aye Montgomery was a practical woman, which was why she made a great nurse. She'd been born levelheaded, just like she'd come out with dark hair and dark eyes, and she was outstanding in a crisis. With a husband in the Marines and two kids at home and twelve years of working in intensive care units, it took a lot to rattle her.

Sitting behind the SICU's nursing station, she was rattled now.

Three men the size of SUVs were standing on the other side of the partition. One had long, multicolored hair and a pair of yellow eyes that didn't seem real, they were so bright. The second was mind-bendingly beautiful and so sexually magnetic, she had to remind herself she was happily married to a man she still had the hots for. The third was hanging back, nothing but a Red Sox cap, a pair of sunglasses, and an air of pure evil that didn't match his handsome face.

Had one of them asked a question? She thought so.

As none of the other nurses seemed capable of speech, Faye stammered, "I'm sorry? Er... what did you say?"

The one with the fantastic hair¡ªGod, was that stuff for real?¡ªsmiled a little. "We're looking for Michael Klosnick, who came up from the ED. Admitting told us he was brought here after he was operated on?"

God... those irises were the color of buttercups in the sunshine, a true, resonating gold. "Are you family?"

"We're his brothers."

"Okay, but I'm sorry, he's just out of the OR and we don't¡ª" For no good reason, Faye's brain changed directions, kind of like a toy train that had been picked up off one track and put down on another. She found herself saying, "He's down the hall, room six. But only one of you can go in and just for a short time. Oh, and you have to wait until his doctors¡ª"

At that moment Dr. Manello came striding up to the desk. He looked over the men and asked, "Everything okay here?"

Faye nodded as her mouth said, "Yes, just fine."

Dr. Manello frowned as he met the men stare for stare. Then he winced and rubbed his temples like he had a headache. "I'll be in my office if you need me, Faye."

"Okay, Dr. Manello." She glanced back at the men. What had she been saying? Oh, right. "You'll have to wait until his surgeon leaves, though, okay?"

"He's in there now?"

"She's in there now, yes."

"All right, thank you."

Those yellow eyes bored into Faye's... and suddenly she couldn't remember if there was a patient in six after all. Was there? Wait...

"Tell me," the man said, "what is your user name and password?"

"Excuse... me?"

"For the computer."

Why would he¡ªOf course, he needed the information. Absolutely. And she needed to give it to him. "FMONT2 in caps is the login, and the password is 11Eddie11. E in uppercase."

"Thank you."

She was about to say, You're welcome, when the thought popped into her head that it was time for a staff meeting. Except why would that be? They'd already had one at the beginning of the¡ª

No, it was definitely time for a staff meeting. They urgently needed to have a staff meeting. Right now¡ª

Faye blinked and realized she was staring into space over the nursing station's counter. Weird, she could have sworn she'd just been talking to someone. Someone male and¡ª

Staff meeting. Now.

Faye massaged her temples, feeling like she had a vise clamped onto her forehead. She didn't usually get headaches, but it had been a hectic day, and she'd had a lot of caffeine and not much food.

She looked over her shoulder at the other three nurses, all of whom were looking a little confused. "Let's head into the conference room, guys. We have to do a patient review."

One of Faye's colleagues frowned. "Didn't we already do that tonight?"

"We need to do it again."

Everyone got up and went into the conference room. Faye kept the double doors open and sat at the head of the table so she could watch over the hall outside as well as the monitor that showed the status of every patient on the floor¡ª

Faye stiffened in her chair. What the hell? There was a man with multicolored hair behind the nurses' station, leaning over a keyboard.

Faye started to get up, ready to call security, but then the guy looked over his shoulder. As his yellow eyes met hers, she suddenly forgot why it would be wrong for him to be at one of their computers. She also realized that she needed to talk about the patient in five right away.

"Let's review the status of Mr. Hauser," she said in a voice that got everyone's attention.

After Manello left, Jane stared down at her patient in disbelief. In spite of all the sedatives in his veins, his eyes were open and he was staring up out of his hard, tattooed face with full cognition.

God... those eyes. They were unlike any she'd seen before, the irises unnaturally white with navy blue rims.

This was not right, she thought. The way he looked at her wasn't right. That six-chambered heart beating in his chest wasn't right. Those long teeth in the front of his mouth weren't right.

He was not human.

Except that was ridiculous. First rule of medicine? When you hear hoofbeats, don't think zebras. What were the chances that there was an undetected humanoid species out there? A yellow Lab to Homo sapiens' golden retriever?

She thought about the patient's teeth. Yeah, maybe make that Doberman pinscher to the retriever.

The patient stared back at her, somehow managing to loom even though he was on his back, intubated, and only two hours out of trauma surgery.

How the hell was this guy conscious?

"Can you hear me?" she asked. "Nod your head if you can."

