And here it is-the final chapter to the final story of my fake season 2. I hope you have enjoyed the journey as much as I have. Blessings! –wired4romance
And Azucar – don't you think it's about time you made an account so I can respond to your comments? :)
Chapter 2
"So will you help?" There was a hint of desperation in her voice, but she didn't care if he heard it. She was long past pride and quite willing to beg, if need be.
Michael Reynolds spied the crack in the open doorway and frowned. "Why would I do that? You're asking me to expose my entire operation to an unknown—and potentially deadly—virus."
He said that to scare her, no doubt. It was working perfectly. Yes, and who knew what other half-human/half-animal beasts he had lurking downstairs on that farm?Catherine wasn't moved. "I'm asking you, as your daughter, to save the life of the man I love—who also happens to be a very valuable asset of yours."
"Oh, so now you're my daughter?" Reynolds held her gaze for a moment, then turned away, frustrated. He was her father when she needed help; not before. He fumed. There was no way to win this. From the sounds of it, Keller was as good as dead. "Perhaps it would be better for all of us if he didn't survive," he finally said, turning back. "Reality, Catherine."
He watched as she visibly paled, but she recovered quickly, just like he knew she would.
"If he doesn't survive," she said, voice shaking, "then neither will you."
"What's that supposed to mean? Threats, Detective?" Turn-about was fair play. Let's see how she liked the change in relationship!
"It means I'll do everything I can to take you down because there'd be no reason not to anymore."
She would do it, too, with a little determination—something she had in spades right now. He stared at her—his proud, fearless daughter. But one who'd never truly recognize him as her father. "I think you grossly overestimate your significance, much less your power. That being said, I don't like cleaning up other people's messes. You're telling me the only thing standing between me staying in operation or not . . . is you?"
"Is him."
He stared her down and made her wait. It was the only satisfying moment of the whole encounter. Finally, he sighed, "Get him ready. I'll have a crew pick him up in one hour from now." Pulling the cell phone out of his jacket, he paused and gave her a look.
"Wherever you're taking him, I'm going, too."
"I wouldn't expect anything else, Detective." He raised an eyebrow toward the door. She got the message.
How Reynolds knew where Vincent was being held didn't bear thinking about, but exactly one hour from the time he made the call, a white van with an ambulance logo pulled up to the curb in front of the club. Four men in white waistcoats carried an unconscious Vincent out on a gurney. Not wanting to risk being separated from him, she climbed into the van after him, daring them to argue by brandishing her gun. The tall man sitting in front of her laughed.
As she guessed, their destination was the farm.
Reynolds, who somehow managed to beat them there, met them at the door. When he directed them to take Vincent downstairs to the same location he'd been kept in a cage months before, she balked.
"You can't put him in there again!"
"In his current condition, I doubt he could crawl over a kiddie gate." Reynolds had the men roll the gurney over to a bank of monitors instead. "You asked for my help, Catherine. I'm helping. Now stay out of this. It's out of your hands."
A team of doctors swarmed around Vincent as Catherine looked on helplessly. She moved back into a corner so she wouldn't be in the way and asked to leave. They wouldn't like the confrontation they'd get over that. At least she still had her gun.
An armed guard pounded down the stairs. "Sir, there are two people at the front door demanding to see either you or—" he turned toward her, "Ms. Chandler. And one of them is threatening to call the cops."
"Oh, for God's sake. Tall, thin and smart-ass?"
"Y-yes, sir."
"Vargas," he ground out. "By all means, do invite them in."
Moments later Tess and JT were 'escorted' down the stairs and into the room. Catherine breathed a sigh of relief at the sight of them. Together, they could handle anything.
Reynolds stopped them. "Don't tell me. Dr. Forbes, I presume?"
JT's eyebrows went up to his hairline. "How do you know that?"
"Just go with it, JT," Catherine said and drew them both over to where she stood.
