Payne refocused on her healer. “I understand.”
The human’s eyes narrowed. “Then tell me what I said.”
“Whatever for?”
“This is your body. I want to make sure you know what I’m going to do to it, and I’m concerned about a language barrier.”
“She knows what the fuck you’re say—”
Her healer glared over his shoulder. “Are you still here?”
The dark-haired male beside her twin locked an arm around Vishous’s chest and muttered something on a hiss. Then he addressed her healer, speaking with a slightly different accent. “You need to chill, my man. Or I’m going to let him turn you into beef jerky for taking that tone. Capisce?”
She had to approve of the way her healer met the aggression head-on: “You want me to operate, it’s on my terms and in my way. So he’s out in the hall or you’re getting yourself another scalpel. What’s it gonna be.”
There was a lot of consternated arguing at that point, with Jane rushing over from where she had been at a window that played pictures upon its pane. She spoke softly at first until finally her voice was as loud as the rest of theirs were.
Payne cleared her throat. “Vishous. Vishous. Vishous!”
Getting nowhere, she put her two lips together and whistled loud enough to shatter glass.
As a flame would be snuffed out, so too were the lot of them, although the angry energy lingered about in the air like smoke from atop a wick.
“He shall treat me now,” she said weakly, the tension in the room a form of fever that took o’er her body, making her even more lethargic. “He shall . . . treat me. It is my wish.” Her eyes went to her healer. “You shall endeavor to rebreak my fused spinal vertebrae, as you call them, and it is your hope that my spinal cord is not severed but merely injured. You state further that you cannot predict the outcome, but that when you are ‘in there,’ you may be able to assess the damage more clearly. Yes?”
Her healer looked at her in a powerful way. Deeply. Gravely. With an edge that she was confused about . . . and yet not threatened by. Fates, hardly that—in fact, something in his eyes made her . . . uncurl on the inside.
“Have I recalled it all correctly?” she prompted him.
Her healer cleared his throat. “Yes. You have.”
“Then operate . . . as you call it.”
Over by the doorway, she heard the dark-haired man say something to her twin, and then Vishous lifted his arm and pointed his gloved finger at the human. “You will not live through this if she does not.”
Cursing, Payne closed her eyes and wished anew that what she had sought for so long had not been gained. Better to have gone unto the Fade than cause the death of some innocent human—
“Deal.”
Payne’s lids popped open. Her healer stood unbowed before her twin’s size and strength, accepting the burden laid upon his head.
“But you leave,” the human said. “You need to get the fuck out of here and stay out. I’m not going to be distracted by your shit.”
Her twin’s massive body twitched in the shoulders and the chest, but then he inclined his head once. “Deal.”
And then she was alone with her healer, except for Jane and the other nurse.
“One last test.” Her healer leaned to the side and got a thin stick off one of the counters. “I’m going to run this pen up your foot. I want you to tell me if you feel anything.”
When she nodded, he moved out of her range of sight and she closed her eyes to concentrate, straining for some kind of sensation to register. Anything.
Surely if there was a response, however dim, that was a good sign—
“I feel something,” she said with a surge of energy. “On my left side.”
There was a pause. “How about now.”
She begged her legs for a similar reception and had to breathe deeply before she could answer. “No. Nothing.”