He stood to the side and leaned over to peer through the peephole. The hotel security/undercover cops were standing back from the door, in sight of the peephole. Between them stood a slight, intelligent-looking male who carried a bag. Even through the door Tiago could pick up a whisper of magic about the man. The doctor was a witch.
Hughes had come to the door as well. Tiago pointed to the door. “Verify this guy,” he said.
The manager took a look through the peephole. “That’s Dr. Weylan, the one I called. The hotel has had him on retainer for several years now.”
Tiago opened the door, gestured the doctor in and shut and locked the door behind him. Then he pinned the doctor to the wall with one hand around his throat and introduced him to the Glock.
“Here are the rules,” he said. “No second chances. I’ve been on battlefields for far longer than you’ve been alive. I have performed triage and I am very familiar with medical procedures, including magical ones. You do not want me to misunderstand anything you do. You do a single thing that seems off to me in the slightest way, and you’re dead. And I won’t lose a single moment’s sleep over that decision. Got it?”
Paling, the doctor nodded. Hughes stared at Tiago, and from the living room Niniane exclaimed, “Tiago!”
He raised his voice as he snapped, “Let’s revisit, your argumentativeness. There’ve been two assassination attempts in less than thirty-six hours. You won’t let me take you back to New York, so it’s shotgun justice until we have a safe base of operations established.” He said more quietly to the doctor, “You got that?”
“Actually, I do,” said the smaller man. Tiago eased his hold on the human male’s throat. Steady, sharp eyes met his. The doctor gave him a tight smile. “You’ve made your point. Let me do what I came to do and treat my patient now.”
Tiago took a deep breath and stepped back. He had lived a long life by trusting his gut. His gut told him that Hughes was for real, and that through the years the human doctor would have proven himself to the five-star hotel and its customers many times over.
Tiago’s gut also knew that anybody could be gotten to, through bribery or coercion, through family or lovers held hostage or through religious or political beliefs. That was why he followed so closely behind the doctor as the human entered the living room, knelt beside the sofa and introduced himself to Niniane as he opened his bag.
Like Tiago had said to Niniane, life wasn’t logical. It was often filled with uncertainties. At that moment he knew just one thing for sure.
That little manipulative sex kitten was not going to die tonight.
The fate of anybody else remained an open question.
Niniane huddled under the blanket and looked at her surroundings with a dull gaze. The hotel living room seemed unobjectionable enough. There were chairs, the sofa, tables, a flat-screen television, all the obligatory elements, but her exhausted mind seemed unable to absorb any details.
She had a weird kind of infection, she decided. Someone had tried to stuff an extra dimension in her head, and it didn’t fit. Too-loud noises came and went. Her vision flickered around the edges.
Her knife wound hurt. The light was too bright and her eyes hurt. Her skin hurt, breathing hurt—hell, even her hair hurt. She felt like she barely had enough energy to lie on the sofa and live.
But whenever Tiago was near she seemed to have plenty of energy for arguing with him. It must be God’s way of telling her how wrong he was.
She opened her eyes as three men entered the room. Hughes showed that he was a man of discretion, as he caught her eye and gestured that he would go to the kitchenette. She nodded in thanks to him. A slender human male knelt on the floor beside her, opened a medical bag and smiled at her. Tiago hovered just behind him, his dark face grim, and his murderous obsidian eyes tracked the human male’s slightest movement.
She turned her attention back to the man kneeling beside her. His intelligent face was creased with kindness. “I’m Dr. Weylan,” he told her. “It’s quite an honor to meet your highness, but I’m sure we both could have wished it was under better circumstances. I hear you’ve been having a challenging couple of days.”
“You can say that again,” she said. Exhaustion kept her voice faint. Then she glanced pointedly at Tiago and rolled her eyes at the physician as she added, “And somebody tried to kill me too.”
The doctor’s eyebrows shot up and he laughed, while over his shoulder Tiago glared daggers at her. “Okay,” Dr. Weylan said. “I’ll explain everything I’m going to do before I do it. The first thing I want to do is to put my hands on you and give you a magical scan. I want to put one hand on your forehead, and the other one close to where you’ve been injured. Have you had one of these scans before?”
She nodded.
“Good, then you know it might tingle a bit but it won’t hurt. It’s just going to give me information while you tell me all about what happened to you. All right?”