Over the next couple of hours, they waited and watched as the team worked on Vincent, at one point pulling a clear plastic curtain around them and their only patient. If that wasn't frightening enough, they then hooked him up to a respirator and had so many wires and tubes connected to him, Vincent resembled a marionette on a string. The monitors were pinging and beeping little warning bells at regular intervals. Reynolds came and went, at one point directing the lab-coated technician who appeared to be in charge to "go get her blood." She could only wonder if the 'her' they referred to was Cameryn Teague, the female super-soldier they'd paired with Vincent a few months back but who died saving his life. It was the only thing that made sense. If that was the case, they would surely have a store of Vincent's blood as well. Why wasn't it being used?
If she could, she would have given her own, just as she had for Thomas Chandler after his accident, little good that had done. When her blood type came back no match for his, they learned she wasn't actually his daughter, but Reynolds'. And that's when everything had come crashing down.
Catherine paced. She wanted to be closer—to touch him, hold his hand, wipe his brow . . . tell him everything she'd been holding back. He was her world. But there was nothing she could do.
After a while, she lightly dozed on Tess' shoulder but came fully awake when Vincent's heart monitor started screeching and the single tone that indicated a flat-line pierced the room. Chaos erupted. Reynolds returned in the midst of it all brandishing a large syringe.
"Move him into the cage. Now! And strap him down, hard," he shouted.
Catherine stood. "No! What's happening?"
The heart rate monitor continued its ear-piercing screech.
"Get her out of here, will you? If her friends give you any trouble, you have my permission to . . ." he looked their way, "escort them out."
Catherine spied the large syringe. "Wait! What do you intend to do? I swear, if you care about me at all—"
"Calm yourself, Catherine. It's too late. I'm going to do what needs to be done—what I should have done a long time ago."
All she heard was the 'too late.' They were shouting 'clear!' and using the electric shock paddles on his lifeless body, even as they were rolling him into the cage. "Please! Don't do this!" She was fighting the guards for all she was worth. "Vincent!"
"Doctor?" Reynolds shouted from behind him as he positioned the needle against Vincent's arm.
Catherine was being dragged kicking and screaming from the room.
Reynolds turned back to Vincent. "Not such a tough guy now, are you?" he murmured to the man lying deathly still on the table. "You're lucky I care about my daughter, much as she believes I don't. This might hurt a little. Try not to kill me while I save your damn hide."
Despite her resistance, someone managed to stick a needle in Catherine's own arm. The last thing she heard before the door slammed shut and she passed out was a terrifying roar.
Catherine awakened to the sound of a lawn mower, of all things. Her lips and tongue felt paper dry and her head fuzzy. As she slowly came to, she glanced around the room. It was a small, cheery bedroom done up with typical country frills down to the eyelet window coverings, which were half-way open. Flipping aside the quilted coverlet, she carefully placed her unsteady legs on the floor and made her way to the window. A wide expanse of green lawn greeted her view, broken up only by a row of fruit trees and bordered by woods. A man on a riding mower was off in the distance. The farm. She must be in one of the upper bedrooms.
How long had she been out? And where was Vincent? She tested the door and was surprised to find it opened easily and noiselessly. No one was in the small hallway, but there were voices coming from a room at the end, one of which she recognized—Reynolds. With as much energy as she could muster, she stormed down the hall in her stocking feet and shoved the door wide open.
The two men looked up.
"Ed, we'll finish this later. Come in, Catherine."
"Take me to him. Now!"
"All right."
Catherine didn't know whether to be glad he acquiesced so easily or mortally terrified. She followed him silently down the hallway, past the room she'd been in, a few other small offices, then through a doorway at the end leading to a stairway to the ground floor. She didn't know what they'd done with JT and Tess, but it was extremely quiet in the building. And that could only mean one thing.
"I'm going to kill you for this, you know. Don't think I won't."
He turned to look at her. "A bit of an overreaction, don't you think? Even for you," was all he said in response.
When they opened the door at the bottom, she could see him, Vincent, stretched out on the gurney inside the cage. Still as death.
Without her needing to ask, Reynolds punched in the code and unlocked the cage door. She ran past him and yanked it open, rushing to the bed. Peripherally, she heard Reynolds tell someone in the room to 'fetch her shoes.'
