me do a check.”
“Check,” he repeated, moving just enough to jolt himself alert, as the haze began to seep in around the fringes again.
“Don’t,” she warned, holding his legs still.
“Have to.”
“You have to do what I tell you to do. And only what I tell you to do.”
He smiled, then grimaced as the action pulled at abused, blood encrusted skin on his face and mouth. “Bossy.”
“I’m about to be your worst nightmare if you don’t lie still.”
“Can’t.” He’d already spent the past two days doing that.
“Will,” she said. “Since you can’t string more than two words together, let me do triage and try to catalogue the numerous sources of the pain you’re presently in.”
The haze was battling valiantly for a return, but while he was reasonably sure of his situation, he managed to tell her one critical detail. “Drugged.”
Her hands paused on their journey up his thigh. A journey that actually made him glad he was in the diminished physical capacity that he was at the moment. Because the drugs in his system wanted to have a field day with the hallucinatory scenarios her mere touch brought to mind. At least, he was going to blame it on the drugs. Easier than admitting he was human.
“How long ago?”
“Days. Think…two.”
“Two days?” She moved back up near his head, then gently prodded his eyes open.
She was nothing more than a vague, wavery image to him, zooming in and out of focus as she tried to see his pupils. It made him nauseous.
“Too dark, I can’t see. What did they use?”
She’d shifted back and he mercifully closed his eyes again. “Don’t know,” he croaked, fighting to stay above the pain, above the fog.
She leaned closer again, putting her hand on his cheek. It felt almost…comforting. He focused on that. “What do they know?” she demanded. “What did you tell them? And who the hell are they?”
So much for comforting.
He would have smiled if he had it left in him. He was sliding away, and he knew there was nothing he could do to stop the void, or the vivid hallucinations that were sure to follow. For how long, he didn’t know. Frustration made him instinctively curl his fingers into fists. The renewed blood flow to his fingers now that his hands were unbound caused needle-pricking pain to shoot straight through to the pads of each finger. Even his fingernails felt like they were on fire. Several of his fingers weren’t right at all. It wasn’t enough to jerk him back.
The void claimed him again.
The next lucid, or semi-lucid, thought he had was about the light. It was piercing, blinding, painful, and he was pretty sure his eyes were still closed. Had he finally ascended from purgatory? Was this the white light that signified the end of the road? Surely he wasn’t destined for that finale. But at this point he was simply thankful to get out of limbo.
He tried to move toward the light, tried to open his eyes.
“Derek?”
The voice of angels?
“Derek. Open your eyes.”
The voice of Tate Winslow. Which, as it happened, was the preferable option. It meant he was still alive.
“Try—” His voice stuck on one syllable. His throat was dry to the bone and swallowing didn’t help much.
He felt the plastic tip of a straw press against his bottom lip, and he instinctively sucked on it.
“Whoa, not too much. Sip,” Angel Tate instructed.
He choked a little, coughed, which reunited him with the pain that had been his constant companion now for what felt like an eternity. He tried to be thankful for the jolt of awareness that always accompanied the shock of pain, but he had things he had to accomplish, and these brief moments of pain-induced lucidity weren’t going to get the job done.
“Must…talk,” he finally managed, though the words came out more like a hoarse croak.
“I’m in full agreement on that,” Tate replied. “But you taking off to la-la land every five minutes isn’t making that an easy proposition. I have to know that what you’re telling me is what’s actually going on, and not some drug-induced hallucination.”
“Not…hallucinating now.”
“Right. And five minutes ago when you grunted something about snakes, you weren’t hallucinating then, either?”
Snakes? He’d always hated snakes, ever since he was a kid. Every nightmare he’d had until the age of ten had generally featured the slithery devils. He’d stopped being afraid of them a long time ago, but he still hated them. So it shouldn’t be any surprise they’d popped up again, given his current state. Especially given the nature of the situation. Snakes abounded, only they were in human form.
“I thought you were trying to tell me you’d been bitten by one, and that was why you were delirious out of your mind, but someone has delivered quite a beating, and that was no snake. Well, not the reptile version, anyway.”
He wanted to smile at their parallel thoughts, but the simple act used way too many parts of his face that had no interest in cooperating without making him pay, so he just tried to corral his thoughts and focus his awareness—such as it was—on assessing himself, his situation, his current specific location. He was no longer on the floor. He was on something soft. He didn’t bother trying to determine how she’d moved him from where he’d collapsed to wherever the hell he was now. Tate had been one of the most resourceful agents he’d ever had.
Then another thought occurred to him. “Where?” he said. “Hosp—?” He didn’t think she’d have made that kind of mistake, but then from what bits and pieces he could recall of their initial conversation, she hadn’t been too happy to see him. Of course, if she had dumped him in the authorities’ laps, he doubted she’d have stuck around to see how he fared.
In response to his attempt to speak, she pressed the straw to his lips again. He sipped slowly this time, and was grateful when she left the straw positioned there for a bit longer, giving him the chance to take several life-giving sips. It could have been the finest champagne, and it couldn’t have tasted any better. “Thank you,” he managed.
To which she replied, her tone as dry as his throat, “Well, well, a please and a thank-you, all in the span of four hours. You must really be in trouble.”
“Trouble,” he repeated. “Yes.” Trouble he’d brought right to her door, and in possibly the worst way he could have. “Sorry.”
“The miracles continue.”
“Tate—”
She pressed the straw to his lips again, effectively shutting him up if he didn’t want to choke. “Right now, the only miracle I need, barring all of this being a really bad nightmare from which I would love to wake up any time now, is for you to get better as fast as possible so you can tell me what the hell you’ve done, and why the hell you’ve dragged me into it.”
“CJ.”
She didn’t say anything immediately, so he tried to open his eyes again. He realized that the blinding light was actually the sun coming in through the window. He squinted against the brilliance of it, and just the act of squinting pulled at enough tight spots on his face to tell him that she hadn’t been kidding about the beating he’d taken. He’d only had to squint his right eye, as it seemed his left was somewhat permanently squinted at the moment, being as it was swollen half shut.
He started to lift his hand to do a cursory touch test, but Tate put a quick stop to that.
“No