Black Heart (Cursed Hearts #1)(103)

“Hold her down!” a nurse ordered just as her large insane friend stormed past her.

“Get yer f**king hands off her!” he roared, noticeably startling the orderlies charged with holding the pretty brunette down while a nurse struggled to shove a very large needle in the woman’s arm.

The two large EMTs and the police officer with pepper hair helping to hold down the woman looked up as the raging insane man headed for them. It was more than obvious that her insane friend’s presence wasn’t a welcome sight and as she followed behind him, once again holding her stun gun, she contemplated the benefits of taking him down for them.

“Mind your business!” the officer snapped, securing his hold around the struggling, screaming woman, that honestly was hard to listen to without feeling her heart break. The woman’s pain was almost palpable and she would have given anything at that moment to turn around and walk out of here, but the man she’d been trying to talk to for the past week was here and this couldn’t wait a minute longer.

“Get yer f**king hands off her!” he snapped, grabbing the two orderlies holding the woman’s legs down by the backs of their necks and tossing them away from the woman like they didn’t weigh anything. That alone had her pulling her stun gun out of her pocketbook and setting the voltage to high, because really, there was just no way that the two EMTs, cop and nurse were going to be able to overpower this man.

Without a word, he reached down and plucked the needle out of the nurse’s hand and tossed it aside, his gaze locked on the sobbing woman. When the younger EMT moved to grab him, her insane friend simply shoved him away, knocking him clear across the room.

“Denny?” an older woman that she hadn’t noticed until then said, sounding calm which was probably a good thing right now since the last thing that this situation needed was a hysterical woman.

“Macha?” her insane buddy said soothingly only to frown a few seconds later when the woman didn’t respond. Then with a sigh and a self-deprecating shake of his head, he said, “Marty? Lass? It’s fine. He’s alright.”

The older EMT released his hold on the woman and looked like he was going to take his chances wrestling with the psych patient when the sobbing woman suddenly opened her eyes.

“A-are you sure?” she asked, looking up at the psych patient with such hope that Ashlyn seriously considered tasering the bastard on principle alone for screwing with this poor woman’s head.

He smiled fondly down at the woman. “Aye, he’s fine, still an ass**le, but he’s fine.”

The woman’s expression crumpled as her expression turned from heartbroken to relieved. She reached for the psych patient and wrapped her arms around his neck. He simply held onto her as she sobbed quietly against his shoulder and Ashlyn took that as her cue to move on. This wasn’t her drama so she really didn’t need to be here, she decided as she moved to take a step forward, but realized that there was no one manning the nurse’s station. So with a shrug, she faced the very confused looking group of people. She decided to ignore the ones that were unconscious, because they probably wouldn’t be much help and focused on the ones watching her insane friend.

“Does anyone know where I can find Detective Black? I was told that he was here.”

*-*-*-*

“How did this happen?” Liam demanded as he paced the long room. He stormed forward, disappeared only to reappear on the other side of the room, doing that over and over again.

“The curse,” he mumbled, carefully shifting Marty in his arms as she slept.

The poor thing had pretty much collapsed into exhaustion once the surgeon came out and explained that it had been touch and go, but that Tristan had pulled through and was being transported to ICU. Shayne had tried to transport them both to his room, but had discovered that his ability to move around by jumping from place to place was gone.

He was once again human and he had no idea how in the hell that happened. The only thing that he’d been able to come up with was the curse, which seemed to still affect him. He still saw ghosts. They saw him and irritated the shit out of him. The only thing that changed was that he was human, all of his memories were intact and the woman sitting across from him, texting like a woman possessed, seriously pissed him off. There was good reason for that, he thought bitterly as he narrowed his eyes on her and glared.

She was his f**king soul mate.

After all these years, here she was pissing him off and reminding him why he hated being human. If he’d still been in his true form he could have given her the swat on the ass that she rightly deserved and popped out of the room, never giving her another thought. That’s not how this was going to work out apparently.

The curse had plans and they involved the two of them now. How did he know this? Well, that was really quite simple. He was the only dumb bastard out of his brothers who had been turned back to human. His brothers were still in their true forms, Tristan was still alive, hooked up to machines, but still very much alive and hopefully out of the curse’s reach.

He ran his eyes over her, wondering how exactly he’d been paired with this woman when she clearly wasn’t his type. He liked long beautiful hair, soft eyes, pouty lips and a slender body. What he got instead was a woman with a very short haircut, shorter than his, about a half dozen piercings in her ears, tattoos on her neck and arms and God only knew where else and a body with an athletic build. Her style also grated, nothing truly feminine about her clothes. She wore a black tee shirt that showed off, of all things, a pierced belly button, jeans that rode a little too low and a pair of black combat boots.