Chapter 26
Stryke paced anxiously in his office, the way he did before every meeting with Cyan.
After over two weeks, he’d have thought his physical and emotional reactions to her would have eased, but nope. If anything, what he felt for her was becoming more intense. He couldn’t wait to see her every day, and when it was time for one of them to leave, he felt like his world was being watered down.
Sex with her was amazing, the most incredible experience. But so was just being with her. They enjoyed the same movies and books—science fiction, mostly. She also liked romcoms, which she said Shanea had introduced her to. Neither of them was fond of outdoorsy things like camping or hiking, and they would both happily spend their lives locked inside a library or research facility.
He couldn’t wait to tell her he’d secured a private tour of the newly built, hyper-modern astrology lab in Germany. It would be their first real date out in the world since the NASA tour, and he wouldn’t have to deal with the hassle of bodyguards. He hated being in public. If he could get a place to shut down while he was there, he did. And he was willing to pay anything. Just two days ago, he’d arranged to shop at Harrods, completely alone except for his personal security team, for an hour while he purchased Christmas gifts.
Usually, he sent Kalis or Leilani to do his shopping—and he had sent them for most of it, but he’d wanted to get Cyan something himself. She claimed to dislike the human holiday season, but the pictures of her and Shanea dressed as Christmas elves said otherwise.
So, for the first time ever, he’d gone shopping and decorated his house. It was completely over the top and ridiculous, but he had to admit that his log cabin worked well as a Christmas canvas. He’d even found himself smiling a couple of times as he admired the lighted garland and perfectly symmetrical tree he’d decorated with handmade glass ornaments from Italy.
He couldn’t wait for Cyan to see it after their tour of the astro-lab.
He glanced at his wrist comms. Where was she? She was never late.
“Tech Comms,” he said, and the building’s AI assistant clicked on. “Where in the complex is Cyan?”
“ Cyan is currently in the Newton Library .”
A virtual screen popped into the air and zoomed in on Cyan. She was walking toward the exit in a hurry. Parker, that asshole, joined her, said something, and she laughed. They exited the building, chatting. More laughing.
“Sir,” Kalis interrupted, “you have an urgent missive from Taran Ross.”
Stryke swiped away the camera feed. Fucking Parker. Also, he could do without the sharp pain stabbing his brain. He’d had a mild headache all morning, but it suddenly decided to go from an annoyance to painful enough to make him wince.
“Thanks, Kalis. I got it.” He tapped his desk comms, and Taran flickered into view in front of him, his jaw tight and his mouth a grim slash. “Taran. What is it?”
He winced through another stab and another pain in his gut. Maybe he’d eaten something that didn’t agree with him. He’d eaten a lot of new things since he and Cyan started seeing each other on a regular basis. And he always looked forward to eating with her, even if he still hated the hassle of eating when he was alone.
“Nothing, I hope.” Taran turned, gesturing to the wall of new or restored monitoring screens. Repairs had gone well so far, and last time Taran talked to him, he’d said the forward operating center would be secure in a couple of days. “Everything’s been quiet since the Gehennaportal was destroyed. But a few hours ago, we got a strange temperature reading. I thought it might be an anomaly, but it happened again. And again. There’s a pattern.”
“A… pattern ?”
“Yeah. And here’s the thing. I went back through all our old readings, and I found the same pattern. We just missed it because there was so much else going on. But it’s back. This is going to sound crazy, but I get the feeling it’s kind of a…heartbeat.”
Stryke gripped the back of his chair as a wave of nausea washed over him. “A heartbeat for what?”
“The Gehennaportal,” Taran said. “I don’t think it was destroyed after all.”
“That’s impossible. Cyan verified it.”
Taran averted his gaze, clearly hesitant to speak. But he was a professional, and he didn’t beat around the bush, which was why Stryke had hired him. “I think Cyan lied.”
“No way,” Stryke said, his voice sounding mushy, like his tongue was too big for his mouth. “She wouldn’t have lied.” He reached for a tissue and wiped the sweat off his brow. Maybe he had food poisoning. “If the gate is functional, it’s not because of anything she did. I’ll see her in a few minutes. I’ll ask her—”
He broke off as pain spiraled through his body. Squeezing, twisting pressure racked his insides as if all his organs were cramping.
“Stryke?” Taran’s voice sounded distant. Muffled. “Stryke! What’s wrong?”
His lungs…wouldn’t work. Stumbling for the emergency button under his desk, he gasped for air, his vision fading and legs collapsing beneath him.
“ Stryke !”
He wasn’t going to make it to the button. He wasn’t…going…to…
Cyan was in love with Stryke.
After two and a half weeks of meeting him daily, mostly in his office and sometimes at his log home, she couldn’t deny it anymore.
The first couple of days had been a little strained, and clearly, he was jealous of Parker, tensing every time she mentioned her coworker as part of talking about their project. Stryke never asked about Parker, though, respecting the boundaries they’d put in place.
She wouldn’t have minded if he’d asked since nothing was going on between them. She hadn’t even seen Parker outside of the office since their pizza night. He’d asked her out a couple of times, but she’d politely declined.
Parker was the kind of guy she’d have been interested in if not for Stryke. He was smart, funny, and sweet. Shanea would have pushed Cyan at him.
But no, the only male on her mind was Stryke, who did something special every time they met. Sometimes, he gave her a gift like gold-plated chocolates from Paris or a signed copy of one of her favorite books about the role of technology in the future. Other times, he made dinner—a Suzanne recipe that guaranteed anyone could make it delicious—or had food brought in. Once they met in his basement lab and conducted an experiment to test the effects of his Sea Storm fog sample on cell specimens from demons of varying moral alignment.
