The Missing

soft and sweet. Her skin was cold, frighteningly so. She was . . . No. Don’t think it. He couldn’t think it.

    “Don’t leave me, Taige. God, I love you so much.”

    CULLEN had gotten used to the incessant noise of the hospital equipment. He even took comfort in the high-pitched little beep. It was strong, it was regular. Taige’s heart continued to beat. The trip to the hospital was one that was going to live on in his nightmares. Twice, they’d lost her.

    Twice, they had been forced to shock her heart back into beating, and each time it had happened when one of the medics tried to force Cullen to give them a little room. The second time they’d been forced to revive her, Cullen had looked at one of the medics and said, “You want me to move again, you’re going to have to kill me to do it.”

    That had been three days ago. Although the medical staff hadn’t been forced to revive her since arriving at the hospital, she continued to linger in a coma.

    Cullen and four of the agents on the scene had donated blood. She hovered between life and death, and Cullen was right there with her.

    “Daddy?”

    He heard that soft, hesitant little voice, and he looked up, felt his heart squeeze in his chest as Jillian peered into the room. Cullen’s dad stood behind her. They both heard the nurse’s quiet voice, and Robert went to intercept the nurse as the woman said, “Sir, there are no children allowed in here.”

    Cullen tuned out the sound of his father’s cajoling voice and reached out a hand to Jillian. “Hey, baby.”

    She glanced at Taige, her eyes huge and round in her face. “She looks different.”

    Yeah, she did. Taige’s skin had a strange grayish cast, but she looked better today than she had yesterday. At least that was what he told himself. “She’s just sick, darlin’. She’s going to be just fine.” Silently, he added, She has to be.

    Jillian nodded. She glanced back at her grandfather and then at Cullen. “Granpa didn’t want to bring me up here. But I had to see you.”

    “I’m glad you came, Jilly.” He forced himself to smile. “You want to say something to her?”

    “Will she hear me?”

    Blowing out a sigh, he murmured, “I think she does. I hope she does.” Managing a faint grin, he murmured, “I sure do hope she hears me, because I’ve been talking to her a lot.”

    Jillian eye’s widened. “You never talk a lot.” Nervous, she edged a little closer to the bed and then reached up, brushed her fingers over Taige’s arm. It was the only part of her visible that wasn’t covered with tubes, bandages, or wires. “She helped you find the bad man, didn’t she?”

    “Yeah.” His throat went tight, and his voice was barely more than a whisper. “Yeah, she did.”

    With a solemn nod, Jillian said, “Now he can’t hurt anybody again, right?” Without waiting for an answer, she shimmied a little closer to Taige’s head. Cullen reached out for her to pull her away from the machines, but she didn’t bump into either of them, and she carefully sidestepped all the tubes and wires. “Thank you, Taige.”

    TAIGE heard that soft little whisper. It brushed across her subconscious like a soft breeze, warm and comforting.

    She thought she recognized the voice, but it was so damn hard to think. So hard to feel, so hard to even force herself into some state of semiawareness. She’d been fighting to wake for what seemed like ages, and she just couldn’t do it.

    Taige couldn’t open her eyes, couldn’t even move. She wanted to, but any time she gained the strength to reach out, exhaustion rose up and pulled her away before she could make contact. The weight of that exhaustion killed her purpose, and she’d have to rest before she had the energy to try again.

    There were people all around her, but the only one she was really aware of was Cullen. He’d been there since the beginning. When she’d felt herself fading away, it had been Cullen who pulled her back. A few times, something or somebody had tried to take him away, and she’d felt her hold on reality slip again, felt herself falling away.

    He’d forced himself back to her side each time, and she knew if it wasn’t for him, she would have drifted away altogether, off into the gray, until she grew smaller and smaller and then just faded entirely. Cullen wouldn’t let her, though. All around her, she could feel his strength, smell his skin, hear his voice.

    She needed to touch him, though.