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I don’t mean that he was grossly over-muscled in a roided-out body-builder kind of way—it was just that his entire frame was pumped in all the right places. He had kind of a swimmer’s build—long and lean and muscular with broad shoulders and narrow hips.

  I bet myself that he had less than two percent body fat. Must be nice—as a plus sized girl, I have considerably more than two percent myself.

  But back to my patient.

  He also had curly black hair and eyes like nothing I had ever seen before. As I watched, they seemed to change color from sky blue to pale, leaf green, to iridescent silver. Wait—silver? Nobody had silver eyes. And how were they changing like that?

  “Get away from me!” the huge patient was storming at the nurse—a girl named Gloria—who was trying to take his vitals. “I told you, I will have none other than Charlotte Walker as my healer!”

  “Honey, I’m just trying to take your blood pressure.” Gloria held up the extra-large cuff. “Come on now, why don’t you be a sweetheart and settle down?”

  “It’s okay, Gloria," I said, coming into the curtained triage area. “I’ll take it from here.”

  “Fine.” She threw up her hands and let the BP cuff drop. “You handle him, Dr. Walker. You’re the only one he seems to want, anyway. Just be careful, I don’t know what he’s on but it must be some wild stuff. You see those eyes?”

  As a matter of fact, I did. At the sound of my voice, the patient’s incredible eyes had fixed on me and he was practically staring laser beams right through me.

  “Charlotte Walker,” he breathed, reaching for me with one catcher’s mitt-sized hand. “I have come for you. I must warn you—you are in danger!”

  And then his eyes rolled back in his head, his head thumped back on the pillow, and he was out like a light.

  Chapter Two

  Charlotte

  “Okay, let’s see—what have we got?” I bustled forward, pulling on a pair of gloves to examine the patient. Sebastian came with me, obviously eager to get a closer look at the big guy.

  “What is this he’s wearing?” he asked under his breath. “Looks like some kind of weird costume from a Roman soldier movie or something!”

  I had to admit he was right. My new patient had on a molded golden breastplate which buckled at the sides and a short kilt made of many leather straps that ended above his knees. There was an undergarment—an under-kilt I supposed—beneath it that had been pure white, which was now bloodstained and ragged. High black boots with golden metal greaves over the shins encased his feet—which had to be a size sixteen at least—and matching golden vambraces covered his forearms.

  In case you’re wondering how I knew all the names of this stuff, it was from playing waaay too much Diablo III with my friend Zoe, back in college. I’m not exactly a gaming geek—I don’t have time to be—but I know my way around an RPG. Still, I had never expected a guy who looked like a fortieth level Paladin to land in my ER.

  “That is one fancy gladiator outfit,” Gloria remarked. She had come back to do the blood pressure now that the patient was out for the count. “You know he has a sword too?”

  “You’re kidding!” Sebastian exclaimed.

  “Uh-uh. Look under the gurney.”

  Sebastian flipped up the trailing sheet and gave a long, low whistle.

  “Oh my Gawd. It’s as long as he is! I wonder what his other sword looks like—huh?”

  He grinned at me but I was barely paying attention. I had finally managed to unbuckle the golden breastplate on both sides but it was really heavy—somewhere in the neighborhood of forty or fifty pounds. This was no cheap Halloween gladiator outfit—it was the real deal. Why was he wearing it and how did he walk around with this stuff on? Added all together the breastplate, vambraces, greaves, and sword, must weigh a ton!

  Also, how had he known my name? But that question would have to wait until I figured out what was wrong with him.

  “Help me lift this over his head,” I told Sebastian, who was happy to oblige. We lifted the breastplate carefully, sliding it over the patient’s head, and leaving the heavy front plate dangling down over the top of the gurney.

  The white wife-beater type undershirt was also bloodstained. But I couldn’t see a wound—only evidence of one by the way the white shirt was rapidly turning crimson.

