Lover Unleashed - J. R. Ward [183]
No pain. No stiffness. No aches.
His body was raring to go.
He thought about what the head vet had said to him just now over the phone, the man’s voice confused and thrilled at the same time: She’s regenerated the bone and the hoof has spontaneously healed itself. It’s as if the injury never occurred at all.
Holy . . . Christ. What if Payne had worked her magic on him? While they’d been together? Without either of them being aware of it, what if she’d healed his body in terms of time . . . turning the clock back not just months, but a decade or more?
Manny grabbed the cross that hung from his neck.
When someone knocked on the door, he flushed the empty toilet and then ran some water to make it sound like he wasn’t doing something skeevy. As he stepped out in a daze, he nodded to the round woman who wanted to get in, and headed back to Goldberg.
Sitting down, he had to wipe his sweating palms on the knees of his jeans.
“I have a favor,” he said to his former colleague. “It’s something I wouldn’t ask of anyone else—”
“Name it. Anything. After all you’ve done for me—”
“I want you to give me a physical. And take some scans of me.”
Goldberg immediately nodded. “I wasn’t going to say it, but I think that’s a good idea. The headaches . . . the forgetfulness. You need to find out if there’s an . . . impairment.” The guy stopped there, as if he didn’t want to tee up an argument or get morbid. “Although God, I’m serious . . . I’ve never seen you look so good.”
Manny snagged his coffee and rose to his feet, his sense of buzzing urgency having nothing to do with caffeine. “Let’s go. If you have the time now?”
Goldberg was right with him. “For you, I’ll always have time.”
FORTY-EIGHT
Every once in a while, Qhuinn’s death came back to him. It happened in dreams. In rare moments when he was still and quiet. And sometimes just to fuck his head for kicks and giggles.
He always tried to avoid the collage of sights and smells and sounds like the plague, but though he’d filed for a restraining order with his inner court, opposing counsel was being a little bitch and putting up objections . . . so the shit kept popping up.
As he lay in his bed now, the foggy stretch of mental landscape that was neither sleep nor waking was like an open line for that horrible night to phone in, and what do you know, it did some dialing, the memories ringing his bells and somehow forcing him to answer.
His own brother had been part of the honor guard who had come to beat him and the bunch of black-robed bastards had tracked him down at the side of the road as he’d walked away from his family’s mansion for the last time. He’d had the few things he’d owned on his back, and he’d had no idea where he was headed. His father had thrown him out and he’d been struck from the family tree, so . . . there you go. Rootless. Directionless.
All because of his mismatched eyes.
The honor guard was just supposed to have beaten him for his offense to the bloodline. They were not supposed to kill him. But shit had gotten out of hand, and in a surprising shift, his brother had tried to stop it.
Qhuinn really remembered that part. His brother’s voice telling the others to stop.
It had been too late, however, and Qhuinn had floated away not just from the pain but also from the earth itself . . . only to find himself in a sea of white fog that had parted to reveal a door. Without being told, he’d known it was the entrance to the Fade, and he’d also known that once he opened it he was donzo.
Which had seemed like a great idea at the time. Nothing to lose and all that . . .
And yet, he’d balked at the last moment. For a reason he couldn’t remember.
It was the strangest thing. . . . For all that night was etched in his brain, that was the one piece he couldn’t recall no matter how hard he tried.
But he remembered slamming back into his own body: As he