"Vincent! Oh my God, Vincent! No . . . ." She touched her face to his, tears dampening his cheeks, then pressed tiny kisses to his chin, his nose, his eyes, his lips—needing to touch him, be near him, even though he was gone, and . . . breathing. He was breathing! She swiveled toward her father.
"He'll be fine. Just needs to sleep it off."
"Wh-what? How?"
"How about 'thank you'? You could have trusted me, Catherine. But you didn't." Disgusted, he turned and walked back out.
Hours later Vincent wasn't in great shape, but he was conscious. She learned that Tess and JT were being held in another room under lock and key. A guard brought them out, returned Tess's service revolver, and told them they were free to go—with Vincent.
Not wanting to do anything to cause those orders to change, they followed two more guards out to the car with the gurney, packed themselves into JT's car, and headed home. Vincent was still asleep, Catherine curled up with him in the back seat. The scene was eerily reminiscent of the last time Vincent had been in Reynolds' clutches in the cage, but this time she felt an odd kind of gratitude for the rustic farm as she watched it fade into the distance in the early morning light.
It took the three of them to get him into his bed back at the club, and by then they were all exhausted. Tess gave Cat a hug and bid her a solemn good-night, and JT quietly closed the door on Vincent's room.
Sometime during the next few hours, Vincent stirred but didn't come fully awake. In the throws of a deep dream state, he wrestled back and forth so much he became hopelessly entangled in the bed sheets, aggravating the situation. Catherine first tried to soothe him, then wake him for his own comfort—he still felt hot to her touch—to no avail. Finally, she touched on a solution.
When JT knocked softly and opened the door later in the day carrying a tray of food and something to drink, he stopped, alarmed. Catherine's head popped up at his soft exclamation.
"Oh, my God. Are you all right?" The sheets were shredded as if Vincent had raged all night long in beast state.
She grinned and held up the pocket knife she'd found in one of his drawers and had used to free her sleeping lover from the tightly wound fabric.
It was two days later that a weak but smiling Vincent showed up at her door.
They sat together on the fire escape, his arms around her loosely. He'd made an amazing recovery, but he still seemed a little fragile yet.
"So, I have Reynolds to thank?"
She grimaced. "I'm sorry. I didn't know where else to go. I'd never seen you so weak; I didn't know what to do. I was frightened half to death. You know we would have gone anywhere else first, but . . . there was no vaccine available."
"You said something about Cameryn Teague."
"They gave you her blood. Apparently, it had properties to fight infection that yours didn't, but it wasn't enough. Then I thought he killed you, and instead—"
"He pumped me with adrenalin to help my body fight off the disease. Yeah. Maybe we can skip that part the next time, yeah?"
"Hopefully, there will never be a 'next time.'" She frowned. " I . . . didn't make many points with 'dear old Dad,' I'm afraid. I didn't trust him. But he did save your life. For me."
"He's given you no reason to trust him over these last few months, Catherine. Don't beat yourself up over that."
She nodded and threaded her fingers through his. "I thought I'd lost you."
Her voice choked up when she said it. He knew that feeling all too well—the night he'd come upon her mutilated car and held her, shot and bleeding to death, in his arms. Vincent cupped her cheek. "You'll never lose me, Catherine. 'Death shall have no dominion.' Not over us."
She turned to look up at him, surprised. "You're reading Dylan Thomas?"
"Yeah, well, I found this strange box on my headboard and one of the things inside was a book of his poetry."
The memory box! She'd forgotten all about it and his birthday. When she'd gone to the club the last time to nurse him, she'd taken it along since it was already his birthday, hoping he'd recover enough for her to share it with him.
"That was supposed to have been your birthday present!"
"I love it, but . . . what were all those other things inside? There was something that looked like a lightning bolt, a few pine needles, a Christmas bulb . . . ?"
She smiled. "Yeah. Did I ever tell you I wasn't very good at arts and crafts? It's supposed to be a memory box. I started it with things that represented the important events in our relationship so far. The lightning bolt—that was supposed to be your scar."
"Ah."
"The pine needles are from the woods where you saved me the first time. The Christmas bulb—the way you lit up the rooftop for me on the anniversary of my mom's death."