  “Scissors,” I said and Sebastian handed them over. Starting at the bottom of the shirt, I slid the sharp blades up, careful not to touch his skin, which seemed to have a slightly jaundiced hue. Only it wasn’t yellow so much as a shimmering of gold—very strange. I wondered if he had something wrong with his liver. But what liver disease turned your skin gold?

  When I peeled back the sodden undershirt, Sebastian gave a long, low whistle.

  “Oh my God—would you look at that!” he exclaimed.

  I frowned. “It’s a nasty slice, all right. Give me some gauze—let’s try and stop that bleeding.”

  “No—I wasn’t talking about the knife wound!” Sebastian threw me an incredulous look as he passed the supplies I was asking for. “I’m talking about the way his chest and abs are even more muscular than that molded breastplate he was wearing! Forget a six pack, he’s got like…an eight pack.”

  “I’m only interested in knowing if any of his fabulous abs got cut up in this fight,” I snapped. “Not how hot they look. Speaking of which, look under his kilt and see if there are any wounds there.”

  Sebastian’s eyes lit up like a kid at Christmas.

  “Yes, Ma’am!”

  I sighed and shook my head, going back to the matter at hand. My new patient had a long slice that started at the top of his right pectoral region, just under the clavicle, and ran all the way down to the top of his groin. It was shallow but nasty and it looked like he had already lost a lot of blood. He might not need surgery but he sure as hell was going to need a whole crap-load of stitches.

  “He’s hypotensive,” Gloria announced, pulling off the blood pressure cuff.

  Damn—I had been right about the blood loss.

  “Does he have any ID?” I asked the nurse. “Is he in the system? Do we know his blood type?”

  “No to all three.” She shrugged. “He just stumbled in the ER door asking for you and collapsed.”

  “Great,” I muttered. "Just great.”

  “No lacerations around the groin but he clearly needs a transfusion,” Sebastian said. “Let’s hang some O neg.”

  Of course, this would normally be the right course of treatment. We didn’t know the patient’s blood type but O negative is the universal donor. Still, something made me hesitate.

  “I said we need O neg up here. And a suture kit.” Sebastian can be really bossy sometimes.

  “Wait.” I held up a hand to stop him.

  “Charlotte—”

  “Just wait, I said!” I snapped at him. “This is my triage, Sebastian—he asked for me personally. So I’m going to determine the course of treatment.”

  “But—” He began, but I ignored him. Instead I took off my glove.

  Now this is something a medical professional should never do—especially around an open wound in a patient with an unknown medical history. There are so many blood-borne pathogens on the loose out there it’s not even funny. But I had a feeling about this strange patient with his bizarre outfit and his golden-sheened skin—and I always listen to my feelings.

  Taking a deep breath, I placed my ungloved hand on his face, cupping his cheek carefully.

  I felt a strange tingle run between us that almost made me pull my hand away. It was like a low-level electrical shock. What in the world could it mean?

  And then my sixth sense kicked in and I knew.

  What did I know from a simple touch? Well, all kinds of things. I knew that O negative blood would sicken or perhaps even kill this man. I knew he had been recently fighting for his life. And I knew something else—but it was something so strange and disturbing that I immediately pushed it to the back of my mind and concentrated on the importa
nt stuff instead.

  How did I know all these things? Well, I have a sixth sense—a gift that I really don’t talk about. An impossible gift, most people would say. When I touch someone, I pick up information about them. Not everything, just…bits and pieces. Don’t ask me how or why it works—I don’t understand it myself. But I’ve had it all my life and lately, it seemed to be getting stronger. This time the certainty was so strong, I didn’t even try to fight it.

  “O neg is no good,” I said. “We’ll have to do a cross-match.”

  “What?” Sebastian frowned at me incredulously. “If O neg is no good then what blood are we cross matching him with?”

  I took a deep breath.

  “Mine,” I said.

  “Yours?” He looked like he couldn’t believe it. “Charlotte—”

  “Just do it,” I said. “Get a cross-matching kit.”

  Like my mysterious gift for knowing things when I touch people—my touch-sense I call it—my rare blood type is something I almost never talk about. Even my best friends Zoe and Leah didn’t know these things about me. They just had a vague idea that I had a rare blood type and thought I was a good judge of character.

