Page 66 of Fuse

He raises his hold and grips my upper arm now. “I can’t fight her off much longer, Emma. And when she gets back into my head, she can’t have access to my free will.” He pauses as if knowing I need a second to process that. To envision what would happen to this place, and possibly all of us, if Faline Garand were able to control Reece like her personal drone. “She can’t get even one crack of access to my consciousness,” he finally utters. “Do you understand?”

I lift my head, giving him an unobstructed view of the pulse pounding at the base of my throat. “I’m… I’m not sure.”

He nods toward a glass-fronted case on top of a nearby counter. “In there. Rear right side. You’ll find some vials of Pentobarbital. I’ll walk you through how to use them.”

“Annnnnd we’re throwing a flag on this play, stud.” Somehow I get it out past my lurching stomach. “You… You want me to do what?”

“Emma. Baby.” He twists his fingers around the ball of my shoulder now. “If there were time to let you peruse YouTube on this, I would, but—”

“Don’t need the video. I get it.” Except that the closest experience I’ve had to this was jabbing a classmate in high school with an epi pen after she rolled onto a bee in PE. She was fine; I nearly passed out. And more recently, having to hold Reece’s hand, while he was unconscious, while Wade drew his blood…

Wade.

Oh, thank God. Wade.

“Just let me… I’ll get Wade or Fersh—”

“No time,” Reece snarls before falling all the way back down, as if I’ve thrown over one of the machines onto his chest. Only I’m nowhere near him now. I’m watching, helpless and wide-eyed, though he no longer sees me. With his body going stiff and his pupils disappearing into his eyelids, he’s got a great start for an impressive horror movie scene—except that this is all hideously real. He’s actually subjecting himself to some strange seizure in the name of fighting off Faline’s mental invasion—and all I can do is sit here and think about bees.

“Shit!”

But not anymore.

“Shit, shit, shit, shit!”

I bound off the table and sprint toward the medications cabinet. The second I haul it open, there’s a seismic rattle behind me. Reece is jerking from head to toe now, going for the ideal punk-rock-video audition.

Shit, shit, shit, shit!

“Hang on, baby.” It’s intelligible past my tears, but I’m not so lucky with my vision. Everything looks like a bad soap opera flashback, watery and confused, as I try reading the tiny labels on the vials inside the cabinet. “Hang on! I’m getting it, okay? I’m…I’m getting—”

“What the hell?” Suddenly, thank God, Wade bursts back in. “Emma? What the hell is going on?”

“Did he wake up?” Fershan enters right behind, rushing toward the bed as Reece goes into worse convulsions. “His readings jumped and then dipped, and now they are all over the place…”

“She woke him up.” I refuse to give Faline any more verbal credit than that. “And then he fought her back, but—”

“He is weakening.” Fershan dips an efficient nod. Though I’ve seen the exact same motion from him so many times before, it’s accompanied by a layer of badass that earns a new river of my respect. I only wish it weren’t because of these circumstances, especially when his lips compress as he looks over Reece’s spasming form. “He is weakening fast,” he stresses. “So we must save him even faster.”

Badass or not, I step into the gap with shoulders squared. “But Reece told me—”

“I am fairly certain of what he told you.” Fersh pivots like a captain on the bridge of his own battleship but tempers the vibe with enough of the aligned-chakras Fersh that I’m double-taking again. Not that he’s even noticing. “Grab the Pentobarbital,” he charges to Wade. “Stat.”

The guys work fast, Fershan slamming an air mask over Reece’s face as Wade sets up to push the coma-inducing medicine into Reece’s IV tube. But while they’re moving like a well-oiled triage team straight out of Grey Sloan Memorial, I stand here with my proverbial girl dick in one hand though manage to throw a hand towel across Reece’s crotch. The larger loincloth has gone missing, so I’m thanking God his erection has finally waned.

But so have all his violent jerks.

And the tension in his muscles.

And the energy of his presence.

Waned. But not gone.

I clutch his hand and hold it tight. Tighter.

When Wade looks up again, it’s to jog his head toward the juncture of our hands. “Good,” he barks, ginger curls falling into his eyes. “That’s really good, Emma. You keep doing exactly that, okay?”

I compress my lips, hoping it helps to rein back the tears. “Uh…okay.”