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-

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-

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 tête-à-tête 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-"

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-

"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.