  I don’t know why I keep the truly important things about me from the ones I love the most. Maybe because I’ve always felt different—like I don’t belong. Of course, being adopted could have something to do with that. Even as a young child, I remember trying to hide my touch-sense from my adopted mom and dad. I think I was afraid I would drive them away with my weirdness.

  For whatever reason, I saw no need to reveal to anyone that I could tell the minute I touched someone if he or she would make a good friend or would probably turn out to be an enemy. Or that they were fighting with their parents. Or that they were having an affair with a married man, or that cheesecake was their favorite food…or any of the hundred other little incidental tidbits I’d gotten from people over the years when I touched them.

  And in the case of men that I touched there was something extra. Another dimension of knowing that was both troubling and provocative. I always knew the moment I touched a man if he—

  “Here’s the kit and I brought a sample of O neg,” Sebastian said, breaking my train of thought. He handed me the kit and the sample with a sullen look on his face. “Just for your edification, your majesty.”

  “Fine,” I said, ignoring his sarcasm as I peeled the plastic sterile wrapping off the tray and set it up.

  In cross-matching blood, you take a small sample of your patient’s blood and mix it with a small sample of the blood you want to transfuse them with. If the blood starts to clump up, you know it’s not a viable match and it wouldn’t be safe to give to your patient. We were in a hurry but the patient wasn’t crashing—yet, anyway. So I decided to prove Sebastian’s incredulity wrong with a demonstration.

  Taking a small plastic pipette from the kit, I sucked up a small sample of the patient’s blood. His wound had mostly stopped bleeding by now but there was still plenty to go around. I deposited the sample into the small plastic tray. Using another pipette, I put a small sample of the O neg on top, letting the patient’s blood and the O neg mix.

  The result was immediate and dramatic.

  Big clumps began to form in the small plastic tray like curdled milk. In under a minute, the tray didn’t hold liquid blood at all—it was just a big, nasty looking blood clot.

  “Holy God,” I heard Gloria, who had been watching over Sebastian’s shoulder murmur. “I’ve never seen anything like that before.”

  “It’s really weird,” Sebastian agreed in hushed tones. “Now what?”

  “Now this,” I said. I took another sample of the patient’s blood and put it in another one of the plastic trays. Then I pulled down the right sleeve of my white lab coat, baring my arm in my short-sleeved scrub top. “Gloria,” I said to the nurse. “Would you mind using a sterile needle to stick me for a sample?”

  I have a really good vein on the inside of my left elbow and Gloria was a pro. In no time she had a small sample of my rare blood in yet another of the plastic pipettes and Sebastian was slapping a band-aid on my arm.

  I put back on my lab coat and squirted a few drops of my own blood into the tray containing the patient’s. Then, we waited.

  As I had expected, nothing happened. Which in this case, was a very good thing. No clumping or clotting—I was a clear match with this strange man who I had never met before in my life.

  “All right—I don’t know how you knew, but you were right.” Sebastian was already frowning in concentration. “So what are you going to do—pump out a pint for him right now?”

  “No need,” I said. “I have several bags saved here at the hospital. Gloria, if you could go get one…no, better make it two.” I told her where to find them and she nodded and went at once.

  In case you’re wondering why I happened to have several bags of my own blood lying around, it’s for a very good reason. When you have an extremely rare blood type, you often can’t accept donated blood from anyone else—at least, unless their blood exactly matches yours. So it’s better to bag some up for emergencies like car injuries or unexpected surgeries. I had never had either one of those but I’m a person who believes in keeping two steps ahead and being prepared.

  The Boy Scouts have nothing on me.

  As it was, it was damn lucky for my patient that I was so anal retentive, as Zoe used to like to call me. Otherwise, he would have been in big trouble with no possible donor.

  “All right,” Sebastian said, putting a hand on his hip as I got the suture kit and began to stitch up the long gash across my patient’s chest and abdomen. “How did you know? And what blood type are you, anyway?”