Cells from evil beings thrived in the fog. Specimens from less evil beings fared far worse. His tiny sample of an angel feather shriveled.
He’d definitely seduced her with science.
But what she loved most was that, for the last week, all their meetings had been about the Moon project. And sex. But after the sex, he’d asked her opinion on everything from where to build the facility to where he should go to headhunt the best employees.
But…as much as she loved working with him on such a monumental project, she was also concerned. His energy seemed to be growing frantic, and she suspected he wasn’t sleeping much. He appeared more and more distracted.
Not that she wasn’t distracted too. Her team had hit a snag on the Reaper project, and it was taking a ridiculous amount of time to solve the issue. She’d become increasingly exhausted, so much so that she’d gone home early a couple of times so she could nap. Even her appetite became a victim of her stress and exhaustion. Yesterday, Stryke noticed and commented on it after she’d shoved her plate of Chinese food aside during dinner.
She was starving at the moment, though, so maybe she could talk him into having pizza delivered when she got to his office. There was a new, werewolf-family-run Italian joint in New York she wanted to try, and they even delivered via Harrowgate. She’d seen one of the delivery people pop out of the company gate just outside the courtyard.
She smiled and nodded to everyone as she traversed the long, sterile hallways to Stryke’s offices. Folks at StryTech had been guarded around her at first, but they’d largely come around. She’d even been invited to a get-together at the Sydney home of one of the scientists from the NeuroLink division.
“Coming through!” someone yelled from behind her.
Startled, she leaped up against the wall as paramedics ran past, their black uniforms and duffle bags identifying them as Underworld General personnel. But where were they going? Surely, not—
They were headed toward Stryke’s offices.
Sudden fear made her gut plummet. Panicked, she ran to catch up, her heels clacking, her pulse pounding. Ahead, Kalis waited at the elevator, her face pale and lips pressed into a thin, grim line.
“Kalis!” Cyan stopped in front of Stryke’s assistant as the medics stepped into the lift. “What’s going on?”
“I’m glad you’re here,” Kalis said, taking Cyan’s elbow and guiding her to the elevator. “Something’s wrong with Stryke. He was talking to Taran and collapsed. If Taran hadn’t alerted me…” She trailed off, her voice quivering as the door slid closed.
One of the medics, a Seminus demon, exchanged worried glances with his ginger-haired partner.
“Are you related to Stryke?” Cyan asked.
“Distantly.” The guy gestured to a spiral symbol woven into his dermoire near his elbow. “But his dad is my boss, and his uncle is the Big Boss.”
“We don’t want to fuck up this call, that’s for sure,” the other one growled as the doors slid open.
Stryke . She gasped in horror at the sight of him lying near his desk, his chest heaving, body twisted in agony. She didn’t remember running across the endless expanse of flooring, didn’t register the pain of hitting the floor next to him with a crack of kneecaps. He moaned, but she didn’t think he was aware of her presence.
The ginger Seminus medic crouched beside her and gripped Stryke by the shoulder. The black lines of his dermoire lit up as his healing energy surged through his arm. A moment later, he looked up at his partner. “We need to get him to UG. Now.”
“Come on,” she said, shoving to her feet. “I can operate his private Harrowgate.”
The two Sems hauled Stryke into the gate, and the moment the door closed, she pressed the lit symbol representing the famous demon-run hospital. Almost instantly, they emerged in Underworld General’s Emergency Department.
Cyan had only been here once, decades ago as a child, when she broke her wrist during an ice skating lesson. She remembered the chaos, the mix of demons and humanoids, and the strange writing on the walls.
What she hadn’t remembered were the gutters that ran with blood or the strange medical devices hanging on the walls and from the ceilings. The place was truly creepy.
The medics barked out a bunch of medical terms Cyan knew but wasn’t ready to think about as a tusk-faced female in scrubs directed them to an empty room.
Terrified and overwhelmed, Cyan held Stryke’s hand as the medics laid him on the bed. Instantly, there was a swarm of people and activity and medical jargon, but she tuned it all out. She couldn’t take her eyes off Stryke’s face, so handsome, but so shadowed and sunken.
“Stryke,” she whispered. “Please. Talk to me.”
He didn’t open his eyes. Didn’t even moan.
Desperate, she swung around to the medical staff. To anyone who would listen. “What’s wrong? Help him!”
Eidolon broke through the crowd, and a sense of relief helped her breathe. If anyone could help Stryke, it was him.
“Someone get Shade,” he barked. “And I want Talon too. Hurry!” He turned to one of the nurses. “Start a line and prep a crash cart.”
A crash cart? The blood drained from Cyan’s face. This sounded bad. Really bad.
“Doctor?”
He wheeled around to her. “Cyan, right?” When she nodded, he continued. “Are you with him?”
“With him?” she asked, confused. She was standing right there. Of course she was with him.
“I mean, are you fucking him?”
Her mouth fell open at the blunt question. “I don’t see how—”
“Yes or no,” he said. “I need to know when he last had sex and when he last used an injection.”
Oh, of course. The doctor wasn’t being a perv. He was asking medically relevant questions.
Feeling like a fool, she said, “I don’t know when he had his last injection. I know that we were, ah, intimate about twenty-three hours ago.”
“Thank you.” He gestured to the door. “I need you to leave.”
“But—” She broke off as Shade burst through the doorway, his expression a tortured mask of devastation and fear that made her heart break. Maybe it would be best to wait outside. This was family stuff, and she wasn’t exactly that.
But right now, in this moment, she wanted to be.
Terrified and feeling lost in a way she hadn’t felt since Shanea died, she slipped out as Talon, another of Stryke’s cousins, entered, looking every bit as worried as his uncles.