Page 4 of Against the Veil (Endangered Fae #3)

“Yes, I know.” Diego pointed at the swinging doors.

“And I want you to turn the charm on full blast. There’ll be a desk with nurses right through that door.

I want you to distract the staff while we slip by.

I can cover our passing to some extent, but anyone paying attention will still question a sliding spot of darkness. ”

Faolchú gave him a very human military salute. “As you wish, Consul. Any sacrifice for the cause.”

Lugh let him clear the doors before he let out an angry snort. “Buffoon. He jests at Zachary’s expense.”

“No, he’s not. He was frantic when we heard what happened.” Diego tilted his head to look up into Lugh’s face. “It’s just his way of dealing with things. Would you rather have him sobbing and ranting?”

“No, I suppose that wouldn’t be helpful.”

The little window in the right-hand door afforded them a view of the desk.

Faolchú’s voice drifted back to them. “Good evening, ladies! Captain Faolchú of the Fae Collective. I wonder if you might lend me some assistance?” He leaned against the high counter of the desk, his uniform jacket straining across his broad chest. Three sets of eyes fastened on him and remained firmly glued as the wolf-Champion smiled and chatted amiably.

Diego raised a hand and bent the light around them.

Lugh’s view of the world broke into strangely angled planes, indistinct and distorted as if he suddenly gazed through a smoky, many-faceted crystal.

The women at the desk didn’t seem to notice when the doors swung open a second time and didn’t react at all to the spot of darkness as it slid past them.

When they turned a corner, Diego let the spell go and the world rushed back in, too bright and sharp-edged.

“If we’re intending on using diplomatic clout to retrieve him, why are we pad-footing like egg thieves?” Lugh whispered.

“There’s no way to avoid a scene over getting Zack out of here,” Diego told him. “But I’d rather one later, when we already have him and have spoken to his parents, than sooner, before we even find him.” He stopped, apparently uncertain. “Which way?”

“Come.” Lugh took Diego by the elbow and pulled him down the hall with his mother trailing them. No one had told him which room was Zack’s, but he knew the way. He could feel that brave heart struggling to beat, the pull so strong on his own he felt like a hooked salmon.

Zachary… His heart faltered in his chest. Zack lay so still, a gray pallor creeping over his skin as if death had already drawn her shroud over him. The gasp and hiss of the machine breathing for him sounded too much like a dying warrior’s last breaths.

“What the hell is he doing here?” A broad-shouldered man, tall for a human, blocked his path to the bed.

Battlefields and years of sorrow rode behind the man’s eyes, the evidence of too much hard drinking on his face.

Zack’s father . Lugh blinked away a sense of dislocation.

This would be Zack someday, if he allowed bitterness a home in his heart and wore the weight of his years like an ever-growing burden of stones.

Diego stepped between them. “Mr. Morrison? Mr. James Morrison? We spoke on the phone.” He extended a hand. “I’m Diego Sandoval.”

The man shook his hand, bemused and off-balance. The red-eyed woman in the chair by the bed rose. “Oh, Mr. Sandoval, it was good of you to come all this way.”

“Please, call me Diego.” He stepped over to Zack’s mother with the father in tow. “Zack’s very important to us. Personally, and to the embassy.”

“Was,” growled Mr. Morrison. His jaw jutted as if his defiance could beat back his grief. “Doctors say he won’t make it through the night.”

Eithne had slipped around Diego and was already at Zack’s side, her hand pressed against his faltering ribcage. With the parents distracted, Lugh took the opportunity to go to the bedside as well. He closed his hand around Zack’s unbandaged forearm.

“Stay a few moments more, braveheart. Help is here.”

“Lugh?”

“I’m right beside you. Don’t leave me.”

There it was again, that fleeting internal communication.

He had achieved mind-to-mind contact with so few humans over the centuries.

Even bespeaking Diego was unreliable and intermittent.

But Zack’s desperate call had ripped him from sleep, sent him hurtling across a continent before he’d had time to draw three breaths.

There had been no fear in the sending, only a desolate sorrow.