  I shrugged uncomfortably and answered the easier question. “I’m just a rare type, that’s all.”

  “Bullshit!’ Sebastian exclaimed. “There’s rare and then there’s rare. What type are you?”

  “All right, I’ll tell you but you have to keep it to yourself.” I sighed and looked up from my stitches. The patient was stirring uncomfortably but he wasn’t waking up—not yet anyway. I didn’t like to give him any medication for pain while he was unconscious and hypotensive so I tried to be quick.

  “All right, all right—I promise,” Sebastian said eagerly. “Now give.”

  “I’m…Rh null,” I said reluctantly.

  “What?” Sebastian exploded, his eyebrows raising almost to his hairline. “You have the golden blood?”

  “Shhh!” I glared at him. “You promised to keep it to yourself!”

  “Yes, but…hell, Charlotte—that’s the rarest type in the whole freaking world! I did a paper on it last year—I think there are only something like ten or twelve registered donors anywhere on the planet.”

  “Nine,” I said, still stitching. “Could you start a line on him and give him some fluids while we wait for Gloria?”

  Sebastian did as I asked, but he couldn’t stop talking about my rare blood type. There’s a lengthy, boring, scientific explanation that goes with it but to make a long story short, Rh null blood has no Rh antibodies or any traces of the Rh factor that most people have at all. Which means that it can be given to anyone—even people with extremely rare blood types. Hence the nickname, “the golden blood.” Rh null is the true universal donor but it’s so incredibly rare that the blood is usually hoarded for extreme cases.

  I knew all this because I had been donating blood twice a month since I turned eighteen and my rare type was discovered by my doctor’s office.

  My blood had saved a lot of lives but if I got sick and needed a transfusion, the nearest donor with my blood type lived in Australia. Which again, was why I always kept a couple of bags on hand for myself.

  Just in case.

  Gloria came bustling back soon enough with several bags of my blood. She hung one from the IV pole and connected it to the drip already in the patient’s arm. I was halfway done with the stitches by then, and hoping to be finished before the patient woke
up. But the minute my blood hit his arm, his eyes flew open and he tried to sit up.

  “Whoa! Whoa, there big guy!” I put a hand on his arm and urged him to lie back down. “Just settle down and let us take care of you.”

  He frowned, gazing at me blearily with unfocussed eyes.

  “Goddess?”

  “It’s just me—Doctor Walker,” I said and added, “Charlotte Walker. Remember, you asked for me?” Although I still didn’t know how he knew me.

  “Goddess,” he whispered again but his eyes seemed to focus more. “I feel strange. What…what are you doing to me?”

  “Stitching you up,” I said matter-of-factly. “This is a nasty wound you have here. How in the world did you get it with that big, heavy breastplate you were wearing in the way?”

  “Assassin droid,” he muttered, his eyelids beginning to drift down again. “They have…armor penetrating weapons. Nano-blades. Caught me…unawares. Inexcusable lapse.”

  “Um…okay. Sure, those sound bad,” I said, wondering if it was the blood-loss talking or if the guy was just out of his head. I mean, assassin droids? Nano-blades? Really?

  “What else are you doing to me?” he murmured drowsily.

  “Well, you need a transfusion.” I kept stitching since he wasn’t complaining and nodded at the bag of my blood hanging from the IV stand over his head.

  “What?” His eyes opened all the way and widened, cycling through a strange rainbow of colors again. Blue, green, pale yellow, silver…what was going on with him? Was this some kind of rare mutation? If so, I had never seen anything even remotely like it.

  He looked worried about the transfusion so I hastened to reassure him.

  “Don’t worry—I know you have an extremely rare blood type.”

  “It goes beyond rare,” he said. His voice was deep but melodious—like someone playing a cello. It was rich and somehow utterly masculine. “No one on this planet could give me blood except…” His rainbow eyes widened and he stared at me. “No,” he whispered. “Please, my Lady…tell me you did not give me your own sacred blood.”

  “How did he know?” Sebastian demanded. “I thought he was completely out of it when we hung the fluids and blood.”