His hand, the one with the tattoos, clawed at his throat, then grabbed onto the tube going into his mouth.

"No, that has to stay in." As she leaned over to take his hand away, he whipped the thing back from her, moving it as far away as his arm would allow. "That's right. Please don't make me restrain you."

His eyes went utterly wide in terror, just peeled right open as his big body started to shake on the bed. His lips worked against the tube down his throat as if he were crying out, and his fear touched her: There was such an animalistic edge to his desperation, like the way a wolf might look at you if his leg was caught in a trap: Help me and maybe I won't kill you when you set me free.

She put her hand on his shoulder. "It's all right. We don't have to go that route. But we need that tube¡ª"

The door to the room opened, and Jane froze.

The two men who came in were dressed in black leather and looked like the type who'd carry concealed weapons. One was probably the biggest, most gorgeous blond she'd ever eyeballed. The other scared her. He had a Red Sox hat pulled down low and a horrible air of malevolence about him. She couldn't see a lot of his face, but going by his gray pallor, he seemed ill.

Looking at the pair, Jane's first thought was that they had come for her patient, and not just to bring him flowers and yak it up.

Her second thought was that she was going to need security, stat.

"Get out," she said. "Right now."

The guy with the Sox cap completely ignored her and went over to the bedside. As he and the patient made eye contact, Red Sox reached out and the two linked hands.

In a hoarse voice, Red Sox said, "Thought I'd lost you, you son of a bitch."

The patient's eyes strained as if he were trying to communicate. Then he just shook his head from side to side on the pillow.

"We're going to get you home, okay?"

As the patient nodded, Jane didn't bother with any more Chatty-Cathy, you-need-to-leave shit. She lunged for the nursing station call button, the one that signaled a cardiac emergency and would bring half the floor to her.

She didn't make it.

Red Sox's buddy, the beautiful blond, moved so fast she couldn't track him. One moment he was just inside the door; the next he'd grabbed her from behind and popped her feet off the floor. As she started to holler, he clamped his hand over her mouth and subdued her as easily as if she were a child throwing a tantrum.

Meanwhile, Red Sox systematically stripped the patient of everything: the intubation, the IV, the catheter, the cardiac wires, the oxygen monitor.

Jane went ballistic. As the machines' alarms started going off, she hauled back and kicked her captor in the shin with her heel. The blond behemoth grunted then squeezed her rib cage until she got so busy trying to breathe she couldn't soccer-ball him anymore.

At least the alarms would¡ª

The shrill beeping fell silent even though no one touched the machines. And she had the horrible sense that nobody was coming from down the hall.

Jane fought harder, until she strained so hard her eyes watered.

"Easy," the blond said in her ear. "We'll be out of your hair in a minute. Just relax."

Yeah, the hell she would. They were going to kill her patient¡ª

The patient took a deep breath on his own. And another. And another. Then those eerie diamond eyes shifted over to her, and she stilled as if he'd willed her to do so.

There was a moment of silence. And then in a rough voice, the man whose life she saved spoke four words that changed everything... changed her life, changed her destiny:

"She. Comes. With. Me."

Standing inside the nursing station, Phury did a quick hack job on the hospital's IT system. He wasn't as smooth or flashy with the keyboard as V was, but he was good enough. He located the records under the name Michael Klosnick and contaminated the findings and notes pertaining to Vishous's treatment with random scripting: All the test results, the scans, the X-rays, the digital photographs, the scheduling, the postop notes, it all became unreadable. Then he entered a brief notation that Klosnick was indigent and had checked out AMA.

God he loved consolidated, computerized medical records. What a snap.

He'd also cleaned up the memories of most if not all of the OR staff. On the way up here he'd swung by the operating suite and had a little t¨ºte-¨¤-t¨ºte with the nurses on duty. He'd lucked out. The shift hadn't changed, so the folks who had been in with V were all present and he'd scrubbed them. None of those nurses would have distinct recollections of what they'd seen when the brother had been operated on.

It wasn't a perfect erase job, of course. There were people he hadn't gotten to and maybe some ancillary records that had been printed out. But that wasn't his problem. Whatever confusion occurred in the wake of V's disappearance would be absorbed into the frantic workings of a tremendously busy urban hospital. Sure, there might be a review or two of patient care, but they wouldn't be able to find V by then, and that was all that mattered.

When Phury was finished with the computer, he jogged down the SICU floor. As he went, he fritzed out the security cameras that were embedded at regular intervals in the ceiling so all they'd show was fuzz.

Just as he came up to the room six, the door opened. Vishous was death warmed over in Butch's arms, the brother pale and shaky and in pain, his head tucked into the cop's neck. But he was breathing and his eyes were open.

"Let me take him," Phury said, thinking Butch looked almost as bad.

