Children of the Sea 02 - Sea Fever

wide-eyed.
     
    “If I can catch you,” Dylan added thoughtfully. “You’re a quick little bastard.”
     
    Nick grinned and tucked his hand into Dylan’s, increasing his pace to an almost trot. They walked like that, hand in hand, the rest of the way up the hill.
     
    *
     
    240
     
    Regina struck the demon’s arm, knocking aside the gleaming needle, and dodged out of range behind the exam table.
     
    Her heart thundered. Dylan was coming. She had to believe that. She just had to buy him time. Time to rescue Nick. Time to find her. Time to save their baby.
     
    The demon darted forward. Regina lashed with her foot at her attacker’s knee. The devil blocked the blow with her thigh. Regina drove her heel down on the soft instep of the doctor’s sensible shoe and Donna yelped. She struck out with the loaded syringe, and Regina jumped back to avoid the plunging needle.
     
    They circled like boxers searching for an opening, the table in between.
     
    “You’re being very difficult,” the devil woman panted.
     
    “The most difficult woman I’ve ever known,” Dylan had called her.
     
    Regina grinned savagely. “You bet your ass.”
     
    *
     
    “Gone,” Dylan repeated blankly. He stood between the restaurant booths, staring at Antonia over Nick’s head. “Gone where?”
     
    His heart drummed in his chest, thundered in his ears. Outside the restaurant, was all he could think.
     
    Beyond the protection of the ward.
     
    All his earlier fears and misgivings grabbed him by the neck and shook him like a terrier shakes a rat.
     
    Antonia looked up from cuddling her grandson, her face deeply wrinkled and tired. “There were . . . problems,” she said, not quite meeting Dylan’s eyes. “She went to see Donna Tomah at the clinic.”
     
    Dylan scowled. “The doctor?”
     
    241
    And remembered, with a clarity that left him cold, the thin, bearded man in the hooded sweatshirt passing them at the clinic door. Christ.
     
    The clinic. Ten minutes on foot. Two minutes by car.
     
    “I need to borrow your car,” he said.
     
    Antonia pursed her lips. “Van’s out back. Can you drive it?”
     
    Dylan’s jaw set. He hadn’t been behind the wheel since he’d steered his father’s truck up and down their driveway twenty-five years ago.
     
    Ten minutes on foot. Two minutes by car.
     
    “I guess we’ll find out,” he said grimly and caught the keys on the run.
     
    *
     
    Regina’s cheek burned from the devil woman’s nails, her back hurt, and her belly was on fire. She faced the demon, her breath escaping in shallow sobs, dismally aware of the heavy flow between her thighs.
     
    Donna Tomah’s nostrils flared. “You’re bleeding again,” the demon observed. “Why don’t you give it up?”
     
    The doctor’s neat braid was frayed and torn, her jaw was swollen, and her left wrist hung at an awkward angle. But her voice was calmly conversational. “It’s still not too late to save Nick.”
     
    Regina hated, hated, the doctor’s voice. But conversation gave her a chance to get her breath back. To get her strength back. She was thirty years younger than Donna, but the doctor was impervious to pain and fought with the strength and quickness of the possessed.
     
    “Nick will be fine,” Regina said shortly. Please, let him be fine. “I’m saving this baby.”
     
    “Too late.” The devil smiled compassionately. “You’ve already lost your little whelp.”
     
    242
    Rage and sorrow swamped Regina, flooded her brain red as blood.
    “Not my baby, you bitch,” she said and launched herself at the demon.
     
    Her charge carried them both to the floor with a bone-jarring thud.
    Regina grabbed the demon’s wrist with both hands, uncaring of the teeth that snapped at her face, that gnawed at her arm. Gasping, sobbing, she crawled over the demon’s body to grind her tattooed wrist against the hand that gripped the syringe.
     
    The demon shrieked. The stench of burning flesh rose from her smoking wrist. Her hand released, and the needle skittered under the sink.
     
    They rolled over the floor, kicking and biting, scratching and gouging. The devil woman drove a knee into Regina’s groin. She doubled up, seeing red. Seeing stars. Seeing death.
     
    The demon heaved and scrabbled over the floor toward the needle.
    Regina jumped on her back and grabbed her hair with both hands.
     
    “Not my baby,” she screamed and slammed the devil bitch’s head into the fixed leg of the exam table.