He drew his first full breath in several minutes when the soft green glow of his mother’s magic enveloped Zack’s chest.

“That’s why we’re here to help,” Diego explained to the Morrisons in the background. “We have…abilities human doctors lack.”

“You mean that unholy fairy magic.” Mr. Morrison spoke the last word as if it were poison. He pointed an accusing finger at Eithne. “You get away from my son! It’s that…that fairy prince’s fault all this happened in the first place!”

“It’s not tricks or the Hollywood version you see in movies,” Diego soothed. “It’s not evil or unnatural. It’s simply learning to use the universe’s energy in different ways than we’re used to.”

“Please, Diego,” Mrs. Morrison sobbed. “If it saves our boy, I don’t care what it is.”

“Marion!”

“It’s not the prince’s fault,” she went on, heedless of the tears dripping from her chin. “You said so yourself, Jim. Now stand back and let them work.”

Lugh could feel Mr. Morrison trying to cling to his anger, but anguish soon crept in to smother it. He folded his distraught wife in his arms and sat back down.

“There.” Eithne withdrew her hands. “I cannot heal so many wounds at once. He’s too depleted. But I have closed the hole in his lung.” She glanced across Zack’s chest at her son. “Pull the thing from his throat. Slowly. Gently.”

With a vise tightening around his heart, Lugh complied, willing Zack to keep breathing with every fiber of his being. His chest heaved, his handsome face contorted with pain, then he coughed twice and was still.

“No,” Lugh whispered. “Great Mother, no…”

“Hush, my darling,” Eithne said as she bent close to Zack’s ear, her hand on his chest. “Zachary. Sweet boy, you cannot tell me you have forgotten how to breathe so quickly.”

A shudder passed through Zack’s body, hard enough to shake the bed. Then Eithne’s hand rose as his chest expanded, first in a halting, stuttering gasp as if he emerged from icy waters, and finally in a deep, even rhythm.

“He’s breathing,” Mrs. Morrison whispered. “He’s breathing on his own.”

Diego put a hand on her shoulder. “Yes. But he probably has a long road to recovery still. We’d like to take him with us. Back to the embassy where he can be comfortable in his own room, where healers can be with him around the clock.”

“This is a good hospital,” she protested.

“I’m sure, but I think Zack needs more right now,” Diego said gently.

“You’ll take him to that damn fairy island, and we’ll never see him again,” Mr. Morrison said, his jaw set.

Lugh leaned in to kiss Zack’s forehead and rose to face the parents.

He was the ambassador, wasn’t he? Time to start behaving like one instead of hiding behind Diego.

“We don’t want to separate you from your son, sir.

I will arrange special visitation visas for you.

We’ll have the staff make travel arrangements.

You are most welcome to see him and I’m certain it would be a comfort to him to have you there.

” At least I hope, if you haven’t pushed your son too far away.

For a moment, Mr. Morrison sat with his head bowed, his thick neck red with some emotion Lugh hoped wasn’t fury. Finally, he looked up, though he spoke to Diego. “All right. You got his lungs working again. You sure as hell can do the rest better than these clowns here.”

Diego thanked them both, shaking hands and offering reassurances as Eithne unhooked Zack from all the wires and tubes attached to him.

Alarms pinged and footsteps hurried down the hall.

Lugh gathered Zack up to his chest, cradling him as gently as a newborn sparrow chick while Diego intercepted the medical staff, arguing with them even as he stepped into the corridor to call the magic for a doorway.

“Faolchú! We’re going!” Lugh bellowed as he followed Diego into the hall where the nurses were making dire threats about security and police.

The heavy thud of Faolchú’s boots grew louder as he pelted down the corridor, skidding around the corner in his haste to reach them. Diego had the door open, the magic winds whipping the nurses’ hair into birds’ nests. His office was once again visible through the doorway.

“Ladies, I am sorry, but we have to go. I’ll call the hospital administrator in the morning to straighten this all out. Thank you for taking care of him.” Lugh strode past the stunned nurses, through the doorway, and heaved a sigh of relief to have Zack home.