Bane's Choice (Vampire Motorcycle Club #1) - Alyssa Day Page 0,10
know better, she’d believe she’d fallen into an episode of the X-Files, except the truth was damned well not out there.
Finally, at the hospital, she’d gotten to the point where people were giving her concerned “Dr. Ryan must be overworked and possibly in danger of needing a psych consult” looks, and she’d been forced to give up.
Maybe she was? Overworked, sure.
Exhausted, yes.
But having a mental breakdown?
She put a hand to her stomach to quell the flash of nausea. Was she seeing things?
No. Definitely not.
She’d seen that man take Hunter, and she’d be damned if she’d doubt herself. It didn’t matter how tired she was; she hadn’t been hallucinating.
She’d been wide awake and had only stepped out of Evans’ room for long enough to head over to the nurses’ station when the resident, medical student, and nurses who’d been in his room had all come running out like they were being chased by monsters.
And when they hadn’t answered her questions—had in fact run right past her like she didn’t exist—she’d raced to the firefighter’s ICU room only to find the monster in question was still there.
Only he hadn’t looked at all like a monster. Or sounded like one.
No, he’d had a husky, whiskey-velvet voice to go with those dangerously sexy eyes—had they been glowing?
She drank more wine and stared unseeingly at her grandmother’s piano.
Sure. Glowing eyes, why not? She’d seen a beautiful, terrifying man with glowing eyes who’d kidnapped a dying burn patient and disappeared into a magic portal. Happened every day, right?
Sure. On my Netflix queue of sci-fi movies, maybe…
Maybe she needed to accept a harsh truth.
Maybe it wasn’t everyone else who’d been wrong—maybe it was her.
No. Not her. Not Rational Ryan. There was no way.
She drained the wineglass and started to pour another but then stopped. She’d only find another headache at the bottom of the bottle, not answers.
Not her patient.
The patient everyone claimed didn’t exist.
The patient that wasn’t in the hospital computers.
She paused again and rubbed her forehead, the doubt resurfacing. Because, in fact, he hadn’t been in the computer.
And everybody was in the computer.
Everybody.
The second you stepped on hospital property, your ass was logged into a computer, because the great twin gods named Insurance and Medical Bills must receive their due. There was no way that a firefighter didn’t have health insurance, and there was no way that Hunter Evans, who’d been there for at least an hour, hadn’t been logged into the system.
If he’d existed.
If he even…
Firefighter.
She caught her breath. Of course! Maybe a gas leak or something was causing memory loss in the hospital personnel, but Evans had managed to tell somebody that he was a firefighter, right?
She grabbed her phone and did a quick search. There it was. Contact information for Savannah Fire Rescue.
Nobody answered the phone, of course, because it was almost freaking midnight, and nobody in admin offices answered phones at midnight. So she’d call the stations. There were probably a few different…
There were sixteen. They were called Engine companies, according to Google. Sixteen of them. She grabbed a pad of paper and a pen off her desk and started calling.
An hour and sixteen frustrating conversations later, she threw the pen across the room.
Hunter Evans didn’t exist.
And Ryan had to face the fact that maybe overwork and loneliness had caused her mind to play tricks on her.
She drained another glass of wine after all, finishing the bottle, because what the hell? Tomorrow, she’d call the hospital and get a little long-overdue vacation time to sort herself out. Tonight, she’d watch another of her Top 100 Movies of All Time.
“Hey, Alexa. What’s the best movie to watch after you hallucinate a nonexistent hot guy who disappears with your nonexistent burn patient into a magic portal?”
The machine’s light flashed for a moment, and then the familiar computer voice replied: “I’m sorry, I don’t have that information.”
Ryan started laughing. “Yeah. Me, neither, Alexa. Me, neither.”
Chapter Five
Three hours earlier…
Bane walked out of the Between and into the vast room that Meara insisted was a ballroom and shouted for help. When four vampires and two humans all lived in the same mansion, someone was usually within hearing distance.
Luke was the first one to burst into the room, but he stumbled to a stop when he saw what—who—Bane carried. “Oh, shit. If you…is he? Fuck…I have to head to the hospital and fix this before we have hordes of peasants ready to shove flaming torches up our asses.”
Edge floated in through the third-floor window and strode toward them.