Page 58 of Devil's Due

A face, looming over the bed. Jazz, looking delighted. Behind her was James Borden, all angles and smiles. His hair was creatively mussed, and his clothes looked lived-in. So did Jazz’s, but that wasn’t remarkable.

“Look who’s awake,” Jazz said, and reached for her hand, and the warm pressure of her fingers felt nice. Felt real. “How you feeling?”

Lucia nodded slightly and tried to talk. No good. Her voice wasn’t even a hoarse croak. She gestured toward the pink pitcher of water on the stand next to the bed, and Borden hurried around to pour some for her.

Water, after such a long thirst, tasted like a revelation of the divine. Lucia whimpered with delight and swallowed until the cup was dry.

“Better?” Borden asked. He refilled it. “You’ve been out awhile. Couple of days.” Some silent conversation between Borden and Jazz passed over her head. “You remember anything?”

“No.” That was a word. A small one, and it sounded rough, but it was a recognizable word. Progress. “Pansy. All right?”

“Pansy’s fine,” Jazz said. “Never even got a sniffle or a fever. No infection at all. No other victims reported, either. Looks like you were the lucky one.”

“What happened?”

“What do you remember?” Jazz asked.

“Going to sleep, after—after the hospital. Tired.”

“Nothing else? You’re sure?”

Lucia swallowed another ball of fire that seemed to be clinging to the back of her throat. “Dreams, maybe. Nightmares.”

“But you don’t remember leaving your apartment.”

The fragile sense of well-being shattered. “I—left?”

Another look passed from Borden to Jazz, Jazz to Borden. Lucia was still fuzzy, the world still indistinct, but even so she didn’t care for the way they were avoiding her questions.

“Yeah,” Jazz said softly. “You left. At least, that’s what the security logs say. You entered the code to disable the alarm, and you just—vanished. No sign of how you got out of the apartment.”

This wasn’t right. Couldn’t be right. She hadn’t felt well enough to leave. She remembered setting the alarm for instant alert and stumbling off to bed.

There was, of course, another way out of the apartment that wouldn’t appear on the security logs—her own Manny-inspired precautions—but why would she run away? And why wouldn’t she remember it? “Where did you find me?”

“We didn’t,” Borden said. “You were missing for four days. And on the fifth day, you were found sleeping in a supposedly unoccupied room at the Raphael.”

“What?”

“Yeah,” Jazz said grimly. “I’m not a woo-woo girl, but I’m not ruling out alien abduction.”

That was impossible.

Lucia didn’t remember anything from the moment she’d fallen asleep on her bed, fully clothed, to waking up here.

Nothing.Just dreams, and those were fading fast.

“Where was I?” she asked. Her voice was faint and weak, and Jazz looked at Borden again, this time for support.

“Honest to God, L.—I wish to hell I knew. The only good thing anybody can tell us is that you were being treated for what was wrong with you. IV antibiotics, just like they would have done here, apparently. You’re weak now, but you’re on the mend. Fever’s gone, no sign of infection from the swabs they took, and you’re not even going to want to know about any of that swabbing business, believe me.” Jazz blew hair off of her forehead and grinned grimly. “Trust you to end up kidnapped by renegade doctors.”

“Renegade doctors whose heads I’m going to mount on my trophy wall.”

“Yes, bwana. I’ll carry the elephant gun.”

Four days. Four missing days. Six, if she’d been unconscious here since they’d found her. Almost a week of her life gone into a black hole.

“What about Susannah?” Omar, dead on the floor, hands open, throat cut. “Do the cops still have her?”

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