"I've got him. You deal with our management issue and ride hard on the security cameras."

"What management issue?"

"Wait for it," Butch muttered as he headed for a fire door at the far end of the hall.

A split second later, Phury got a load of the problem: Rhage walked out into the hall with a rip-shit human female in a choke hold. She was fighting him tooth and nail, the muffled yelling suggesting she had a vocabulary like a trucker.

"You gotta knock her cold, my brother," Rhage said, then grunted. "I don't want to hurt her, and V said she had to come with us."

"This was not supposed to be kidnap operation."

"Too fucking late. Now knock her out, would ya?" Rhage grunted again and switched his grip, his hand leaving her mouth to catch one of her flailing arms.

Her voice came through loud and clear. "So help me, God, I'm going to¡ª"

Phury took her chin in his hand and forced her head up. "Relax," he said softly. "Just ease up."

He locked his stare on hers and began to will her into calmness... will her into calmness... will her into¡ª

"Fuck you!" she spat. "I'm not letting you kill my patient!"

Okay, this wasn't working. Behind those rimless glasses and dark green eyes, she had a formidable mind, so with a curse he brought out the big guns, mentally shutting her down completely. She sagged like a mop.

Removing her glasses, he folded them up and put them in the breast pocket of his coat. "Let's bust out of here before she comes around again."

Rhage flipped the woman over, draping her like a shawl off his heavy shoulder. "Get her bag from the room."

Phury ducked in, picked up a leather tote and the folder marked with the name Klosnick, then beat feet from the room. When he came back into the hall, Butch was having a run-in with a nurse who'd come out of a patient room.

"What are you doing!" the woman said.

Phury got on her like a tent, jumping in front of her, staring her into a stupor, planting the urgent need to get to a staff meeting in her frontal lobe. By the time he caught up with the evac again, the woman in Rhage's arms was already throwing off the mind control, shaking her head back and forth as it bobbed to the beat of Hollywood's get-up-'n-go.

As they came up to the stairwell's fire door, Phury barked, "Hold up, Rhage."

The brother stopped on a dime; and Phury clamped his hand on the side of the woman's neck, putting her out cold with a pressure lock.

"She's gone. S'all good."

They hit the back stairs and hauled ass. Vishous's rasping breath was testimony to how much the express-train action was killing him, but he was hard-core as always, hanging in, in spite of the fact that he'd turned the color of pea soup.

Each time they came to a landing, Phury pulled a little scramble with a security camera, running an electrical surge through the things so they blinked out. His big hope was that they'd make it to the Escalade without tangling with a bunch of security guards. Humans were never targets for the Brotherhood. That being said, if there was a risk of the vampire race being exposed, there was nothing that wouldn't be done. And as hypnotizing large groups of agitated and aggressive humans had a low success rate, that left fighting. And death for them.

Some eight flights down the stairwell bottomed out, and Butch stopped in front of a metal door. Sweat poured down his face and he was weaving, but his face was soldier-strong: He was going to get his buddy out, and nothing was going to stand in his way, even his own physical weakness.

"I'll do the door," Phury said, jumping to the head of the pack. After taking care of the alarm, he held the slab of steel open for the others. On the far side, a maze of utility halls branched out.

"Oh, shit," he muttered. "Where the hell are we?"

"Basement." The cop marched ahead. "Know it well. Morgue's on this level. Spent a lot of time here in my old job."

Some hundred yards farther, Butch hooked them up with a shallow corridor that was more a shaft full of HVAC piping than any kind of hallway.

And then there it was: salvation in the form of an emergency access door.

"Escalade's out here," the cop said to V. "Sitting pretty."

"Thank... God." V's lips pressed flat, again, like he was trying not to throw up.

Phury did another jump ahead, then cursed. This alarm setup was different from the others, operating on a more complex circuitry. Which he should have expected. Exterior doors were frequently wired more heavily than interior ones. Trouble was, his little mental tricks weren't going to work here, and it wasn't like he could call a time-out to disarm the thing. V was looking roadkill bad.

"Brace yourself for a screamer," Phury said before punching the bar handle.

The alarm went off like a banshee.

As they rushed out into the night, Phury wheeled around and looked up at the ass end of the hospital. He located the security camera over the door, got it to misread, and stayed locked with its blinking red eye as V and the human female were dumped inside the Escalade and Rhage got behind the wheel.

Butch took shotgun and Phury hopped into the back with the cargo. He checked his watch. Total elapsed time from when they'd first parked back here to Hollywood's foot slamming down on the gas pedal was twenty-nine minutes. The op had been relatively clean. All that was left to do now was get everyone to the compound in one piece and scrap the plates on the SUV.

There was just one complication.

Phury shifted his eyes to the human woman.

One big, huge complication.