There were other mementos, too: a petal from the orchid he gave her the day they visited Milltown, an empty pill bottle like the one Gabe had given him with the cure, a ticket stub to the ball park batting cage. Every one of them had a story to tell.
Vincent touched his lips to hers. She was all the gift he ever needed, yet she kept on giving. It humbled him, and that reminded him of what was in his pocket. He pulled out the folded sheet of paper. "I thought I'd add my own."
Catherine looked down at the single page and realized it was the letter Thomas Chandler had written years ago to 'the man worthy of my daughter's heart.' It had been something he'd no doubt intended to give to her fiancé if and when that time ever came. As soon as she'd found it, she knew it could only be for Vincent.
His eyes shiny with emotion, he licked his lips while trying to find the words. "You know, the day you gave me this . . . I'll never forget. I can't even express what that meant to me. I don't . . . I don't deserve you, Catherine. I'll never feel worthy. But here you are."
His voice failed on the last word and her own breath caught.
"I never expected anyone to feel this way for me again," he continued softly, "and now I don't know what I'd ever do without you."
When they got back to his place the next evening, they spent time going through the box, talking about each one and remembering—because they were all pieces that made up the tapestry of their love.
The next morning the precinct was in an uproar. People with boxes were coming and going from Reynolds' office. Confused, Catherine stopped one of them. "What's going on?"
The man shrugged unhappily. "He's moving—again."
"Moving?" She looked around for Tess but she wasn't anywhere nearby. Finally she made her way to the corner office. "What's is this?" she demanded of her boss.
Reynolds glanced up from his now cleared-off desk. "Detective. Glad to see you've finally decided to show up for work again." When she remained standing there with a question on her face, he relented. "I'm moving my operation."
"What does that mean?"
"It means I'm leaving New York City. For good."
Catherine started to stammer. "And Vincent?"
"What about him? He's remaining here. I find I don't need the . . . complication." He looked at her. "This is too difficult for the both of us, Catherine. We'll end up killing one another."
"So this is good-bye? Just like that?"
"I don't expect you to say anything."
"No, you just roar into my life, turn it upside down, and then leave as quickly as you came."
He shrugged.
She held his gaze one more moment before turning to go. "I'm sorry, too."
Catherine went back to her desk and tried to concentrate on the latest case before her, but nothing was working. The office at the end of the hall was blaring in its silence, the room now dark and vacant. She rubbed her forehead, frustrated. This was not how things were supposed to go. He'd saved Vincent's life and now, essentially, had freed him as well. And all she'd done was yell at him and demand . . . what? That he stay and participate in her life? She didn't even know, herself, if she wanted that.
Finally, she went in search of someone who could direct her to Reynolds' city apartment. She needed to at least smooth things over before he left.
"He's already gone," the assistant told her. "He was taking a private jet out of the country this afternoon."
Catherine gasped. "When?"
The assistant checked her watch. "Anytime now."
"Do you have his flight information?"
She grabbed the info hastily scrawled on the back of a business card and ran for her car. There was only one private field close by large enough to handle an international flight for a private jet.
Catherine got to the field and flashed her credentials at the guard gate. Then, without waiting for confirmation, she roared through the chain link access gate with her lights and sirens blaring. A single plane sat on the tarmac, its door ajar.
Michael Reynolds heard the distant wail of sirens and turned half-way up the portable staircase to the plane's access door. He recognized the car. "Too little, too late, Catherine," he sighed and mounted the stairs the rest of the way. As soon as he was on board, he ordered the plane taken to the runway. He took his seat on the airport side and looked out the window.
Catherine stopped short once she saw the plane begin to taxi to the runway. She had half a mind to chase after it, but what good would that do? She was too late. Putting her car in park, she got out and watched the private leer jet take off.
The plane banked to the north first then turned east, heading out over the water. She watched and waited, lights still flashing, until it was nearly out of sight. Just as she started to turn away, a giant fireball materialized in the very spot the plane had been. The sound of the explosion reached her moments later. She watched in horror as flaming pieces of metal fuselage, where his plane once had been, dropped to the water in black streaks of billowing smoke.