Кей Хупер - Blood Ties

“You did it,” Diana murmured, her voice as scratchy as her throat was. “Thank you.”

“Don’t mention it. My pleasure. Let’s not do it again, okay?”

“Okay.”

“Diana…”

She looked to her right to see Quentin, feeling something inside her turn over with a painful lurch: He was haggard and hollow-eyed, and it hurt her to see him like that. It hurt her and moved her unbearably to see that he was, still, afraid to hope she was really back.

He was holding her hand against his cheek, and she managed to move her fingers against his skin.

Scratchy voice and all, she said, “I love you.”

His eyes lit up with a warmth she knew she could wrap herself in to truly begin her happy life. “I love you. So much.”

Hollis stopped grinning long enough to look up at DeMarco. “You think maybe we should leave?”

“That would probably be a good idea.”

Diana tore her eyes away from Quentin long enough to say to Hollis, “You have to tell them. In Serenade. So they know what they’re really up against.”

“Oh, yeah. Right. Only—listen, you are okay?”

“I’m fine. Tired and sore, but I think the doctors will be surprised when they check under these bandages. Very surprised.”

“In that case,” Hollis said to Reese, “we need to get to Serenade. Because it’s worse than you know, and they’ll need your primal ability to sense a threat and maybe my shiny new ability to heal, and—”

“Yeah, I’ve got all that,” he said, calm. “You’re broadcasting.”

“Am I? Sorry.”

“It’s a time-saver.” He looked at Quentin, his brows lifting. “I don’t think there’s anything else for us to do here, and they’ll definitely need us in Serenade. I’m assuming Diana will fill you in.”

“I will,” she said.

DeMarco nodded. “And we’ll tell the others you’re okay. Quentin, you should probably stick close, just in case. I don’t think there’s a threat here, but until we get things cleared up in Serenade…”

“Don’t worry, I’m not planning to leave her side for the next fifty or sixty years.”

To Diana, Hollis said, “Yours is more romantic than mine. That might be a problem.”

Diana tried hard not to smile as she looked at DeMarco. “She’s … really tired right now.”

“I know. She’ll hate herself later. Assuming she remembers. You two watch your backs. Come on, sweetie, let’s go.”

“Sweetie? You’re being sarcastic, aren’t you?”

“A little bit.”

“Well, I’m not sure I like sarcasm from my—from mine. You might have to fix that.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“I mean fix it now , not keep doing it….”

As DeMarco took her away and Hollis’s rather plaintive voice faded with distance, Diana looked at Quentin and said, “I’m glad he enjoys her.”

“Yeah. Reese has a wicked sense of humor; it just doesn’t show very often. I think they’ll be very good for each other.”

“Like you’ve been good for me.”

“I was beginning to wonder,” he said.

“I know. For a long time it seemed like there was nothing in my life, and then there was so much I couldn’t trust it all…. I’m sorry,

Quentin.”

“Don’t be sorry. Some things have to happen just the way they happen, remember? I’d never want to go through the last thirty hours again, but the last year, getting to know you and watching you…bloom right in front of me? I wouldn’t take anything for that.”

“I’m glad. And as soon as I get out of this hospital bed, I’ll show you just how much.”

“Promises, promises.” He saw her fumble with her other hand for the bed’s controls and begin to raise the head slowly, and he said, “Hey, are you sure you want to do that?”

“It’s okay. I’m just a little… stiff. But I won’t face him lying down.”

“Face who?”

“My father.” She stopped raising the bed when she was half sitting up, then took a deep breath and shifted a bit. “Ouch. Quentin, I want you to hear this, okay? Hear it and believe me when I tell you that he is never going to interfere in our lives again. And I’m more than okay with that.”

“Diana—”

She turned her head and said, “Dad, you can come out now.”

Surprised, Quentin saw Elliot Brisco come around the curtain, apparently from the far corner of the room. His instinct was to rise and greet the man, despite the tension that had existed between them since their first meeting nearly a year before, but what he could feel in Diana kept him still and silent.

“What are you doing here, Dad?”

“I came to see you, of course. As soon as I heard about… the accident.” His face was pale, and there was an odd stiffness about him, like something brittle in danger of shattering.

“The accident? That’s the way you prefer to think about the fact that a sniper shot your daughter in broad daylight on a public street?”

He started to reach a hand out to her, but something in her face, something hard and closed, stopped him. “It—was a terrible thing. Horrible. I’m so sorry that happened to you, Diana.”

“I’m assuming you didn’t know he was going to shoot me.”

His face went even whiter. “Christ, Diana, I swear to you that’s the last thing in this world I would have wanted.”

She wasn’t particularly moved by his obvious anguish. “Yeah, well, the thing is, if you’d understood anything at all about my abilities, if you had just kept an open mind and tried to believe what I was telling you was real and not some disease you could cure by throwing money at it, you would have known. You would have known the instant Samuel was killed that he’d have to come after me.”

“Do you know how insane that sounds?” His voice was harsh.

“Even now you can’t admit it. He had me shot because he needed my abilities, Dad. He needed what I could do to get out of the place you’d probably call limbo—if you believed in anything not of this world, that is. But you don’t. Even now you don’t.”

“Diana—”

“So much of this was your fault. Because you couldn’t bear to give up control over my life, you destroyed so many other lives. Innocent lives. Destroyed them, Dad. Snuffed them out like candles.”

“You don’t know what you’re saying.”

“I know exactly what I’m saying. You’ve been trying to control events since I met Quentin. The same way you always try to control events. Only this time it wasn’t business deals or doctors, or just keeping your daughter too medicated to live a normal life. This time it was twisted people with evil agendas of their own. You thought you could control them and use them to destroy the SCU, destroy Bishop.”

He hardly seemed to be breathing as he stared at her.

“I wonder what it cost you to hire enough private investigators or pay off enough cops or feds to find the information you wanted—a name. The name of someone who hated Bishop as much as you did and was willing to go to any lengths to destroy him. Whatever it cost, you got that name. Samuel. Adam Deacon Samuel. A man who already had the SCU in his sights, had already begun to test them and test their defenses. You didn’t much care about the rest, did you? Didn’t care how sick and twisted he was. Didn’t care about the victims of his evil, their bodies piling up like cordwood. Didn’t care about the people in his so-called church, the children he was damaging and killing. And of course you didn’t believe he had any kind of paranormal ability. All you knew, all you needed to know, was that he wanted to destroy the SCU. So you helped him.”

“I made a donation to a church,” he said finally, his voice more hoarse than before.