Helen stood in the wings, staring out at the incredible show, feeling giddy like a teenager. Nick was surrounded by crackling blue electricity, the air was alive with static, and the music was deafening with a deep bass that thrummed through her like a second pulse. He played his guitar with nimble fingers and smiled his manic grin at the screaming, crying, enraptured audience whose energy filled the stadium more so that even the ten thousand watts that Nick manipulated over their heads in writhing, screaming glory as it cascaded into grounds behind him in a showy display that should not thrill her as much as it did.
He was a master of showmanship, a damn good musician, and she was his doctor. Should be just the tour doctor, who was supposed to keep him healthy and alive, as per the label's contract. She should be watching his skin tone, his sweat, his pupils, determining if he was healthy enough to continue on. Instead, she was riveted by that damned smile, and spending far too much time looking at his arse in those tight leather trousers and wondering if he was going to take off that cravat this time and throw it into the audience. Or at her. That was not at all professional.
The music calmed suddenly, sweet and deceivingly gentle for a song about a vampire.
Could this be the answer
Uncorrupted carmine red
Voices keep resounding
In my dazed bewildered head
Have I found myself eternity
Someone has heard my prayers
Now I'll become divine
Have I found myself divinity
I'm no longer a slave
To the vicious hands of time
A burst of crackling red fire above Nick's head, and the music erupted again with the screams and chants of the audience. She shuddered, half seduced and half terrified.
She done her job two days ago, plunging a needle of epinephrine into his chest during rehearsal as a live wire had severed and shocked him unconscious, his heart stopping. She'd desperately worked to save him and when he'd taken a huge breath and looked up at her with wild eyes and a smug grin, she'd bent her head and kissed him so hard he'd almost fainted again. She'd disappeared afterward, hiding in the streets of São Paulo, working at a medical clinic, just as she spent her days at most stops along the way. She spent these hours justifying to herself why she was doing this tour, why she was giving transfusions and planning the diet of a single, wealthy rockstar instead of working at her foundation.
She was not supposed to remember what it felt like to be in love.
She'd been seventeen once. A levels early, snuck into Medical at Oxford with a smile and a legacy and more than a little genius. She'd met a fifteen year old prodigy, Dmitri Nikola Tesla, yes that Tesla. His great grandnephew who was half convinced he was his ancestor's reincarnation.
He certainly had the ego for it.
She'd rarely met anyone as intelligent and driven as herself, and this skinny, scrawny Serbian boy with a slight accent, wild eyes and slicked back hair made her seem merely mildly smart. He made her better, brighter. He was doubling in music composition and electrical engineering, and she was in love. He talked with her late into the nights and watched the stars with her, he composed complex sonatas that brought her to tears, he brought her coffee at three AM before finals and he insisted she call him Nick while he called her, "ljubavi".
But he never ever touched her. She decided that she wasn't his type, and tried not to think about him when she touched herself for release.
Then, he disappeared for weeks, and came back drawn and pale. Confessed he was a vampire - sort of. He needed regular transfusions to treat thalassemia, an inherited blood disease. She helped him recover, researched like mad, and realized that this was her calling. Rare diseases. Orphan syndromes. Helping people with the mysteries of their own bodies. He was her muse, and he claimed she was his. He wrote her a symphony at the end of their second year, and she got thoroughly pissed on cheap wine and kissed him.
She left on a humanitarian tour to Africa the next day, and didn't talk to him for months. In Mauritania, she met John Druitt, a Doctors Without Borders volunteer with an impeccable pedigree of English aristocracy that her father would love. He was a philosophy graduate student, also at Oxford, though they'd never crossed paths. Older, handsome and tall and very very interested in her.
She lost her virginity in a sandy tent in the Magreb, and she swore it was romantic and exciting and exactly what she wanted.
The first time she saw Nick again, she had just opened her eyes from John kissing her senseless in front of her rooms at school. His face looked so pale, his eyes wet and shining. He ran.
The next time she saw him he acted like nothing had ever changed. He was his normal, snarky brilliant self - with a hard shell that was new and disconcerting.
John had hated him. And the feeling was mutual. John yelled at her to forget the boy, find better friends, friends that could help her career. She even walked in once on John with his hands wrapped around Nick's throat, and she screamed bloody murder about it. Nick snuck around to find her when John was far away. Nick whispered that John was evil, underneath. Cold and rotten inside, more a vampire than he was.
She should have listened.