Shadowstorm (The Shadow World Book 6) by Dianne Sylvan Read Free Book Online Page B

her phone it was easy enough to catch up again. She looked up at the sign here:
    Neonatal Intensive Care Unit
    Same drill. Deven moved from room to room, but this area didn’t take as long; there were only about 20 beds that she could see.
    As she walked, she bolstered her shields again: even after visiting hours, she could still feel the lingering presence of sadness and hope. She didn’t get much of anything off the inhabitants of the alien-looking plastic beds. She wasn’t sure how to describe it. She guessed most of them were significantly premature, but it wasn’t that they weren’t alive, it was that while pain was physical, suffering was an emotion that depended on context these babies didn’t have yet. She couldn’t decide if that was comforting or not.
    Finally, she saw her chance: an open area with curtained bays instead of closed off rooms. The room was dimly lit from a bright lamp that was shining inside one of the bays. She moved into the one opposite, which fortunately held only an empty bed. From there she had a perfect view.
    Deven drew aside the curtain of the bay closest to the window, revealing a clear plastic bed—incubator, if she recalled correctly—with a variety of tubes and wires connecting it to the bank of machines nearby. She could barely see inside, but then a tiny pink hand flailed up in the air.
    Her heart was held in her throat by a tangled net of emotions. She held onto the curtain with one hand and just watched.
    Deven slid his hands into the holes in the incubator’s side and gingerly plucked some kind of tubing out of the way. He didn’t seem stymied by the equipment the way Miranda would have been. Miranda shifted a little to the right to get a better look at the inside of the box.
    It was, of course, a baby, wearing nothing but a diaper and a pink knit cap on her downy head. Miranda didn’t know much about babies but this one had to be pretty new—she didn’t have that fat rounded-off look babies got once they’d been eating for a while. This one wasn’t eating anything, though. She had a tube down her throat.
    That little hand caught one of Deven’s fingers for a moment. Miranda glanced up at his face in time to see a soft smile.
    It occurred to her to wonder if he’d ever wanted children of his own; she doubted it, given his monastic life, but she wasn’t sure. It wasn’t the sort of thing vampires usually talked about. David hardly ever mentioned his son, though she knew he had loved fatherhood.
    Deven closed his eyes.
    She knew what he was doing before she even felt the wave of energy rising up through him. She had seen this before, that night when he knelt on the street beside Kat’s bleeding body. This time, though, the amount of power she sensed dwarfed that by a factor of ten at least—she had no idea how he could control that much power, but somehow he modulated it, feeding a little at a time into the tiny wrinkly creature in the bed.
    Miranda had no idea what was wrong with the baby, or how he knew when she was better, but after a couple of minutes, he withdrew his hands and placed them on the lid of the incubator to steady himself, breathing hard. She had counted: he’d been to thirteen different patients tonight, and by now had to be on the verge of collapse. Just healing Kat had put him out for a whole night. Where had all of this come from?
    Taking a deep breath, he rubbed his hands together, flexing the fingers. While he did that the machines around the baby’s bed began to beep faster or slower or whatever they had to do to indicate something was very, very different.
    This time when he left the ward he headed for the elevators. Miranda stayed where she was for a good five minutes before doing the same; he would probably be on his way to the park now, and she had a good idea why—to rest, and possibly hunt.
    She was thankful to get outside again in the free air; the more distance she could put between herself and the hospital, the better she’d