His name was Jonathan, but he had another name, one he couldn’t remember. He wished he could. He wanted to tell Willie he was sorry he’d frightened her, that he’d tried to catch her when she’d tripped but she’d fallen right through his hands.

He held them out in front of him and spread his fingers. He couldn’t understand it, or remember how he’d suffered the hook-shaped scar below the knuckle of his right index finger. He’d been touching things in the house all day, picking them up, examining them and putting them back, but Willie had slipped through his fingers like smoke.

He laid his right palm on the arm of the sofa, behind the pillows tucked beneath her head. He could feel the nubby texture of the upholstery, a rose brocade chain-stitched with pale green vines and tiny yellow flowers. He raised his hand, fingers half-curled, brushed her cheek and felt—nothing. He tried again, pressing harder, saw his knuckles sink into her cheekbone, and jerked his hand away, startled. She stirred in her sleep, murmured and turned her head away on the pillows.

Apparently he could touch and feel things, but not people, not flesh, since he had none of his own. The creature Willie called Raven had flesh, the body that had once been his.

He got up from the table and walked to the French doors in the dining room, being careful to avoid the furniture. He’d realized he wasn’t dead when he’d staggered—still reeling with the shock of believing he was after Willie had walked through him—face first into her bedroom wall. He’d knocked himself senseless and had lain on the floor, grief stricken and bewildered, until Raven had come.

The house had turned cold and rigid with terror around him. He’d heard Raven speak with his voice, flat and lifeless in his dead mouth. All his instincts had screamed at him to hide, until he’d heard Willie answer. Then he’d run downstairs, shouting at her not to let him in, shrieking at Raven to go away and leave her alone, leave him alone, to go back to hell where he’d come from.

He’d never done that before. He’d always run from Raven whenever he came. And Raven always came. Wherever he went, wherever he found himself, Raven came looking for him. He remembered that, too, but he couldn’t remember why.

He stood at the French doors looking out at the terrace through the white curtains, at the moon-silvered top of the wall, the backs of the chairs and table legs, the dew jeweling on the table’s pebbled glass top. He’d stood here last night watching himself eat and drink and laugh and talk. He’d wept with the bitterness of it, and he’d raged when Raven had tried to use his terrible powers to make Willie give him the house.